All businesses are created for the purpose of turning a profit. That doesn't mean they're all exploitative. People who make, publish, distribute, etc. video games need to put roofs over their heads and food on their tables too. If we held gaming to some sort of purity test where games were created and distributed for free, without a focus on making money, then the average quality of games would only go down because they'd be made by amateurs who do it on the side when they're not working to make a living.

I don't blame LRG at all for accepting these partnerships. It would be stupid for them to turn down publishers with name recognition and games they know will sell well. It's not a scenario at all unique to LRG either. For example, Square Enix is using Strictly Limited Games to distribute games under the Taito brand. These publishers can and have in the past easily absorbed the cost of creating and distributing smaller runs for their releases that are more niche, and when they do it themselves, they don't have to split the profits with these LRG-style companies. I think the main motivation is that, because these games are sold for a limited time when using a company with a business model like LRG's, they can better ensure quickly selling through the whole stock at whatever price was set. If you distribute via GameStop, Amazon, etc., you're at the mercy of however many copies these retailers want to order, and the game very well may see markdowns. On top of that, you have companies like GameStop selling used copies, so that eats into the sales potential of new copies. But how consumer-friendly a company is can affect sales too, especially long-term. As a consumer, I much prefer games to see wide releases when at all possible. That way I have multiple options in terms of where I can buy a game, and I can do so at my leisure, without worrying about being on a specific site at a specific date and time. Even the one-month preorder windows that LRG does for many of their releases these days is pretty limited compared to going on Amazon and ordering a game that was released months or even years ago. I wish these bigger companies would put more stock into how consumer-friendly their distribution models are.