Destiny went through the same phase as well. Remember how well The Dark Below was received? Granted, Bungie turned it around with The Taken King, and subsequently Rise of Iron, but the seeds of monetization were sown with Destiny.
In Destiny 2 they just double downed on the microtransaction and monetization creep, which has only grown worse since they left Activision. All of those that thought the monetization was an Activision thing were pretty much wrong…when FTP came along it made sense that monetization was necessary, however the creep over the past few years has been abysmal.
I play, but it always seems to be to diminishing returns. It’s not really fun or rewarding any longer; Bungie can’t decide who to cater to (casuals or hard-core gamers). They’ve pretty much abandoned new PvP content (no new crucible maps for two years and counting, no new Gambit maps with only four available for play). I paid for this year’s content and admittedly, I’m just thinking about sitting it out entirely and just be done with the game.
I was initially put off by the UI of Lemmy that I encountered when I first went to the Lemmy site. I was a little confused as to which instance to join. That’s when I stumbled upon kbin.social and that’s where I landed my new account. Overall I am most comfortable here.
Since joining, I’ve encountered Lemmy posts that take me to their instances proper, and the formatting looked different, more like here just with a different colored background. Overall, Lemmy instances seem okay, I just like it here better.
Maybe it’s the overall familiarity with the instance, calling main topic pages “magazines,” the microblogging option, etc. Lemmy’s resemblance is a little closer to Reddit, so that might account for why people decided to go there instead of a kbin instance.