The microtransactions are one issue among many. To be frank, putting microtransactions in a $70 USD title would still warrant negative reviews in and of itself, but the the game is also having catastrophic performance issues and crashing on PC for what seems to be the majority of players, to the point of many Youtube channels covering it that did not get press copies being all but unable to play at all.

It doesn’t matter if a game has a lot of good elements, if it has bad ones and people cite those bad elements in negative reviews it’s not review bombing, it’s consumers giving an honest review of a product.

Even if Edge was marginally better than Chrome (it’s not), allowing monopolistic practices simply for the sake of slightly evening out a corporate race to the bottom is not a good standard. The actual solution is a browser like Firefox that actually has some remote respect and business interest in user privacy, and to aggressively litigate both Microsoft and Google for the use of their dominant service platforms to cross-promote their other products to captive audiences.

The unintended part was people noticing and it making it into the news cycle, everything else was very clearly exhaustively planned and intended.

Getting out of the Google frying pan and into the Microsoft fire is in no way better. Both options are exploitative anti-user monopolies, and both Chrome and Edge are the same browser engine under different corporate skins that aggressively violate your privacy in numerous ways for their own gain.

The fact that Microsoft’s constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn’t triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.

They are not being “honest”, they are representing flawed and problematic data patterns integrated into their models, because the capabilities they actually posses are dramatically less than companies and the general public seem to be happy to assume. LLMs aren’t magically going to become pop culture evil robots that want to kill us all, but what they have already become is tools for unethical corporate exploitation and the enablement of more advanced scams and disinformation campaigns.