He brought it up because of the rhetoric in the article, not specific to anything about the game itself. I mean, purging online aspects of a game with no way to recover them is still wrong, even if it doesn't render the entire product unplayable. Maybe instead, just burn the last ten pages or so of every copy of Dracula if you want a comparison.
I can't speak to the former, but as for the second part of your statement, you're correct in that this is all historical. However, I can't think of any reason to assume they've become less influential since then as their budget is only larger and there's more media conglomeration since then. If there was a mass purge of state actor influence, it certainly missed my attention. On the contrary, one we know of was the false reporting of WMDs starting the Iraq War (which the article also mentions), that happened long after the Cold War. My reasoning is "the influence never left", but if you have evidence to the contrary, I could look at it.
Shaddy more or less explained it, I was referring the to the rhetoric being used. However, you illustrate an important point of why communication gets lost SO EASILY online if I refer to anything other than COMPLETE shutdowns, since there's wide room for confusion on the internet. Ubisoft killed Mighty Quest For Epic Loot, Ghost Recon Phantoms, Might & Magic Showdown, etc., I think it's just a matter of time for bigger titles.
I'm not sure that's fair. The internet as a collective needs to be more descriptive about what "game journalism" means. Sure, people have been memeing on the incompetence of games media for years now, but why they do that is much more important.
Best I can tell it's about companies like IGN who have reviewers who completely tare into games in reviews but still give them a high score like 4/5, or just give bad games high scores just because they are afraid of being canceled (i.e. lose their critic perks) by the game company.
I'll put aside the CIA thing. But about multiplayer features, aren't there inevitably going to be some games that are simply not popular enough for fans to bother setting up a server, even if the company released the code for free? Even popular games can eventually have empty lobbies even if the server is technically running after enough time.
That is true, a lot of people will move on after enough time passes. This was addressed in the "GaaS is Fraud" video. This boils down to the company deciding what games we still get to play not the actual players. So in this case, the players have decided that they don't want to play that game right now, but maybe in a couple years when a new game in that series is announced people will go back to the older ones. It never went away and is always there waiting. If a game is terrible and nobody wants to preserve it, then it doesn't get preserved. That is not because nobody could preserve it but because nobody wanted to, there is a massive difference between those two.
I think it isn't just about losing perks of free games and getting info sooner (although that is a part of it), since that company blacklist can hurt but I think the problem is also on some of the people that see those reviews. It also isn't just limited to that specific company but also other companies see that and add you to the blacklist. If a game gets any less than a 9 or 10, I always hear some people making claims about the review or essentially attacking them. You might remember Jeff Gerstmann getting fired over the Kane and Lynch review years ago. That's because the publisher had tons of money in that and any slight amount of negativity surrounding it was asking for death.
But the point isn't about whether the server will have a bunch of people on it, it's about being able to run it at all. Plenty of games will go unplayed whether a publisher kills them or not, but the focus is that publishers shouldn't be able to kill them regardless. You can't predict whether a game will stay popular, but you can choose whether to deny anyone the right to ever play it again, and that's a shitty thing to do which shouldn't be allowed, at least if they paid for any part of it.
But like, what if no one is even willing to run such a server in the first place? I mean, we're not talking about erasing the full game, but just the multiplayer aspects of a game you can still play. The company can't run the servers forever, so the proposed other option is to turn multiplayer servers over to the fans. But someone will have to run and pay for those servers. That's just not going to happen every time even if the company does allow it.
I'm not saying I agree but if this scenario happened, "but maybe in a couple years when a new game in that series is announced people will go back to the older ones", the companies would argue, "If such a demand appeared we would reopen the servers."
I'm pretty sure I covered this is in the DGN Lawbreakers episode, but this is an easy one to address.