Of course, but that's not on a personal insults level, after all. It's on a professional, "product unfit for purpose", level. As part of a commercial transaction, a goods purchase.
Hence your course of action would be:
Refund the product.
As deemed necessary, avoid that brand in the future.
But just like when your power drill doesn't work, calling the helpline then verbally abusing the call center person gets you nowhere, and just ruins someone else's day who had no say in the product disappointing you. And you didn't really improve your own situation either, you feel briefly improved by being able to vent but you are still sitting on having spent X money for an unfit product. At least get that money back, that's some genuinely action being taken.
I'm with you, that studio brought the Sims sales model into the new era. The only people who actually play all their content are either wealthy losers or pirates. Nothing is more unwelcoming than a small closed off community.
I'm proud to say the whole family were big on Sims 2-4 and we pirated every single version and all expansion packs as children. It was a gateway drug to more pirating in the future. Those are the real, open, and welcoming community.
Haha. I gave up on the first Sims because no one was putting up expansion packs to pirate and I sure as fuck wasn't going to pay for them, so I got bored and quit and never came back to that game series.
Also I think there are a couple of copies of the first 2 sims floating around where you get robbed daily and the mailman hates you as an antipiracy measure.
I didn't. I never played the game. I wanted to play the first one but then saw how many DLCs it has. I don't like this way of developing software, in bits and pieces, so I didn't want to support it. This changes nothing about the rest of the discussion though.
Honestly, if one person or entity chooses to act shifty, then it should be okay to be shitty back. Please, let's have consequences. Let's not "let it slide" in the name of decorum or politeness. What motivation would people have to act less shitty in the future if everyone just turns the cheek and deals with it? Lol