I never understood why Valve's comment was controversial.
I could see a few reasons why people were shocked. Valve's comment was unprecedented:
- this was the first time that Valve would manually write a disclaimer for a specific store page. Valve is known for automating everything.
- Valve's message was directly aimed at gamers. This is also very rare, as Valve was* known for writing/talking to gamers as little as possible.
- Valve would call the exclusivity "unfair" for their customers, which is quite strong considering that pre-orders were ultimately fulfilled.
This makes the comment controversial, and the "lightning bolt" image is not too far off in my opinion: there was a manual intervention to target a game, the comment was tailored for the audience of gamers, whom we know are not the most pleasant individuals to deal with on the Internet, and the comment used a vocabulary which would exacerbate their anger by playing with the "entitled gamer" cliché. I imagine Gabe as Zeus, standing at the top of the Steam mountain and aiming his bolt.
The next event is an angry mob banging at the doors of every social media account of the devs and publishers, and rampaging the reviews of their previous games. That is the fire created after the lightning bolt struck their store page.
It is nice that Valve acknowledges that they messed up, that they have great powers, and thus great responsibility.
*things have changed a lot after Artifact's failure and the development of Underlords and Steam labs.
The publisher created an unprecedented mess by pulling a game that had already been sold to people.
I disagree. This was not an unprecedented mess:
- the people who pre-ordered the game got what they paid for on day one. The game was NOT refunded and was NOT removed from their Steam library.
- games are removed from Steam every day, even though some people already purchased them.
