Comment by m12k

I think there's a pattern here: 'Highly talented company makes highly praised product but eventually realizes there is much more money in exploitative products instead'. Valve made the amazing Half-Life series, then later seems to have come to the conclusion that their return on investment is just much higher if they focus on multiplayer games with loot boxes (plus selling other people's games and taking a cut). Blizzard went through a similar transformation from e.g. Warcraft 3 to World of Warcraft, Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone (these days WoW is probably even the less exploitative of the bunch). Facebook went from being 'the place to hear about what my friends are up to', to just trying to show me as targeted ads as possible. I don't blame them, per se - these companies are just following the economic reality, but I just wish being exploitative wasn't so damn profitable.