Yeah I agree with you here. A lot of Trackmania players are annoyed by Trackmania’s $20 a year subscription and have called to make it F2P with cosmetic microtransactions, but I’m pretty happy that hasn’t happened. There isn’t even any DLC. It is really nice to see not have to see ads to pay more money for stuff.
I don’t think they do much investigative journalism, but I’ve found Rock Paper Shotgun to have some more thoughtful pieces among their more traditional reporting.
That just incentives devs to just push out whatever mess they currently have and say the game is released, and they’d do it unless Valve wanted to start moderating game again. At least right now the abandoned games are still labelled early access.