And I can refund the game if I don’t like it. And I can see reviews of the game by those who have been vetted as having bought it.

Steam still lists Civ7 as requiring a third-party account and stays off my wishlist while it does.

I’m actively working on building something for this. In the interim, most phones have something akin to a voice recorder with transcriptions.

I suspect the difficulty the publishers face is that fun is difficult to quantify. The read on this might end up being “All things being equal, DRM/MTX/etc aren’t statistically impediments to financial success if the game is going to sell well anyway. If we percieve them to improve our bottom line, let’s include them”.

Take a read through https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc.

Real shame this was terminated rather than extended to streaming platforms.

Totally possible to go overboard in either spectrum of complexity. But yeah, take Prometheus for example. It’s super easy to set up and does a great job of metrics. Reimplementing this in bash would require… a lot of work.

I’d recommend considering how the recently expired https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc. would have applied to streaming services.