to add to this, ironic jokes where the irony is inside the context of what’s being parroted will mostly get people to jump in with the joke. One where it’s outside of it will get people tired of seeing others pretend to be dumb on purpose, and people that believe they legitimately are, to dogpile on it.

and communicating that irony on edgecases between the two is like balancing on a tightrope

Not just the last few years, that’s just how the system is set up in general; companies are rewarded for reaching over a wider population, not for the quality of the established coverage. They need to keep growing or die.

It’s more financially incentivized to put time to get at least a handful of new customers onboard than it is to address the grievances of a single customer, so the quality of marketing gets boosted while customer support gets shafted. Any public negative feedback can be drowned out by the larger pool of customers that aren’t involved in any direct interactions with the company, and there’s also the classic astroturfing + plausible deniability combo for good measure to maintain that public trust.

and to add to this for anyone else reading this far, Steam wallet refund is much faster to refund than credit/debit; the latter is subject to whatever archaic processes the financial institute has to go through for it, and takes about 2-3 days iirc

While there are legitimate reasons to pirate certain media, Steam and GoG have great refund policies that perfectly serve this use case.

I use Steam, and recently refunded Stray for my stated reason to them that it’s way too scripted and linear for my tastes, and refunded Street Fighter 6 because I’m still not a fan of the movement in the franchise - they refunded me within the same day for both times.