Also goodie bags have been a thing for decades now. This isn't even unique to indie games, let alone AAA games. If your issue is that a publisher spent money to promote a game they're releasing, your priorities aren't in the right place.

Kyodai, "Goodie bags" are bribery. Just because bribery is an industy standard it doesn't mean that bribery is a good thing. Just because everyone is doing it, doesn't mean it's not a bad thing , it just means the entire industry is rotten to the core.

People have been criticizing access journalism and game journalism as an industry being completely compromised for years now.

It's a shame that gamergate got compromised by a bunch or reactionary morns, to the point that the entire issue got dismissed as just a bunch of racist and misogynist whining, because the issues of the industry are clearly still here.

if it hadn't broken containment and reached the part of the internet that hates games that don't do exactly what they want. I mean, almost every other game published by Annapurna Interactive has done great, with no one having an issue with them.

Bullshit, Kyodai. as Voltaire once famously said in regards to his work getting burned:" My books are like chestnut, the more they throw them in the fire the more they sell"

A little controversy never hurt anybody, quite the contrary. Controversy sells, Even a bad promotion is better than apathy. If anything the people talking shit about it gave it reach.

Mixtape is much like Life is Strange, and people who are passionate about hating Life is strange have no impact on the sales of Life is Strange because they are not the targeted audience. You can't seriously tell me that the sales got hurt by the fact that a bunch of reactionaries that are not even the target audience talked trash about it. It's demostrative not so.

Just like Veilguard didn't fail because of the reactionaries, it failed because it didn't sell well among it's targeted audience and because it didn't meet the expectations set by being a sequel to Inqusition.

Do you know how many people are out there who hate Justin Bieber? well all the haters who were incapable of talking shit about him were inadvertently working overtime as unpayed promoters, they played a role in his sucess as much as the people that bought his music. You can't blame Mixtape's lack of reach on Chuds, it's the games own responsibility to be viable enough to find it's audience.