Steam Forums are one of the worst hellholes I've seen on the modern internet, and Valve does nothing. Any game that gets declared a target by the post-Gamergate crowd ends up having its board seiged until it's unusable for any kind of actual discussion.
If they would, no one could ask anything pre purchase.
But I also don’t like the forum in there because of the bad atmosphere. Also I don’t know whether it is because of a special group or because the general communication style in games is toxic, dumb, aggressive and egoistical as fuck… Like in almost every ingame chat.
Every discussion board has several categories by default
General/bugs/events/trading
Simply moving the default category or locking it massively decreases trolling and appropriate category use.
The main problem with discussion trolling is that valve never deals with the rampant spam bots or people who continually post egregious material. I've seen bots last years posting update edits on every large game news post.
The only way to fix it is to lock it to game owners/account age/community engagement. But valve will never do this unless it negatively affects their image because their leadership have become deluded weirdos (exempting art lead and gabe newell)
Valve’s hands-off philosophy with almost all of their social components is one of those massive double-edged swords, as anyone who trades steam items will tell you as well.
It allows anyone to take charge in participation, but that’s EVERYONE, including those who enjoy belittling others, which sucks.
Yes, but they are almost never exercised unless it involves legal requirements - Valve’s ideals are very much “We will not bother anyone unless we have to”, which is nice for people who want to forge spaces but sucks when people show up to be shitheads.
It’s not Valve’s job to provide a liberal education and loving community for the young’uns, the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying. Like tiktok is doing with “Israel is controlling the U.S. through AIPAC”.
the only thing Valve can do is censor discussions and ban people for what they are saying
Except they don’t, which is the problem. Moderation of the forums is pushed off on developers, publishers and volunteers, and Valve only gets involved if they absolutely have to. It makes effective moderation of the forums dedicated to games made by small and solo devs functionally impossible, and allows for rampant abuse of the systems by publishers, such as Take Two marking negative reviews as “off-topic”.
I don’t see how it’s Valves problem. They are a marketplace and essentially rent a store front to developers. Forum moderation for a specific game should be up to the developer/publisher.
It’s like if you rented a spot in a stripmall, and you want the stripmall owner to come clean the floors when people come into your shop and piss on your floor. Don’t want to manage your own forum, then disable user posts entirely.
Now I wish Valve would implement Bluesky’s idea of blocklists.
Basically, the community would pool together to make voluntary lists of “Anti-woke mobs” that just troll through forums with rage bait, and add them to that list. It would require a level of trust, and tools to confirm each addition (eg, highlight a worst-case post from that user) but could start to clean things up.
They could also let users choose to hide posts from users below a certain Steam score, making it hard to occupy space with brand new accounts.
Argo Tuulik was a minor shareholder part of the coup of Ilmar Compos who ousted the original creators and inventors of the elysium universe using legal exploits.
Robert Kurvitz the actual creative force behind disco Elysium has been barred from telling stories of this own world because he no longer holds the copyright.
The people who are trying to sell this “successors” are the people who robbed us from learning more about this world.
Argo Tuulik along with Martin Luiga were players in Robert Kurvitz’s Elysium TTRPG sessions, perhaps less important than Robert in the creative process and world building but still definitely participating enough to be considered co-creators of the setting. Torson and Mcclane were characters created and played by Argo and Martin during the tabletop sessions, for example.
Argo Tuulik was also a writer for Disco Elysium who was hugely important to the game, and wrote several iconic parts of it like the Hardie Boys. His involvement in trusting the people who betrayed Robert is something he personally regrets, and has talked about in his extensive interviews with the 41st Precinct YouTube channel.
The reality is, that it’s often stated that generative AI is an inevitability, that regardless of how people feel about it, it’s going to happen and become ubiquitous in every facet of our lives.
That’s only true if it turns out to be worth it. If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
Those heavily invested in it, ether literally through shares of Nvidia, or figuratively through the potential to deskill and shift power away from skilled workers at their companies don’t want that to be a possibility, they need to prevent consumers from having a choice.
If it was an inevitability in it’s own right, if it was just as good and easily substitutable, why would they care about consumers knowing before they payed for it?
AI storytelling is an amalgam of several different narratives, including:
Inevitability: AI is the future; its eventual supremacy is both imminent and certain, and therefore anyone who doesn’t want to be left behind had better embrace the technology. See Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, insisting earlier this year that every job in the world will be impacted by AI “immediately.”
Functionality: AI performs miracles, and the AI products that have been released to the public wildly outperform the products they aim to replace. To believe this requires us to ignore the evidence obtained with our own eyes and ears, which tells us in many cases that the products barely work at all, but it’s the premise of every TV ad you watch out of the corner of your eye during a sports telecast.
Grandiosity: The world will never be the same; AI will change everything. This is the biggest and most important story AI companies tell, and as with the other two narratives, big tech seems determined to repeat it so insistently that we come to believe it without looking for any evidence that it’s true.
As far as I can make out, the scheme is essentially: Keep the ship floating for as long as possible, keep inhaling as much capital as possible, and maybe the tech will get somewhere that justifies the absurd valuations, or maybe we’ll worm our way so far into the government that it’ll have to bail us out, or maybe some other paradigm-altering development will fall from the sky. And the way to keep the ship floating is to keep peddling the vision and to seem more confident that the dream is inevitable the less it appears to be coming true.
speaking for myself, MS can thank AI for being the thing that made me finally completely ditch windows after using it 30+ years
Don’t forget, “Turns out it was a losing bet to back DEI and Trans people”.
This is something scared, pathetic, loser, feral, spineless, sociopathic, moronic fascists come up with to try to win a crowd larger than an elevator; Assume the outcome as a foregone conclusion and try to talk around it, or claim it’s already happened.
Respond directly. “What? That’s ridiculous. I’ve never even seen ANY AI that I liked. Who told you it was going to pervade everything?”
That reminds me how McDonald’s and other gaat food chains are struggling. People figure it’s too expensive for what you get after prices going up and quality going down for years. They forgot that people buy if the price and quality are good. Same with AI. It’s all fun if it’s free or dirt cheap, but people don’t buy expensive slop.
If the cost of using it is lower than the alternative, and the market willing to buy it is the same. If the current cloud hosted tools cease to be massively subsidized, and consumers choose to avoid it, then it’s inevitably a historical footnote, like turbine powered cars, Web 3.0, and laser disk.
There’s another scenario: Turns out that if Big AI doesn’t buy up all the available stock of DRAM and GPUs, running local AI models on your own PC will become more realistic.
I run local AI stuff all the time from image generation to code assistance. My GPU fans spin up for a bit as the power consumed by my PC increases but other than that, it’s not much of an impact on anything.
I believe this is the future: Local AI models will eventually take over just like PCs took over from mainframes. There’s a few thresholds that need to be met for that to happen but it seems inevitable. It’s already happening for image generation where the local AI tools are so vastly superior to the cloud stuff there’s no contest.
MIT, like two years out from a study saying there is no tangible business benefit to implementing AI, just released a study saying it is now capable of taking over more than 10% of jobs. Maybe that’s hyperbolic but you can see that it would require a massssssive amount of cost to make that not be worth it. And we’re still pretty much just starting out.
I would love to read that study, as going off of your comment I could easily see it being a case of “more than 10% of jobs are bullshit jobs à la David Graeber so having an « AI » do them wouldn’t meaningfully change things” rather than “more than 10% of what can’t be done by previous automation now can be”.
The study you are referring to was released in late November 2025. It is titled “The Iceberg Index: Measuring Workforce Exposure in the AI Economy.” It was conducted by researchers from MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Here are the key details from the study regarding that “more than ten percent” figure:
The Statistic: The study found that existing AI systems (as of late 2025) already have the technical capability to perform the tasks of approximately 11.7% of the U.S. workforce.
Economic Impact: This 11.7% equates to roughly $1.2 trillion in annual wages and affects about 17.7 million jobs.
The “Iceberg” Metaphor: The study is named “The Iceberg Index” because the researchers argue that visible AI adoption in tech roles (like coding) is just the “tip of the iceberg” (about 2.2%). The larger, hidden mass of the iceberg (the other ~9.5%) consists of routine cognitive and administrative work in other sectors that is already technically automated but not yet fully visible in layout stats.
Sectors Affected: Unlike previous waves of automation that hit blue-collar work, this study highlights that the jobs most exposed are in finance, healthcare, and professional services. It specifically notes that entry-level pathways in these fields are collapsing as AI takes over the “junior” tasks (like drafting documents or basic data analysis) that used to train new employees. Why it is different from previous studies: Earlier MIT studies (like one from early 2024) focused on economic feasibility (i.e., it might be possible to use AI, but it’s too expensive). This new 2025 study focuses on technical capacity—meaning the AI can do the work right now, and for many of these roles, it is already cost-competitive.
I’ll be honest, that “Iceberg Index” study doesn’t convince me just yet. It’s entirely built off of using LLMs to simulate human beings and the studies they cite to back up the effectiveness of such an approach are in paid journals that I can’t access. I also can’t figure out how exactly they mapped which jobs could be taken over by LLMs other than looking at 13k available “tools” (from MCPs to Zapier to OpenTools) and deciding which of the Bureau of Labor’s 923 listed skills they were capable of covering. Technically, they asked an LLM to look at the tool and decide the skills it covers, but they claim they manually reviewed this LLM’s output so I guess that counts.
Project Iceberg addresses this gap using Large Population Models to simulate the human–AI labor market, representing 151 million workers as autonomous agents executing over 32,000 skills across 3,000 counties and interacting with thousands of AI tools
<span style="color:#323232;">user_prompt_template </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">= </span><span style="color:#183691;">"Your age is </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">{age} {gender}</span><span style="color:#183691;">,</span><span style="color:#0086b3;">{unemployment_rate}</span><span style="color:#183691;"> the number of COVID cases is </span><span style="color:#0086b3;">{covid_cases}</span><span style="color:#183691;">."
</span><span style="font-style:italic;color:#969896;"># Using Langchain to build LLM Agents
</span><span style="color:#323232;">agent_profile </span><span style="font-weight:bold;color:#a71d5d;">= </span><span style="color:#183691;">"You are a person living in NYC. Given some info about you and your surroundings, decide your willingness to work. Give answer as a single number between 0 and 1, only."
</span>
The whole thing perfectly straddles the line between bleeding-edge research and junk science for someone who hasn’t been near academia in 7 years like myself. Most of the procedure looks like they know what they’re doing, but if the entire thing is built on a faulty premise then there’s no guaranteeing any of their results.
In any case, none of the authors for the recent study are listed in that article on the previous study, so this isn’t necessarily a case of MIT as a whole changing it’s tune.
(The recent article also feels like a DOGE-style ploy to curry favor with the current administration and/or AI corporate circuit, but that is a purely vibes-based assessment I have of the tone and language, not a meaningful critique)
It’s really disappointing the game hasn’t released with mod support. People are making do by editing a few scripts, but full mod support would’ve helped this game so much out of the gate.
it's definitely a full release. i'm like 20 hours in and just scratching the surface with no real bugs to speak of. it's just not mind-blowingly amazing and there are too many loading screens. it's fun enough to entertain me until phantom liberty drops.
Agreed. Holy fuck are there so many unique quests with full voicing (at about 20 hours in). I've heard people say they aren't getting that "losing yourself accidentally seeing five different POIs", but it's definitely still there in a different package.
I get that by going to do one quest, having to stop off at other planets along the way, where I'll poke my head in and talk to whatever named NPCs I see, who'll inevitably give me a few quests, some of which lead to other places where I'll pick up other quests.
It was especially apparent with some random side quest somebody gave me in New Atlantis where I just had to go get a dead drop package from some other planet, which turned out to be the site of the Red Mile which is its own sort of arena/quest that I then enjoyed in the middle of the other quest. I've just been ping ponging around like that picking up stuff and stopping now and again to knock a few out.
The game is fine, and what most people who play Bethesda RPGs expected (or even better).
Also, if I’m not mistaken, previous Beth RPGs released without official mod support and had it added later as well. Almost no game by any company has released with official mod support; almost no game even has official mod support.
Except the whale narrative is largely a false narrative created by the game industry to avoid saying that the money comes from kids and gambling addicts.
Those people with more money than sense do exist and they make up a portion of the mtx money, but the vast majority is from people who probably can’t afford to make purchases like that (but do anyways because their brain can’t say no).
The industry has been honing these skinner box techniques for decades now - it’s what they used to get people to pay a monthly subscription for an mmo they only play when they log in to do their dailies.
Yeah man I know a lot of guys who drop money on shit like this. None of them are “whales”, but i know they’ve dropped hundreds if not thousands on this mtx bs. None of them own homes (which is kinda normal as we are in our 20’s), but only a few of them are even living on their own at all. Something is clearly going on psychologically there, if someone is willing to forego their own needs for cosmetics (that they will later replace with new cosmetics they bought!!)
Also kind of crazy that loot boxes were far less predatory than the current ow2 system is. It was very possible to never buy boxes and get everything. Nowadays? No chance
To a healthy person, the current system is pricier and more aggressive. Things are constantly being shoved in your face, but they’re all purchase-only, and 20€/skin is just absurd.
But, I disagree that it’s more predatory. To a vulnerable person, the new system doesn’t elicit an addictive response, which loot boxes due to their gambling nature do.
I think FOMO is quite a strong motivator for a addictive person. At least loot boxes were obtainable via playing the game. I wouldn’t say I am an excessive gamer, but I still managed to basically get everything over the span of 6 years playing the game. But now you HAVE to spend money to relieve FOMO pressure. Forcing you to spend money is quite predatory.
It was possible to get everything but lets not overlook the inherently manipulative framing of either paying or making the game a second job, which cultivates a sunk cost mindset, which might once again make the player pay out of FOMO.
There are reasonable amounts of grind that can make games fun for some people, but the length of grind and the limited timeframes for obtaining items are all geared to feed into the same monetization cycle. All of that artificially, because it’s not like any digital game has to clear their storeroom and shelves to make space for new collectibles.
Game companies have been very sly about how they use physical real world metaphors to create justifications for their manipulative systems. Lootboxes too, because you can’t guess what’s in a closed pack… except the game keeps perfect track of what is available, what you have and what you don’t have. The only reason why anyone would get repeated lootbox items, is to lead them on and get them to waste money.
Grubby is a good example of someone who was recently reformed. In one of his early Dota 2 videos (some time last year), he admitted that he didn’t know that games outside of Blizzard had gotten so good - he actually only played Blizzard games and nothing else. It’s been pretty wholesome watching someone learn the wider gaming world.
I find it bizarre that someone would ever pigeonhole themselves into one developer. I don’t even know who makes games half the time. There’s only one that I have blocked on Steam.
Personally I’d give it like a C or maybe B- at the top. It’s fine, but there are so many missing basic quality of life features that should be there.
My biggest gripes are all focused on outposts though. Outposts seemed to be one of the focuses from the marketing material, but they’re a pain in the ass to actually use. There’s somehow no list of the outposts you have, let alone a way to view what they’re producing. Outposts need to be linked together, but there’s no way to sort or auto-delete items, so it all eventually will get clogged up with lead, or whatever other resource doesn’t get used often. You’ll have to manually go through your containers to remove the clog and just dump it on the ground, where it’ll remain for the rest of your playthrough. There’s no snapping for anything except storage containers and the habitation modules. Everything else has to be placed by hand with manual rotations, so nothing is ever lined up. The alignment will also change after you place an object, so literally nothing will ever be aligned.
I have issues with many other parts of the game too, but outposts seem so incomplete, and somehow generally worse than what we had in FO4. Yet, outposts were prominent in their marketing. How?
They were certainly Bethesda games. I'm not even remotely fond of multiplayer fallout. But for 4, it's a marvelous modding world that I've sunk over a thousand hours into.
Oh, so you ARE aware of their other games and you were just cherry picking the ones that weren’t as popular? Now with that brought to light, you’re changing the date parameters to suit your narrative?
Technically Skyrim has also been published in the past decade, and even more recently than Fallout 4. In fact it's been released 5 times since Fallout 4.
I've never played 76, but 4 is one of my favorite games of all time. I think most people who didn't like it were going into it desiring for it to be something it wasn't. What it was impeccably good at was being a scavenging looter shooter with addicting weapon and armor modification and a fun outpost building system that wasn't for me, but did let me make my own little home.
Definitely not Bethesda's strong suit and not what I go to their games for. Their NPC interaction is made up of tons of awkward TMI introductions and dialogue too quirky to take seriously most of the time. That's a valid criticism, I would not say Fallout 4 is well written. I think it has some interesting premises like the whole synth idea, but not a well executed story.
The only overall story I really thought was good in that game was Paladin Danse's quest chain.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you filthy Imperial? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in House Telvanni, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Black Marsh, and I have over 300 confirmed farm equipment kills. I am trained in Dunmer warfare and I’m the top battlemage in the entire Vvardenfell armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision spells the likes of which has never been seen before in this realm, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across Cyrodiil and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the ash storm, scrib. The ash storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with conjuration. Not only am I extensively trained in alchemical combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Sixth House and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn N’wah. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
My guilty pleasure is to install Morrowind again and commit to replaying it, but to instead do another Skyrim playthrough because I just have more fun for some reason.
There’s something about the newer Bethesda games. I’ll go and install legacy games from other companies all the time for the sense of nostalgia, but despite having beaten almost all of them going back to Arena, if I want a Bethesda game I always end up playing Skyrim or FO4. And now (I presume) Starfield
It’s another subpar Bethesda game in a long line of subpar Bethesda games. Lifeless bland NPCs, tons of glitches, bad gameplay issues, and the same “shallow ocean” criticisms we’ve been going over since Skyrim.
It’s clear to me that Bethesda thinks Skyrim was peak Elder Scrolls, when I think Morrowind was peak Elder Scrolls. Unfortunately, it seems too much to ask for a decent story and interesting side content.
So I just don’t buy Bethesda games anymore. I was disappointed in Skyrim, and Fallout 4 wasn’t really my thing. It also doesn’t help that I don’t like the leveling mechanics of RPGs either and tend to prefer ARPGs like Ys and Zelda where leveling isn’t a major part of the game loop. I know what Bethesda offers, and it’s just not what I’m looking for these days. I play RPGs for story and immersion, not for graphics, character builds, and mods, and Bethesda seems to be more interested in the latter than the former.
But that’s what I appreciate from Bethesda. They’re pretty consistent at delivering a certain experience, it just so happens that it’s not for me.
Anything is better than No Man Sky, after a trillion updates they still haven’t fixed the one issue the game has. There is only a single planet but a million copies of it with different colors.
Yes but planets like that are realistically quite common. The ones with special features and biomes however are few but quite well done. Really not comparable.
I don’t believe that even without DRM the game would’ve been pirated that much… i mean people usually pirate games they actually want to play lmao.
But let’s see how long it takes the industry to realize that games like bg3 and palworlds, that don’t have any DRM, are still money making machines… hmmm
Maybe, but when people talk about “cracking” a video game, they mean removing the telemetry parts of the .exe that might phone home and tattle on you. So often a cracked version of a game will have most online features removed. If it’s a game with a single-player campaign, it might still be totally playable.
Perhaps, but the devs have now said that offline single player mode is a feature coming "soon after launch", which says to me that perhaps it's more coupled to a server than just a bit of telemetry, or they'd be far more reactive to the public response about the online requirement. Not to say that I know for sure; it's just a gut feeling.
Yeah we’ll only know for sure after it comes out, and after we see what the pirates are able to do. Pirating online-only games is also possible, it’s just more difficult so it’s less common. Maybe the pirates will wait until the single player mode launches.
Never underestimate how much people want to see a trainwreck up close. Of course, pirating is free, I doubt many people want to pay money for a trainwreck, so not sure if Denuvo is really going to save them from losing actual sales
Seriously “#1 sold game on steam in 2024” ah yes, because that’s a good metric when it’s been only one month and the biggest titles have a tendency to drop in December
This seems like EXACTLY the type of game I would pirate, if I was still a teenager pirating games. Something without online play (or with online play that I don’t care about) that looks kinda dumb but maybe it could be funny, and I don’t feel like it’s worth full price. So I would just pirate it, play it halfway through, get bored, and delete it.
I’m too old for that shit now, I don’t want viruses on my PC because I store things on there that are actually IMPORTANT, instead of just porn and video games. But back then, I’d risk a virus for this mediocre-looking Suicide Squad game.
Oh, pirating movies/TV/music is a totally different story, the risk of a virus is near zero if you’re careful, because you’re not running random .exe’s. I said that I was done pirating video games, not that I was done pirating completely. 😄
Well it runs - just not as fast as you want. I personally would never want to play those competitive shooters that need pixel perfect aim on a handheld console… but that’s just me.
No, a 3ds to switch is a pretty apt comparison about a modern pc to a steam deck actually.
There is absolutely no reason why anyone would assume this should be optimized for a mobile device. You would be limiting its potential in PC, if they can’t provide the same experience across all devices, they aren’t going to. It’s a competitor shooter for one thing….
Where am I comparing apples to oranges…? I’m using different approaches to show that not everygame a company designs is going to be playable on all devices, it’s NEVER, been that way. So why would it suddenly change just for this one case…?
How is any of that relevant to a company being able to design games for what they want…?
But I will address this point. Yes it would limit what they could do to the PC version, look at what happened to coop for BG3 on the series S, sometimes devices just can’t do everything….
I also never put words in your mouth. I’ve used different methods to describe how companies make games for other hardware all the time.
Why should this game be different? Are you going to answer any of my questions or are you just going to continue to deflect with these endless fallacies?
I’m glad you’re making it apparent that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Sure you can’t compare it to a two thousand dollar PC with top of the line hardware, but it’s plenty capable, affordable and you can take it anywhere. They’re fucking awesome and have made PC gaming accessible to lots of people
I think people expect a game made by Valve to run on gaming hardware made by Valve, even if it’s only for casual playing.
Yes. Why else did CSGO get controller and gyro support? While Valve did not promise anything in that regard, there was the expectation that CS2 would basically be fully optimized for Deck. Maybe it will still happen. The “final” release is nothing but an open beta.
Sure but they haven’t cared about the state of their games in ages. Iike I’m all for pushing to get them to fix it and all, but think it’s weird that people are surprised. Especially when the vast majority of their focus has been on steam for the last forever
I play Destiny 2 on my Asus ROG Ally almost daily, and have played lots of PVE and Gambit, but hate Crucible. It’s really powerful, so I think it’s possible to play competitive games on a handheld if you’re comfortable with using a controller. Of course, you can plug it into a monitor and use the XG Mobile to get a decent graphics card. So yeah, I think a handheld can hold up to a gaming PC if you temper your expectations. You’re not going to be playing at 4k, 120 fps, but instead 720p 50-60 fps. Good enough for casual play all the time.
It has competitive modes, but I don’t know how well it would do at tournament play. I’m not a big fan of PVP, but I’m pretty sure the Ally is powerful enough to play most of those games if you lower the graphics to get a nice FPS. I just cited Destiny because it’s what I’ve been playing lately.
Denuvo is the apex of a long history of bad choices.
Maybe actually sell us the games in a way we really own it, without any sort of online activation/account/telemetry/data-gathering like when we could buy a disc and just use it, and it should all be ok.
I feel like a dinosaur every-time I think this nowadays, but what is so problematic with the “own as in physically own” that is so hard to implement? If they want to provide a service, sell a service.
In the past I used pirate versions of games I bought just to be able to play them offline, or because I did not agree with the terms of service. It is so much for our info, it goes beyond just knowing you are the real owner of the software copy: it comes to the point where it looks like it’s to guarantee we are not its’ owner.
Now some DRMs even destroy gaming performance and its just faster to use 'ked versions. I hope it changes somehow.
Is it really possible to own them properly? If in almost all cases we lack the source code and there are even proprietary requirements for both software and hardware, what chance do they have of working halfway well in a few decades?
I mean, now that the video streaming industry has shown us how the endgame looks like for subscription models, you'd have to be crazy to want that for the videogame industry.
Whatever short-term gains you can get in convenience or price by buying into their penetration stage are not worth contributing to leading the hobby down that road even an iota.
It’s not even about what we want, but what the stakeholders and decision-makers push for in order to rack in more profits.
The gaming industry was at its highest in terms of fun and variability and innovation when the industry was still figuring out best ways to make mad money, no matter how ethical or morally bankrupt - now they know they can use fear of missing out and predatory tactics to lure people into essentially gambling in a free-to-play online game, or pad out a singleplayer one with mechanics that contribute nothing to the gameplay, but manage to fool game journalists (the ones that weren’t already paid) into praising the game for its deep and branching loops, attracting more investor money or something.
A lot of people accuse us gamers of being a whiny crowd that cares too much and doesn’t like to have fun, but I guess yeah, we do care a little too much and that’s why so many of us try to actively influence the industry to go into a better direction when we vote with our wallets or write reviews or discuss games and practices in ways that can be hopefully seen by the industry’s decision-makers.
Not to say there isn’t just as many (if not more) gamers that don’t care enough and still pour money into games and practices that are ultimately making the industry worse, only to make the stakeholders and CEOs wealthier.
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