I think the business side of things is often viewed with disdain because the business side of game development often is what gets in the way of consumers getting, what they want.
This. I am pretty pragmatic about certain things like the EGS deals because it doesn't fully inconvenience a lot of gamers to a reasonable or objective degree. It's a timed exclusive and the inconvenience disappears even if the hype is already dead by then, and objectively the inconvenience is launching a game on a platform you may like less, but that tradeoff to your
inconvenience of launching a product compared to the, not just convenience but, safety and support it ensures the developer is what I would call "good business". In some cases it might even have been the means of developers greenlighting a pc-port.
But what I wanted to say especially to the quote is a very great turn of phrase I heard from a person on YouTube many years ago and it's about two types of companies:
There are some companies out there in games business that don't think alike, specifically in what they say...
A: "Make money so we can make more games."
B: "Make games so we can make more money."
This is, maybe a bit banal but to me is still the ultimate distinction between a the mentality of companies like EA and a company like 2004's Bungie or the Iwata-era Nintendo or, if I am to stretch it far as I can, 2019's Capcom.
I know there's a lot of factors and even the better "passion"-companies occasionally slipped into pure capitalistic approaches to game dev like the New Super Mario Bros. part of Iwata's legacy or, if I'm being extreme, EA in their lootbox era which would then be their "safety" net to the road to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order... yeah, sorry but I doubt it. That's a personal take though.
The capitalistic approach to games publishing that EA has often taken goes beyond "creating a safety net", they've made too blatant, too obvious missteps in their bartering with us the consumers. A lot of their approaches have seemed like what I think it is: Greed. I do know that if you look at their yearly reports they don't always rake it in and certainly not last year, but I believe they would make less short-term thinking if they truly cared about the games they release and show they understand why a consumer wants to buy it, beyond the careless mainstream consumers who are victim to advertisements and where companies spend their marketing budget. But the people at the top of that company enjoy the privilege of their positions a bit too much, and they seem like they just want more. The top of EA from the outside looks like a lodge of lucky people who get to make asinine decisions for games publishing with only one goal in mind: We have to make more money, and games exist to achieve that... And I don't believe all companies actually act on that idea as EA or Activision do.
...And I think the backlash you see is because people who play games can look at what good things games can do, and how, with the worst business conglomerates such as EA in the industry, there seems to be such an active push for "gaming as a money machine" that it is becoming the culture of work, which it may have always had a lot of, but now it's really becoming commercial, attracting people who want nothing else to do with the medium than billions of dollars, and it's also actively pushing gaming in the opposite direction of its values of artistry, fun and even "play" by going too far into purely capitalistic ventures.