If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.
If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.
Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.
I'd recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you're also giving Bad Company A's product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B's product, encouraging more of Good Company B's product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn't say "unprofitable") games, which means they're not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they've diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they're using now piss you off, it's important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.
For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don't buy it, I don't pirate it, I don't play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.
You know, it’s funny, I used to feel big FOMO when it came to games I wanted to play. Then the Epic Game Store came along, and started paying for timed exclusives, and I adopted the philosophy that I’d just wait for the games to get a Steam release.
There’s only been a handful of instances where I even bothered buying them once they came to Steam; turns out that by not buying them when they’re being hyped by all of the new release marketing, I’ve mentally moved on to other things by the time they come to Steam, and I just don’t feel the need to buy them anymore. I just needed help getting past that initial mental hurdle.
The same applies to companies whose philosophies I object to; as long as I have a reason to mentally justify not buying them initially, I just lose interest in the products entirely very quickly.
People would often respond to me with the sentiment that "games aren't fungible", which is true, but there's so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you're looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don't have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.
I'm a former game dev and I can tell you, at least from my experience, there was no golden age where developers and customers were treated fairly. It's the primary reason why I left. Hell, I once interviewed at a place that showed off how the offices had beds in them, as if that was a selling point.
That said, I'd probably be someone who you'd consider "doesn't care about the bad things these companies did." I'm just too fuckin' old to be mad about shit all of the time. If I was only going to patronize folks and companies who matched my own set of ideals and ethics, I would be more than just gameless. I would be homeless and penniless as well.
What I do is simply detach products and services from those who provide them. I can buy a thing from a person I find distasteful. I don't have to invite them out for a drink and I certainly don't have to avoid taking them to task for their poor or unethical behavior. Moreover, ethics and behavior are saleable. If someone comes around who offers something comparable to something from someone I find distasteful, then I can go patronize the new person instead. I have jumped ship from many service and product providers for that very reason. If you want my business, then you better ensure you're either the only person who can provide what I want or ensure you're the person I want to buy from.
@emeraldheart I'm not frustrated, because it's not a dilemma to me.
Blizzard's glory days are long gone, WOTC does whatever, I had my fun, and J.K. Rowling is a more complex topic. But assuming she's "bad" I'm fine with that too.
The games industry is only bleak if you omit the #indiedev scene. there are so many cool, new games.
E.g. In the last 12 months I have had a blast with Against the Storm, Phantom Brigade and Mechabellum.
Papers, please. This was dystopian but it still felt like it captured the banality of some of communism’s negative side rather than just creating moustache twirling villains.
While the game is pretty fun and the banality is the point, I feel like it doesn’t have a lot of things to say about communism itself. You can swap it out for any failing country and it would just work the same.
While Papers Please is very good, it has more in common with nations in a post-soviet balkanisation than a communist nation. The banality is very present in modern western government as well, and the inability to afford medicine for your child is something that is ripped straight from the modern USA. It is a great approximation of what people imagine due to media conditioning, and that makes it very easy to role-play within the game and really enjoy it.
All in all, amazing game, amazing soundtrack, not really indicative.
I’m frustrated by the current largely-unethical state of the games industry
It’s the fate of any large enough company in a capitalist system. Greed creates/incentivizes this behavior and then rewards it. Microtransactions and dark patterns wouldn’t exist if they didn’t work. Greedy people know this and the rest of us are plagued by them.
Xbox has always doing the x86 architecture(Edit: as corrected by following comment, 360 was not.) so it’s much easier to do BC. For Sony or Nintendo it’s just not worth the effort until the emu is mature that they can just reap the benefit. PS5 can already play almost entire PS4 library, Anything PS2 or before can be emu pretty consistently if you are trying to get it done, then it only left PS3 in a weird place. For PS3, many good games already have a PS4/PS5 remaster games, for non-best sellers you can probably get a cheap ps3 slim with enough storage to play those left out games.(ie, PSN only Puppeteer), OR stream them like you mentioned.
When it comes to the corporate world, your purchases are like your vote in politics. WotC has done some stuff that lots of people (myself included) don’t like. They’ve also done some stuff people really do like.
The situation around the open gaming license was the perfect example. People boycotted D&D beyond, and other directly related products, but very few boycotted the D&D movie, because people wanted to discourage Wizards from the specific license changes, but didn’t want to discourage making good movies for our niche audience.
Obviously not all companies have separate things like this. Activision/Blizzard are more monolithic, and so selectively boycotting them is harder.
All this said, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if any boycott is costing you too much, monetarily, mental health-wise, etc., you shouldn’t feel bad for breaking it
I once heard "when you vote with your wallet, people with more money get more votes", and that really helped me internalize how unlikely it is to expect occasional boycott to beat executives investing millions in marketing to lure entire audiences of well-off customers might not even be informed of the issues going behind the scenes. You can boycott for your moral satisfaction, but to enact actual change, it isn't enough.
Frankly, it depends on how micro or macro you’re willing to think, and how much that personally bothers you. At the end of the day we live in multiple systems of oppression and exploitation that make it very hard - and sometimes outright impossible - to properly consume something without being unethical. From The Good Place:
“Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for the Good Place. These days, just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making!”
From my personal point of view, there’s a few choices. The first is, you can just not consume. There’s more than enough indie games, as well as plenty of old-AAA games that won’t directly benefit their companies anymore. You can also pirate, if that’s not an online game.
From a more cynical point of view, your individual purchase (and, frankly, even a organized boycott) won’t make a difference to these companies. Modern capitalism doesn’t rely on genuine profit, just on the idea that an IP or corporation is profitable, and that’s enough to attract investors and investments, and inflate its share price as well as its value in the eyes of capitalists. This is a gross oversimplification, and generally only applies to the largest names, but still sadly relevant.
So at the end of the day, you have to think to yourself: Does it bother you to consume something? I won’t buy or play anything related to Harry Potter media because JKR disgusts me, but I see no issue with indirectly supporting WotC. Likewise, while the decision to not support Blizzard products is very easy (they don’t really make that many), I can’t say their scandals forced me to stop playing any more than their lack of dedicated support to their products.
There’s rarely an absolute moral good when it comes to consuming products, even indie ones; Publishers like Chucklefish and Dangen had their own share of abuse and neglect, and sometimes individual creators are just, well, assholes.
If you didn’t enjoy it the first time I don’t see why you would now, even with a better framerate. It’s still the Assassin’s Creed Kurosawa Edition it always looked like, just smoother.
I didn’t mind it, but if you don’t like AC gameplay, you won’t take to this.
Try Days Gone instead, that one actually feels like the better gyro and framerate of the PS5 improves it.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne