Money mumbles. Don’t buy the game, and also actively notify the company of your decision and why. Twitter, feedback form, steam review, whatever channel lets you get that message across.
This doesn’t work. It will never work. You can’t shame conscious consumers into voting with their wallets while the other 99% keeps buying the bad practices.
Thing is, if nobody on Lemmy, and literally nobody in general who cares about anticheat, buys GTA 6, you know what effect that would have on the company’s bottom line? None, they’ll make record profits.
So now you try to convince the 99% of players that are buying the bad practices, that a magic (to them) program that prevents cheaters is bad (since “has too much access” doesn’t really explain anything). They don’t care and won’t care.
Why would they listen to your personal complaint if you, singular, are going to buy it anyway? Your voice only matters to a company if it means you won’t buy their product otherwise. Don’t buy the game, then tell them why you didn’t.
You’re not listening to what I said. I said that most people will buy the game and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Most people are fucking idiots. You can morally decide not to support it by not buying the game, and that’s perfectly reasonable. But it won’t do fucking shit because all the idiots will still buy the game. That’s just how the world works because most people don’t give a fuck. Unless you can personally convince millions of people to change their behavior and agree with you, you not buying the game doesn’t matter.
There is a network effect to popular games.
However as more people stop buying the network effect gets weaker.
Its happening visibly with the new Call of Duty. Many i know bought it and then stopped playing shortly after because much of their friends are waiting for sales now or just find the game bad.
Those people will be thinking twice before buying next year.
Exactly, every time I say ‘I’m thinking of putting up a Factorio server, you want in?’, they are significantly less likely to be playing (or paying for) the newest game that has kernel-level access. Why, because we are playing Factorio for the next few weeks together and Factorio is fun.
Factorio isn’t the only game we play, but the point is to reinforce yours. If you are playing fun game x, your friends are more likely to play x instead of something else. Even if they have no care about Kernel-Level access, the fact you do affects their buying (and playing) patterns.
A PC game is either on Steam or GOG or it doesn’t exist to me.
I subscribe to the humble monthly bundle thing and if a game doesn’t activate on one of those two I’m probably never going to play it despite owning it.
I’d maybe have added epic to the list if it wasn’t for the store exclusivity stuff. I know that they’ve dialled it back significantly, but anti-consumer stinks like that don’t readily wash out.
Conversely, GOG is on the list because they’re expressly pro-consumer, particularly with their preservationist initiatives. My monkey brain would prefer everything in one place on Steam, but I recognise behaviour I want to support in these companies, so GOG gets my money too
You forgot patreon. Steam censors the library in places (hello German government & fuck you hard with a rusty rebar). But even outside censorship, patreon game developers usually do not lock in their games into rootkit-protected anticheat/copy protection/whatever bullshit.
Not censored but mandated by a government body so they literally have no other option other than doing that.
If the dev is too lazy to fill out a questionnaire for self-categorizing the age rating why is Valve responsible for that?
I am not talking about the age categorization, I am talking about having to implement a customer age verification which they won’t do for the German market, and again, while this would be easy, I don’t necessarily blame steam for it. But that they do censor is unquestioned, and therefore more options are welcome, as long as those stores do not require a launcher, installer or otherwise intrusive software.
Not just the costumes. They green screened the fuck out of that scene. Wonder if they shot the whole thing on a sound stage and tried to AI in the entirety of the background? This has all the earmarks of a “Are you piggies willing to pay $20 a ticket for entrance to the slop show?”
Simple premise is basically Minesweeper, but all the puzzles are handcrafted with some neat designs and concepts that will stretch your puzzle solving to the limit. Also importantly, no guessing required to solve and it’s dirt cheap for the amount of hours of puzzles you get!
No guessing is required to solve any puzzle either, despite some variants seeming completely impossible.
Fun fact: There’s an achievement for stumbling across a level with a conpletely empty starting board, without any spaces being revealed to be mines or non-mines. Yes, that can be solved without guessing.
Fun Fact 2: I’d argue there are more than 14 variants.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
I managed to soft lock the new Pokemon Snap game in the tutorial where they had you take a picture of a Butterfree (I think is the right Pokemon). Somehow when I took a picture, it flapped its wings and turned enough that it was flat in the picture and couldn’t be selected when you were at the next phase of the tutorial selecting the shot to show the Professor Oak stand in. You couldn’t go back to take another picture, so I was effectively unable to continue the game from there. I was pretty proud of my bad picture taking skills.
Ultimately, the world is not a grid. So while grids may be great for pure strategy games like XCom (and I really enjoyed XCom, not knocking it at all), I think a lot of people would say that for more story-focused games like RPGs, they break the immersion. Thus, BG3 (which I’m also really enjoying) does not use one. Neither do any of the party-based RPGs that I can think of off the top of my head. For me personally, it depends on the game. I am perfectly happy without one in BG3. But I enjoyed having one for XCom, and more recently for Warhammer 40k Mechanicus. I would offer that as a suggestion if you are looking for a gridded turn-based strategy game.
I’m really confused as to why everybody’s saying BG3 doesn’t have a grid. It’s not visible, but it’s there. BG3 is obviously built around a grid of hexagonal prisms as its basic building block and it shows in everything, including combat and level design. They’ve done a great job with graphics and animations to make them smooth and make it seem like the grid is not there, but it is.
Of course the ground itself needs some kind of abstraction, there is no actual computing in the real numbers. Thats not the kind of grid OP is talking about though, they mean a grid where a character uses up a single tile.
Oh right, I forgot that people insist on humoring that change. I feel like if everyone keeps just calling it Twitter, he’ll just quietly change it back.
Regardless, X was used to represent a variable for about a thousand years longer than Musk has been using it, so I will keep using it that way too.
Keep it up. For me, that confusion is part of the entertainment. No one will know what the fuck anyone is talking about when they say “X”, necessitating an overly complex explanation every time. Fuck everything about X.
it’s not that I want to think of that loser more than we have to, it’s that i see the title of your post on the feed and for a brief moment i think it’s a headline from a news community. Like @MagicShel said, keep it up.
It’s awful seeing a game based on a bigots work being bestselling.
It just feels like a reminder that so many people don’t care about trans people at all because of “nostalgia” and not caring that Rowling benefits and hurts us.
sighs I’m sorry for that rant just sad/disappointed/angry to see this.
Harry Potter was such a crucial part of my childhood and teen years. I cried when Dumbledore died. I read several of the books over a dozen times, and did an annual reread of the whole series for awhile.
I’m not trans but that TERF cunt will never see another cent or good word from me. I spit on her name as she spit on my childhood. Solidarity, friend.
It’s really simple: don’t buy it but pirate it and enjoy it anyway. As the game itself is pretty solid for what it is, just works and does not sell addons and has no mtx-shop, which really baffled me.
I don’t like her stupid ass and can’t stand her silly propaganda. I don’t even like harry Potter at all, yet still enjoyed my time in the game. Like i highly dislike star wars, yet cherished the Kotor games very much.
I usually strip the art from the artist. And in those cases I won’t purchase but download. Me not playing it does absolutely nothing, but me not buying it does a microscopic tiny fraction.
And don’t forget that most people just don’t know And/or don’t care. Not everyone buying it or loving potter is some backwards yokel. Ignorance can be a bliss.
Speaking of your coincidental “And/or” spelling, as much as I know you probably don’t think it would be good, Andor is 1000% worth watching. It is one of the best antifascist, anticapitalist pieces of art I’ve ever seen. It honestly does play into being in Star Wars but it leaves behind the fantasy.
Really, stupidly good show. Tony Gilroy absolutely delivered with that show.
You will be surprised to know that you don’t agree on much of anything with most people.
Why tf do we need to investigate every damn niche of a creator’s mind before deciding to buy?
Idgaf he’s a bigot, a cow or a racist. If I like x thing that was made, and them being a bigot, cow or racist does not impact the product I’m buying, then I’m buying it.
Every day we use products that were made under the control of CEO’s that would shit on us rather than shake our hands, that have ruined so many lives you can’t count them because it’s probably “illegal” since they sleep with everyone in power, but somehow we draw the line at bigotry.
If you don’t like supporting bad people you better move in a forest and start raising some chickens because almost everything we buy supports some form of moronity that we can’t even comprehend. That one product you don’t buy won’t make a sliver of difference.
You not buying it is whatever, but expecting others not to is really pretentious.
The problem with Rowling is she has a massive influence over the space.
It’s not like some random black metal artist who lives in a cabin that no one’s heard of. She’s quite literally a billionaire from this franchise and spends a ton of that wealth lobbying against Trans people.
Quite literally the profits from Harry Potter are going towards hate.
Idgaf he’s a bigot, a cow or a racist. If I like x thing that was made, and them being a bigot, cow or racist does not impact the product I’m buying, then I’m buying it.
Congrats on perfectly respresenting the core of what is wrong with modern society.
“If it doesn’t get in the way of my mindless consumerism, I’ll happily support people who are openly racist”
People like you, more so even than the bigots themselves, are why society is turning to shit.
Well thank god you’re not buying anything from thisi artist. You singlehandedly fed like 1000 children who now don’t get free lunches at school in america.
No I understood the point of your comment perfectly, it’s the old “well we can’t complete fix every problem with society magically overnight with 1 action, so we shouldn’t try to do anything” argument. With perhaps a dash of “you want to improve society, yet you participate in society, curious” thrown in as well.
Basically if everyone were to have the same attitude as you literally nothing would ever get better.
Some chunk of that is from counter-boycotters and anti-trans NGOs (allegedly even some GONGOs like citizengo), who bought up a lot, then dumped them onto G2A, gifted them for cheap, etc.
I guess you don’t care about a lot of the other categories either.
Rank 1, 8, 11, 14, 15, 16 are developed/published by a patent troll that stifles the whole games industry with frivolous patent suits and milks their audience dry while investing hardly anything into their games.
Rank 5 and 6 are published by a corporation widely known for their leadership being extremely misogynistic and exploitative.
Rank 17 is published by a corporation that’s known for being extremely exploitative.
Btw, most of the corporations on the list donated to Trump, spy at their customers, use anti-competitive tactics, overwork and exploit their developers, employ psychologists to squeeze as much money out of vulnerable customers (e.g. those with psychological issues) and so on and so on.
And you apparently don’t care about any of that. The only thing you care about is that a game that actually includes a trans character is based upon a 20-30yo book series that contains no anti-trans content, but was written by an author who later went on to post some anti-trans garbage years after the series was done and dusted.
Tbh, that’s concerning, that you prefer games that directly benefit a transphobe regime over games that are remotely related to a transphobe influencer.
I haven’t played 99% of the games listed here. Pokémon Shining Pearl has been the only one I played.
I don’t support any of the other companies either and I’m well aware they donate to fascists.
The reason I brought up the HP game is because the author directly has been doing a lot of harm to trans people. This doesn’t condone what these other companies are doing but I find that many people tend to look the other way with the HP franchise as a whole.
People look the other way with literally everything.
They happily shop at Amazon, even though they are the modern-day equivalent of slavery.
They play Minecraft even though it’s been developed by a white supremacist.
They use Windows even though Microsoft is complicit in a list of all sorts of horrible things too long to list here.
They use Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta VR even though this corporation has done more for the errosion of democracy than any other entity so far.
They buy Nestle, even though it’s going so far as to cut off local populations from their water supplies.
The list continues on and on. Name a single corporation where people en large have done a real, long-term boycott for moral reasons. The only thing I can think of that kinda happened was when Tesla sales fell a little bit for a few months after Musk did a literal Hitler Salute on the largest stage he could find, but even that wasn’t a lot and it’s pretty much over already.
People, by and large, don’t prioritize morals over comfort. They will always choose the best deal they can get, no matter what the long-term or moral effects are. People who put morals over comfort exist, but they are very rare.
And in most cases, people who shout for boycotts the loudest were never customers to begin with (e.g. me, who has never bought a Tesla, saying I will never buy a Tesla because of Musk. Well, I wouldn’t have bought a Tesla anyway).
You, not having played a single game on that list (1% of 20 games is 0.2 games, so none) seem to be firmly in the camp of “I’m not a customer so I can feel morally superior by not changing anything I do”.
Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Best estimates for their subscribers are north of 25M and as high as 35M. The $1 subscribers have dried up by now, but even if we assume an average of $10/month/user, in the current world where there’s a $20 tier with the really juicy stuff, that’s at least a quarter of a billion dollars per month in revenue. Now that’s revenue, not profit, but those several hundred million dollar deals also died down, as well as their willingness to license outside content anywhere near as much as they used to, which they can feasibly afford to do because they’ve built up a portfolio of games that they own in perpetuity, not unlike what Netflix did.
MS may not have invented it (although I’d argue they essentially did) but they did perfect it. That was the whole idea behind windows and IE, market share dominance at any cost.
Depending on how you do accounting, they may or may not have paid off the $70B. They’re firing people and cancelling projects, according to reporting, because they want to free up $80B of capital across the organization to invest in AI. Whatever money these other sectors are making, the money AI could make is seen as being way higher.
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