Fun resource management situation from a weird JRPG: Rather than Phoenix downs, each party member has “hearts”. Each time they are KO’d, they lose one heart for the rest of the (short) game. But, at low HP, they have a high chance of critical hits and resist some status effects.
So sometimes playing that risk when you have spare hearts late in the game lets you get a lot of benefit.
There’s an alternative, to make it popular with the American people. Republicans look bad to their constituents each time they vote against policies that would relieve the American people as a whole, such as net neutrality and healthcare for all.
Make some noise about it! Make it known that Democrats fight for everyone, and that a certain sect is very vocally rejecting that fight.
There’s a very good bill for achieving this result by a senator from my state, which requires companies to elect their board members through employees.
As depressing as it is to ask, I feel I should kick off the brainstorm: Given that this personal information has been doxxed, is there anything that individuals could do to help the affected developers in any way?
The only people who can object against hating Nazis are Nazis themselves.
This was the key to his statement and I agree with him.
Video games need to generate acceptable targets. Aliens invading people’s homes, PMCs controlled by powerful men, thugs and looters looking to beat up whoever they find, etc.
But it’s ridiculous anyone would post “Hey! If aliens did come to our world to take control of our governments, they would be sorely offended by video games about killing them!” On one level because aliens don’t exist. On the other because if they were coming to take control of our governments, why would we want to protect or respect them?
Now, replace the little green men with discriminatory, media-controlling purveyors of hate speech. They exist. Everyone sane would rather they didn’t. That’s all.
That set of games in my library evaporated. I still have plenty of other games.
I’ll admit, if GP was someone’s entry into gaming and they never buy individual games, they would be a bit starved on unsubscribing except for any F2P games (which, tbf, is still a big set of options). But someone only able to spend that much a month on games is not going to have many options anyway; they’re the type that might buy a Ubisoft open world game just to get hundreds of hours through the year for their money.
But you’re also missing that this is very much the agreement and expectation: It is literally over a hundred video games, given the instant you pay them $15 (now I think $20) It is very fully understood to be on rental basis.
I’m trying to write a story, and I struggled with this, especially when confronting certain realities:
While fantasy, the story is meant to reflect some harsh political realities
Multiple villains are killed, but the heartfelt good guys live.
The ending has everything fixed and everyone’s happy.
I’m aware most stories don’t come anywhere close to a full happy ending like this. Every Batman story ends with Gotham still a miserable shithole. Every noir story ends with the case solved but everyone broken for it and the city still a dystopia. It generally has good reasoning, to reflect harshness of reality, but that’s a realm of fantasy I really want to venture into; one where things just work out.
I mean, I’ll bite: I enjoyed GP for a while, up until MS went firing-crazy and upped their prices.
Until then, I was very aware I rented games and might not get to play them later. Given that I was generally playing games that were new or sampling genres I don’t play much of, I wasn’t opposed to the time limitation, and the low price was reasonable.
Now that their price increased, I ended it. I am not locked into their ecosystem, and in fact swore off it pretty easily due to their changing circumstances.
I would agree the renting situation is poisonous when it comes to housing, because the model has driven the purchasing price of homes through the sky. But that is a situation with scarcity of goods. You can get video games anywhere.
Valve absolutely limits the sale of people’s games.
Usually, this would come in the case of “Hey, this game doesn’t work, we’re taking it out of sale everywhere.” But with Helldivers 2 being so popular and high profile, that wouldn’t have been a good look for Valve. Instead, they limited the zone of sale to prevent customer support complaints.
Sony was limiting where you could legally sign up for PSN and thus play the game, not where you could buy it off Steam. That was a conflict of their own mismanagement and inexperience selling on PCs. Had they been smarter, they would have restricted regions to begin with and there might have been less outcry, but poor planning caused Valve’s parental slap.
You’re browsing Steam. You find “ULTIMATE Inchworm Arena”, a strange but fun-looking online multiplayer arena. You buy it, and download it. The game then says “Welcome to Inchworm Arena! To certify yourself for online play, you must provide One MoistCoin, a cryptocurrency obtainable only in the Republic of Kongo!” None of this was clear from the Steam store page. The developer support response is less than helpful.
Would you continue protesting the developers, or would you blame Valve for presenting this obvious worthless scam game as an offering on Steam? By putting it on their store, Steam asserts some level of responsibility that the game in question is actually playable, and doesn’t contain critical bugs; like failing to start up, or having a user license agreement that its lawyers did not think through.
When this happened for Helldivers, it was Valve that restricted their access because Sony didn’t even know what they were doing on the PC store, and hadn’t thought through that players had no legal avenue to play in some countries. Valve does not want to be put through more cases of user customer support complaining to them, and wants to ensure certain behavior from their game vendors to ensure that doesn’t happen.
As I understand it, there’s not currently a PSN restriction on Helldivers 2. Valve themselves blocked it because Sony was making no promises that it would continue to be a legal and playable purchase in outside countries.
I would guess Sony may still have to convince Valve to increase the game’s availability. To sell a product that will remain usable, Valve needs a better commitment/promise than “We’we so sowwy consumews, we pwomise we won’t do it again.” Probably some kind of contract.
I maintain it was more an issue with basing their fight around spacing, than teaching via popups. I didn’t even mind the many enemies that had unintuitive concepts like feeding them grenades. Once you attune to them, they’re simple enough.
Even after they teach you all that about Marauders, it’s not just a matter of how to shoot them, and when - but when NOT to. Plus hoping for their AI to act reliably as described.