Eric's dominance passing a certain level led to Game Over on the Enemy/War path. Originally, there were two paths, Friendship and War. Friendship was more or less what you're describing, heavy voyeurism stuff and probably some sharing etc too. War was war, MC vs Eric.
For my sins, I was pledging to DS at the $40 level during the high drama, so for maybe the third or fourth time I'll explain the history. DS ran a poll on Eric due to the persistent complaints from anti-NTR crusaders. The poll had two options, with the pro-Eric response being "Eric is the main attraction". That option won the poll - I think it was in the low 60s, not a blowout, but far from a squeaker. Some guy - who I'm fairly convinced was just a troll, though $40 a month is an expensive trolling habit - went on a days-long meltdown about how the poll winning meant that Eric was now, or would soon become "the main character" and the game was going to be nothing but hard NTR etc. Nothing anyone, including DS, said to the contrary seemed to get through.
Persistence can pay off sometimes, and people started to take him seriously and to accept this idea that DS was trying to make Eric "the main character", whatever that even meant. Given what they now seemed to think was the choice between removing Eric and hard, unavoidable NTR that would be the point of the game, rather than a negotiable hazard to be avoided, more and more people started demanding that Eric be removed from the game. DS caved and the game became more or less just another bang-your-family fetchquest effort.
It's honestly kind of extraordinary to me that so many people seem to want the same thing to happen again. There's hundreds of games on this site that Eric isn't in. Hell, there's two or three other ripoffs/remakes of Big Brother that Eric isn't in. Can't we just have one remake that's actually trying to do what the original set out to?
