I think the better term is being a cycle of perpetration and apology. They screw up and the community calls them out on it. They do something somewhat reasonable and the community praises them for it and then they do something to screw it up again. It's a constant cycle of companies screwing up and then the devs offering half hearted apologies and 'incentives' to keep playing the game and the community falls for it, then it just gives the devs free pass to try and do something shady again. Seems to happen a lot when something off happens since I doubt many devs out there want to give an actual sincere apology and a proper make up for the mistakes they made. They just half ass it and a lot of people just accept it and the process just repeats in a cycle.