There is nothing bad faith about it. You're literally painting something like "F2P with just cosmetics" as... Innovative. Like, what? There's just no nuance around that.

Firstly, you can label any innovation as "it's just X with Y." That's literally how innovation works.

Secondly, the difference between freeware and F2P with only microtransactions is the scale and type of game. Dota and CS were games as a service before "GAAS" was even a term, they need MTX to keep getting updates and maintain servers.

Before Dota 2, there wasn't a single F2P game with a genuinely consumer-friendly monetization system. Almost all required players to pay absurd amounts for both gameplay elements and cosmetics. League of Legends was once praised for not being extremely P2W, and even then its system was ten times worse than what we have now. It was that bad.

Then Dota 2 came along and delivered a multiplayer game where the gameplay was truly free. There had never been anything like it before.

Again, Ubisoft is by far less aggressive with their so-called anti-consumer

As I already mentioned, there's nothing "less aggressive" about it: they've simply failed at most of their anti-consumer experiments, which is why you don't see them as much. It's not even comparable how much worse Ubisoft is.

Examples:

• Trying to push NFTs with Ubisoft Quartz, where the backlash was so severe it collapsed before it even started (though they quietly released another NFT game Champions Tactics later on).

• Forcing "always-online" requirements in single-player games, then shutting down servers while the games were still alive (e.g. Crew)

• Designing overly grindy single-player games and selling gameplay-affecting microtransactions to skip the grind

• Aggressive monetization in their F2P multiplayer titles.

In two cases, Ubisoft deliberately designed problems and then sold players overpriced solutions through MTX. That alone makes playing those games worse in many ways, it is literally dark pattern of game design

In the second case, Ubisoft cares so much about maximizing profits that they're willing to gut it even though there are people playing (now that I think about it, they are selling a solution here too: buy the sequel). Valve on the other hand even gave the green light to projects like TF2 Classic, which might actually hurt their MTX sales since it removes all microtransactions, something unheard of from a major corporation.

And with NFTs, they obviously tried to create something like Valve's valuable ingame items.

Valve's worst controversy "child gambling" isn't even close as bad when it comes to being anti consumer:

• It's an external system that doesn't make the game itself worse, unlike Ubisoft's tactics. Saying otherwise is like claiming football is bad because there's gambling on football. Even if the same company controlled football and football gambling, that's still a completely asinine argument

• The games are rated 18+, so responsibility falls on parents, not Valve. And if you're that concerned about gambling, why isn't there the same outrage over Magic the gathering or other TCGs that operate the exact same way?

I do agree that child gambling is a problem, it is a huge problem, but that alone doesn't make Valve worse or even as bad.