For some definition of "common", yes. Some try to be less shady by asking for consent (e.g. in exchange for in-game credits), others are essentially malware.
FYI this is a rebranding of the notorious “Luminati” service that sold a residential proxy network based on the ”Hola VPN” chrome extension. They’ve upped their game and now pay application developers to embed their botnet in their application.
the idea that games should be written solely to extract revenue from players is so repulsive to me that I actively disrespect and disfavor people I know who work on things like this.
humans are a truly horrible species and this kind of thing is a great example of why I believe that.
That's every billion dollar publisher that releases games with initial purchase + microtransactions beyond cosmetics. So Activision/Blizzard, EA, Take Two, and Ubisoft. Like it's one thing to do free-to-play + pay-to-win but it's quite another to charge $60 and then make the game worse solely to drive people to buy things that will make it suck less. And they all do it.
Residential IPs are extremely valuable for scraping or other automation flows so yeah getting kids to run a free game that has malware seems plausible.
For example: https://bright-sdk.com/
> Bright SDK is approved by Apple, Amazon, LG, Huawei, Samsung app stores, and is whitelisted by top Antivirus companies.