Some games had online activation built in. Some games would simply not install on a second or third machine without getting permission from the publisher.
Regular CDs have a lifespan of 5-10 years, shorter if not stored ideally. Almost all games had sophisticated mechanisms to prevent backups being taken.
Even if you could take a backup, record associations and publishers lobbied to make it illegal and punishable by severe fines in many countries.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software. EA shipped CDs with autoexexuting software that would actually delete CloneCD and other CD copying software and prevent new installes from working. My copy of Sims 2 came with that bullshit and OH MAN I was not happy about it.
Skyrim is ported to RealityV3. It is still buggy. Hackers have successfully run Doom on a hydrogen atom. Gamers are shitting and yelling that someone put a Martian as a playable character in Red Dead Redemption MCMVII.
Any organization that sees success will attract profit-driven leadership, and will become such over time. The soul from the original founders will be watered down, dampened, or ejected.
A profit-driven organization will over time become more and more profit-seeking, never less. Once this reaches a certain threshold, we start to use phrases like “enshittification”. Valve hasn’t gone shit yet imho, but their soul and passion doesn’t seem to lie in games anymore.
The next excellent product comes from new, growing organizations or small teams that may grow into such.
It is best to just treat it as any other law of nature and so we move on from Blizzard, Google, EA, Valve, Epic Games, Unity, etc and go swim in the wonderful vibrant indie scene.
It’s playable and you can enjoy the game, but 30FPS is embarrassing. It makes me feel like I’m a kid playing on a PC assembled out of old leftover components. Which was tolerable when I was a cashless kid playing pirated games on inherited frankenPCs, but it feels so wrong when playing a bought game on its intended spec hardware.
Been playing it a few hours. So far the tactical part feels very similar to Fights in Tight Spaces but more forgiving. Puzzly, lots of interactions with environment.
The writing is really well done and the humor and tone are wonderful in the way only brits can do it.
There is something about an out-of-work elite strike team having to rely on public transport and using the lead wizard’s mom’s apartment for HQ while they are still taking everything seriously.
A bit of both! RTS games are fun as practice-repeat challenges when I have enough free time to game while I have a bit of energy. Turn based are good any time. :)