"because people will begrudgingly buy games even with all of the nonsense attached"

This is how I convince myself this rant is not totally pointless.

"EA is, as expected, the worst offender, but Activision has knocked it out of the park with their matchmaking patent."

Konami is also awful, relegating franchises to pachinko machines. Ubisoft has been as bad as EA recently. Nintendo is practically colluding with scalpers to drive up the price of their shitty plastic overpriced emulator boxes. Sony and Microsoft have almost nothing to offer over a PC/Nintendo combination.

It's a pretty grim market. "Voylent Green".