system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
The distributors never cared about the games. Don't kid yourself. For brief moments, publisher interests are either overrun by random happenstance or by strong pushes from the developer side, or just happen to briefly align with those of the people playing the games (which is rare and uncommon). There's tons of shite that they pushed out back in the day too, it's just that the protocols for doing the predatory shit of the modern day hadn't been developed then.

If you think game publishers in '94 wouldn't have pushed for microtransactionas, "live services", skinner boxes, etc. if they had had the tools and know how to pull something like that off, you are mistaken.
gpt
This. Some crazy strong rose tinted glasses in this thread. They were only “good” because they didn’t have the resources to bend you over yet.