And I’m fine with them wanting to do that.
The protest was less about them wanting to charge a price, it’s that in a time frame of 6 months reportedly went from “the API won’t have changes anytime soon” to “we’re going to pivot to a paid API soon” to “we’re charging you advertiser rates per x million API requests, starting in a month, and you cannot supplement with your own ads”.
There was no time for these apps to adjust their pricing models. Most were on yearly subscription models or ad-driven. Having that large a pivot in the rules with no time to adapt the business model is just shitty partnership on Reddit’s part.
Prior to ESO, though, Elder Scrolls was a franchise entirely marketed at people who wanted single player RPG experiences.
Even if it’s still Elder Scrolls content- a good portion of that original market is not going to have interest in a multiplayer experience. Or a subscription experience. Or a”live narrative” experience with gated content windows.
It’s a very different experience at its core, so while there may be an overlap between the two markets in the Venn Diagram, it’s still a very different market segment than a pure single player outing.