They deliberately hindered the release of Starcraft 2 by releasing the online experience completely unfinished. No clans, no chat (at all), no PMing, no custom games. Nothing. It was like that for several years.
At that point, with 3 years of hype for the game, people came, played a bit of 1v1 then left. It was a botched job. Blizzard died with the release of SC2.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHZru-6M8BY
That would screw up anybody's motivation a bit.
Players get what they incentivize, and thanks to video games getting more and more popular, the tragedy of the commons applies.
Still, it sucks.
It's not crazy that people bought the horse in more $ amounts than SC2's first release. It's crazy that people spent $15 on a single cosmetic.
I don't fully trust piratesoftware guy, since he does do a lot of clickbait, and isn't exactly a well known body from Blizzard. But I do reckon that micro transactions for a larger game would well outsell an old purchase model on a smaller game.
And yeah. We can only blame gamers for the way video games are now. The good games rarely get acknowledged, but the bad games proliferate continuously.