I feel like we need a catchy word for this "destroy creative works for tax purposes" thing that has become increasingly normal in the past few years. It's hard to call it out right now in a way that gets people riled up about it, because it's hard to explain to people what it even is. I think part of the reason why so many corpos have become okay with doing it is they realized people don't understand it, and so must assume they are killing the thing for a good reason. I know I was perfectly willing to assume there was a good reason for this game getting delayed back when that was announced.

I still like the one suggestion I saw to combat that… “sure you can claim it as a loss on your taxes, but in return it must be released to the public domain for free”

Yeah, like the Coyote VS ACME movie and Batgirl

I'll bet you it's because the game looked like shit

How does this even make sense? You can't pay more in taxes than the earnings you're paying taxes on. If you deliberately cause a 10 million loss reducing your earnings by those 10 million and thereby saving a percentage of those 10 million in taxes, you're not very good at math, are you?