Talk about petty topics...much as I don't judge books by their cover, I sure don't judge computer games by their cover art...;) I mean, I could care less whether some fictional 3d-model/artist's-rendition-of-a-person's belly-button is revealed on the cover--or whether a shirt covers the belly-button. Who gives a great big flip, eh? Has nothing whatever to do with the quality of the game itself--nothing. And that's all I care about, personally. The cover art for the game--for any game--is so far beneath my personal game-hunting/investigating radar that this post represents the first time in my posting history that I've ever mentioned the topic, even in passing.
Any web site that would make an issue out of something so trivial is doing so simply to draw attention to itself--often such sites speak in the imperial "we" instead of the author being honest and saying "I"...which is another reason to disdain comments of this type. They are meaningless drivel--not worth your consideration--not worth the time of day.
It's not even an issue of moral turpitude, for instance--because even children on public beaches are legally exposed to a wide array of bikinis and belly-buttons--so there's not even a moral component to such a suggestion, even for strange people who find something salacious about bare bellies. There's nothing in such "charges" that anyone could use to "threaten" Larian (or any other developer.) Nothing. If a site is dumb enough to try and "stir the pot" with such silly presumption, most developers could and would ignore it--and whether the author meant them as a veiled threat would be irrelevant--amusing, even.
But, even if a developer comes to the conclusion that a particular objection is specious and void of any redeeming social value, he still has to carefully consider all issues raised by potential customers, even the inconsequential ones like this one. Then he does what he wants because he decides it is prudent to either respond or ignore such commentary. It's a simple judgment call--but the bottom line is a developer has to consider his customers and his market--"blackmail" has absolutely nothing to do with it, imo...;) But customer satisfaction is the Holy Grail for any game developer worth his salt, and even dumb comments must be considered and weighed. It's just part of doing business with the public.
A web-site author that would wag a finger at a developer and say, "If you keep doing this we're not going to review your games anymore," is acting pompously and far above his station--as reviewing popular games might be the only reason anyone at all visits his site, and refusing to review popular games for any reason will hurt the struggling web site far more than it will the successful game developer. In fact, to the developer, what a site owner might do or threaten to do just won't make any difference at all. And, if a developer does anything at all, it will be because the developer deems it wise--not at all because he "fears" some obscure web-site somewhere...;)
