Could someone just make, like, Raunchy Mastercard and just process payments from everyone including all the porn and weird shit that the other mainstream companies don’t want? It seems like the payment processors being puritanical dipshits is a weakness that could be exploited by an enterprising competitor.
But then again, we’re talking about a natural monopoly that has been in place for decades at this point. I wouldn’t expect them to exactly play fair.
One of the great mysteries of the 21st century is how a tiny number of US companies control most of the world’s payment processing, when it’s not a technically difficult problem.
You could implement an entire end-to-end payment processing system in a year with a team of a few dozen competent engineers. The only difficulty is getting banks and retailers to sign up to it, but when the big players charge so much and create so much trouble this doesn’t seem like it should be a tough sell. In most cases literally all you’d need to do is charge 2.4% instead of their 3%.
I don’t even. Every individual part of RDR2 is pretty good. It looks good, sounds good, the writing really deserves recognition for managing to keep a 100 hour plot interesting and at no point was it ever clear to me why this needed to be an interactive medium because the gameplay and all the other bits don’t really interface. Inside missions you can’t leave the very narrow developer intended path at all, your choices boil down to “what gun do I shoot this guy with”. Outside of missions you’re free to do “whatever” except whatever is also just mostly shooting guys or animals - none of which you have to do or affect anything.
The exploration is and stumbling upon odd sidequests initially is like the only part where it makes sense to be a game, because you couldn’t recreate that in another medium and some even ask of you, the player, to use your noggin to solve shit. All the rest of it though, you could basically get the same experience by watching The Sopranos and after every episode you finish a level of Quake.
Which on it’s own would be fine, a piece of art can just be a good time for a (long) while and that’s good but RDR2 ranks among there as the most expensive videogame, especially if you exclude obvious scams like Star Citizen and live service games like WoW that have just been getting content forever and everybody involved in the production was reportedly forced into insane crunch times to make the horse balls react to temperature. And for what?
Star Wars knights of the old republic (it was so much fun exploring none skywalker Star Wars stories)
pong (first commercially successful game)
baldur’s gate II (because I love it)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial ( it is universality recognized as the worst game of all time)
the legend of Zelda (it is universally recognized as one of the greatest of all time)
world of Warcraft ( the most successful English mmorpg of all time)
Warcraft III
sim city
Everquest ( it is called evercrack for a reason, this game literally gave rise to emotional support groups) The most amazing tidbit about that game. After it had been out three years I saw a guy playing his character in a Wizards of the Coast store, who had a really weird color name over his head. Apparently one got that color when you have looked 500 days on the character. I did the math… that is real time days. That meant he had played that game 1.5 years of the last three. My mouth fell open……)
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