December 13th, 2020 addition:
In the first comment underneath the OP, I've added some quotes by Gary Gygax, who coined the phrase "role-playing game", where he says linear narratives aren't RPGs, that combat shouldn't be fixated on in an RPG, and that combat and levelling-up just for the sake of combat and levelling-up doesn't constitute an RPG.
October 8th, 2020 addition with January 3rd, 2021 edits:
Let's start with what the creators of the RPG genre say an
1.
US companies heavily sponsored Hitler's rise to power and supplied the Nazis' war preparations to an extent that WW2 would likely not have been possible without the US' support of the Nazis. For one example, by 1942, 1/3rd of all the Nazis' vehicles were made by Ford, while half of the Nazis' vehicles throughout WW2 were made in GM factories (which GM lost control of in 1940), and Standard Oil (today's Exxon and Chevron) continued to supply 13,000 tons oil to the Nazis every month until
For a long time, there has existed a strange anomaly in the gaming community: The unbalanced and blind perception of Bethesda / ZeniMax as being a 'good-person' developer and publisher. This perception has been held by many of the companies' fans despite all the while the company keeps doing things that contradict that perception. In many ways, Bethesda / ZeniMax have been games industry leaders in scummy, disrespectful, and exploitative lawsuit-happy practices, going back for more than a decade
Updated August 2020
Some of the bottom part of this post is a paste of a message I sent to Steam support following the seemingly-bullying actions of a Steam forum moderator who has been falsely telling people that Steam rents / leases games through their service and doesn't sell them, and who was intolerant of anybody telling them they're wrong. That moderator liked to do things like delete posts and lock any threads where people demonstrated otherwise.
To be clear