It doesn’t feel practical to enforce, save in so far as it lets them put you on a list of people not to extend future early-release games to. But you have to assume they were already doing that, as any marketing department worth its salt is going to have a boutique set of insider streamers who are effectively just contracted media flaks plugging your product.

On today’s episode of “This shouldn’t be legal”…

Think about it this way. The same guys who stream video game reviews to make money are paid by the advertisers who sponsor their streams. And the sponsor won’t pay for a stream if its disparaging of their content. So the streamer is being paid to cut an ad.

Imagine if you hired someone to go door-to-door selling people your sandwiches. And in the middle of each sales call the guys you hired would take a big bite, spit out the sandwich, and say “This is awful! I hate it!” What are you paying these asshole for?

Just stop pretending streamers are these independent objective observers and recognize them for what they are - online door-to-door sales guys. These early releases are just their sales kits. And why am I going to extend a sales kit to a guy who isn’t going to sell my shit?

Well that’s stupid. Getting negative reviews is also a good thing. It allows you to re-evaluate your product(s). Pretty much you’re going to sell a half assed product, pretending it’s amazing because you refused to take critically-negative feedback from your paying customers. Guess they just want to completely obliterate their company.