Opiate said:I didn't do the renaming, but the implication should be obvious.
This ARG gave people the illusion of control: that through playing a variety of other independently developed games, players had the opportunity to release Portal 2 more rapidly.
It is clear, now, that audience participation does not actually have any effect, and that we all could have literally done nothing but watch and the result would have been identical.
That is not satisfying. Being given the illusion of control when your input is actually meaningless is frustrating in virtually any context. I'm not sure why that's confusing to people.
If true agreed. Obviously Valve has a ton of good will, so this isn't going to hurt my feelings or something, but I certainly don't think it's awesome.