Not exactly crazy but just mysterious…this was at a software company I worked at many years ago. It was one of the developers in the team adjacent to ours who I worked with occasionally - nice enough person, really friendly and helpful, everyone seemed to get on with them really well and generally seemed like a pretty competent developer. Nothing to suggest any kind of gross misconduct was happening.

Anyway, we all went off to get lunch one day and came back to an email that this person no longer worked at the company, effective immediately. Never saw them again.

No idea what went down - but the culture at that place actually became pretty toxic after a while, which led to a few people (including me) quitting - so maybe they dodged a bullet.

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

For digital copies, they could bury this into the EULA and make it a requirement that you agree to it before you make your purchase (IIRC some storefronts do this already).

However for physical copies I suppose there could be a case made if the duration of support was not disclosed at the time of purchase (or it was not printed somewhere on the outside of the packaging).