while turning a blind eye to the mountains of other people who don’t care
People, fundamentally, care.
That’s like the whole point of having a hobby.
No-one games because they don’t care.
You won’t find anything people are more passionate about, than something they do for fun.
I’m not claiming that there’s some point where people magically come together and stick it to the megacorps.
I’m saying that if you consistently burn your fans in ways that result in them hating you, eventually, you wont have any.
That’s not something that happens overnight. A slow-ass process that leads to a gradual decline, which you can only put off by duping brand new people who haven’t sworn off ever purchasing your product again. But eventually, you run out of those, too.
Why are you trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?
What good does that do?
You’re not wrong.
But all I’m doing here is saying “things can get better” and your replies are just you pointing out how bad things are right now, as if that proves the only way things can go, is to get worse.
The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.
Am I wrong?
They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on.
You bring up gambling. Its de-regulation and consequent proliferation via online casinos has made the problems it causes more likely to be addressed than ever.
The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes, the more likely you are be ousted entirely.
A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever, because there didn’t use to be a casino in every persons pocket, worldwide, that might’ve already taught every new mark to be wary.
It will work. Even if they get 10 new subscribers, it probably took them 20 minutes to whip up this splash screen. They’re wasting much more of your time. And people have proven time and time again that they will get outraged but they’ll never actually do anything about it.
For now. But eventually they do. That’s how entire governments have fallen time and time again.
They won’t stop playing Xbox. They won’t stop buying games. People grow increasingly accepting of advertising and invasive business practices every day.
Indeed. People can get used to a lot. But being used to something isn’t the same as being ok with it. No-one I know is ok with there being ads on their tvs, phones and laptops. Living with something isn’t the same as accepting it. People are tolerating more BS than ever, but that doesn’t mean they wont rally the second there’s a way out of it.
Remember how angry everyone was at horse armor? Most people wouldn’t think twice about it these days. It’s so much worse now.
I still am. So are many others. Remember when people thought NMS would be a good game on day one? Remember when Fallout 76 was going to be bigger and better than 4? Remember Concord? Remember when Overwatch was going to have a story?
Suicide Squad.
There was real hype. The second people found out it was a live service, they simply didn’t play.
Every fuckup, is another portion of the masses getting the memo. And the fuckups aren’t stopping. If anything there’s more of them than ever.
These corporations used to be afraid of looking bad, but mistakes happen. Except when they did, and stocks didn’t suddenly implode, their takeaway was they could be horrible, and still make a profit. Because yeah, most people don’t learn the first time. But what about the second? Or the third? Or the tenth?
If you ask me, given time, the one thing every person on this planet can do, is learn. Eventually.
The only reason Roblox and Fortnite keep growing is that there are markets they haven’t penetrated. Finding new customers faster than the old ones leave doesn’t work forever. There are only so many humans on this planet.
Meanwhile, indie games with actual passion behind them and fair business practices that still feed the mouths of the devs, without private equity firms in the middle sucking up all the value, are absolutely exploding.
XBOX is dying. MS won’t say it, but they are less involved in the game-industry than ever. This price hike is a death-throw. Not the next step in their master plan to dominate the market forever.
IMO, the only gaming mega-corporation with the goodwill to exist 20 years from now is Nintendo, and even they are burning through the nostalgia people have for them faster than ever before in their insanely long history.
It’s not sustainable. Tricking people faster than they wise up to your BS is not a business model that leads to a healthy, content, customer base. And if it’s what EVERYONE does, you get an unhappy SOCIETY.
No-one will enjoy where that leads, and is already leading.
It’s a ratcheting mechanism. Unless something about capitalism changes SIGNIFICANTLY the masses will simply grow more and more discontent.
That was a fun one! I don’t think fully utilized Aeriths kit until that fight, either.
Intergrade still has some of my favorite fights.
I really wish Rebirth was more difficult right off the bat. When you go into it having played Intergrade, you already know to min-max character usage, and the fights are a little too easy.
A lot of the bosses are spot on tho, and the game absolutely SHINES as you juggle three characters and their full range of abilites. In longer fights you can also go past limit breaks, and use level two and three limit breaks. Lining up three level three limit breaks on a boss is 👌.
And the gameplay does improve massively. The addition of party abilities, powerful mini-limit breaks which you can use if two compatible party members both have the relevant bars filled, are an amazing addition to the combat system.
The combo moves are also a huge qol improvement. In intergrade flying enemies are kind of a pain when playing melee characters like Tifa, but in Rebirth you can have Cloud (if he’s in the party) launch you at flying enemies by jumping off his sword at any time. In Rebirth all the characters get additional combo moves depending on who is in the party.
The ATB bars fill very slowly when you aren’t playing as a party member, meaning that if you need to use certain abilites or spells, you should focus on playing as the character’s that can use them.
Same goes for limit breaks. On harder bosses you may need to build up a stagger, and then pull off a triple limit break during the stun. But you won’t have all three limit breaks ready if you didn’t evenly play as all three.
Also pay attention to ability effects. Some cause stagger instead of damage, some are single target vs AOE. The game doesn’t do a super good job of telling you what to use when, but read the descriptions and remember to check for weaknesses with assess.
Often assess will literally tell you how to beat a boss with specific instructions like “do a stagger ability during its charge up”, so always always always use it.
I think they should make it a daily deal, but not for a week. They should also eat the discount cost, which they apparently aren’t doing, and entirely waive their cut.
What I think they should do instead of extending the deal, is reset the games launch.
There is absolutdly no reason Valve couldn’t re-launch the game, along with all the algoritm benefits an unbugged 1.0 launch should have had.
Also, you seem to have missed that the article says they are contractually obligated to complete their current WIP game. Valve giving them a bunch of money would not give them time to work on further updates for Planet Centauri before then.