I think that this "game" launch has taught the absolute worst lesson to gaming companies and the entertainment industry at large. This game was panned by everybody I care to pay attention to (please let me know if somebody is giving this abomination a good review), and has a record setting low score on meta critic. It was boo'd at blizzard's own fan-attended convention...like the one place where you know you'd have fans, right? Nobody thought this was great.
From my understanding, it's an issue with rampant capitalism mixed with feduciary responsibility. Essentially, the company is responsible for doing the most for their shareholders. They could make claims that ignored potential revenue (e.g., leaving out (some) microtransactions) could be done for intangible and/or long-term benefits (e.g., reputation); however, I wouldn't be surprised if doing so resulted in a request for evidence. In other words, being able to provide substantial evidence that ignoring short-term gains is better for the long-term.
To a degree, I wouldn't be surprised if some people just love the game, and by "game", I do not mean Diablo Immortal. I mean the game of making money; treating real life as if it were a game of Monopoly. It's easy to hand-wave and ignore consequences, because you're so disconnected from the 20-somethings with addiction problems that spend too much on your products. If news does start to break, they'll make concessions. "Oh, they're just wealthy individuals or children of wealthy parents."
I'm so tired of the Red and Blue team worshipping. Our leadership has gotten objectively worse, and it's impacting the life of the common man.
There are plenty of politicians that actually seem to care. I don't want to get too deep into politics here, but I doubt you'll see much change in the government until you remove or vastly reduce the significance of money in politics. It's far too expensive to run for office, and while I don't like their actions, I understand why politicians avoid biting the hand that feeds.
Spoken as a gamer and a father, I want this microtransaction nonsense taxed to high heaven. Maybe that will make them think twice about ignoring the traditional model of make a good game and it sells many copies for gambling machine that prints money. Fix my roads with it the proceeds...make college free....or for the love of god just stop raising my property taxes? It would be nice to entertain the idea that my kids could own homes before they're 75....
There are a lot of issues causing the housing market to be pretty awful right now, but I don't know if I'd look much at taxes. The low interest rates during the pandemic were causing a heavy amount of investing in rental properties, which included buying lived-in homes for use as rental properties. That influx of buyers drove up prices all over the United States; however, we're starting to see that turn around now. I recall seeing a news segment talking about how home purchases are starting to fall through, and there was some city in Florida (Tampa, I think?) where it had something like 30%+ of contracts fall through.
I'm not an expert on this, but just looking around my own area, I see plenty of other things that factor into it. One problem is that no one seems to want to waste money on lower income housing, and I'm not even talking something like Section 8. Why build small houses (~1500 square-feet or less) that are good starter homes when you can build McMansions? Everything gets built as part of the suburban sprawl where homes are built for the middle class. There's also a
heavy push in my area to create more and more rentals. If rentals were meant more as temporary locations for incoming people or younger folks, why are we getting so many of them?
I remember lining up at midnight releases for blizzard games. I wasted so much time playing Warcraft 3 custom maps, and starcraft before that. Blizzard is like this old friend that you loved to hang out with, but as you got older, they just got worse. The care, the stories, the magic of what made blizzard what it was is gone. The people behind those things are gone. The magic is gone. And the new generation of creative folks that doubtlessly work there are likely kneecapped by the nonsense of management backed by greed-driven investors.
It might be a bit foolish of me, but Microsoft has been really good lately with this sort of "developer first" attitude. They seem to be willing to let developers have a bit of free reign. I don't know if this is based on some serious lessons learned from how bad they kneecapped previous acquisitions like Rare. Now, it's probably easier to let a company like Double Fine be a bit more independent as they cost a small fraction of what Activision did. Although, Activision-Blizzard is made up of three distinct parts, and I could certainly see Blizzard getting a different internal priority than King.