As a player of some of their games - they not only don't care about their players, but have a deeply abusive relationship with us.
Quitting Riot games was one of the easiest things I've ever done, especially now that Deadlock lets you make lobbies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4YvcQOSiRM&list=PLzBq1zjrpq...
- penalizing a pro player for picking a particular champ and rune combo due to it being bugged (which is their fault) even though the player didn't abuse the bug
- the CEO of the company doxxing the developer of a competing game
- the insane AI-powered "zero tolerance chat filter" that regularly catches comments that, upon human review, are clearly inoffensive
- the "lane swap detection" anti-feature
- autofill
- client and server crashes being blamed on the players
...and many, many, many more examples.
An extremely profit driven company wouldn't allow that.
Perhaps you may benefit from reading this.
But basically, if the product is free, then you are the product.
It's invalid to say "a profit-driven company wouldn't do x" for almost any value of x.
It's also invalid to suggest that a company that doesn't require money isn't profit-driven. There are thousands of free-to-play games run by greedy companies that push monetization on users (even if they don't require it). There are tens of thousands of companies that use ads to monetize their games.
There's also ample evidence of Riot's greed over the past few years - $500 skins, progressive removal of more and more free cosmetics from the game despite record revenue, encouraging and enabling smurf accounts (which absolutely ruin the experience for other players) because they buy more skins, and many, many more instances.