Man, I miss being all agitated about the thing I bought, ordered or took as a gift. Idk if it’s depression or just an aging thing, but I do miss being tempted like that. 1-day delivery and digital purchases kinda ruined it and I want an option to intentionally slow delivery down. Waiting and anticipating something that’d arrive on the X day added a lot to the value I see in a product.
I’m surprised Смута’s even been released unlike hundreds of such projects, but instead of dunking on this half-cooked product that can thank UE5 for it’s looks - the only thing reviewers mention in a positive light - one thought captures me more. That this game for some reason took the weirdest period possible for a hyperpatriotic game. I urge you to read about it, it has so much potential for the opposite. In my mind, a set of white subtitles flashes over black:
The mad king is dead.
Moscow is weak.
Would you be dare to take it?
After a stroke of psychotic and delusionary policies of Ivan IV, that country took a nosedive into a violent disorder when a lot of parties, including poles, several fake sons of a dead emperor and nobles taking their turn of establishing their rule, and the new dynasty of Romanovs who won in the end weren’t any better.
That makes an insanely good ground for a macchiavellian powergrab simulator as well as a sim of administrating a rogue land that’s fed up with that bullshit. A medieval New Vegas, if you will. With no laws but the ones you can establish.
That’s the least fitting setting for their imperialistic masturbation.
It’s probably they don’t want to dive nose deep into all individual cases and local shenanigans* about that and probable scams that can occur. You can take other person’s account if you have both password and email access, they don’t oppose that under the table, but they don’t want to be a party in account transit because it makes them responsible for that.
Is it legal what’s described in one’s last words, can these games be lawfully transfered as they are under both legal code and game licensing agreements? If there’s no more living relatives, would Steam transfer your purchases to the government? Or if the inheritance is disputable between two parties, should it decide anything there? They let anything happen as long as they aren’t involved.
I mean, some game studios consult child psychologists and lawyers to better implement addictive gambling-like mechanics without being liable for that. Media does impact the consumer, and the bigger the initial predisposition, the worse the effect, and kids like shiny animated casino boxes. But violent games that do reach the market and aren’t dead on arrival are mild in that and can only supplement other, more real problems like mental health issues, trauma, neglect, bullying. And in 99.9% cases it’s just an excuse to push them under the carpet. Like, from drawing a line to what makes older demographics cause daily mass shootings. Not videogames, not even guns mostly, but the environment and culture as a whole.
The titular arguments about game leaks: that would crush our sales as it shows the version of our product not on par with our quality standards and our vision. When we see how games from Ubi\EA\Beth\etc got released this raw and untested, this argument gets rekt. Digital releases and updates, forever-beta products, raw indies and many other things enabled AAA studios to do the same and get no repercussions, but they’d still bitch if their game is leaked earlier even if they ship undercooked product.
It’s rational to assume if you play leaked pre-release, you have a deficient product on your own terms. Like Diablo 2 remaster that still has LAN play before this P2P solution was killed. It’s on gamers to be that stupid to review-bomb games based on alpha, beta versions. It’s fair if it’s a contemporary comment, but not a final judgement with a youtube title GAMENAME FUCKING FLOPS - MY FIRST UGLY MOMENTS WITH THE GAMENAME. Clickbaity, unfair and tastes like piss.
You expand this conversation to games-as-a-service mode, that is a very different beast. I like seasons and regular updates to a polished games. I dislike games who defacto employed first players as beta-testers who paid money for that.
And I like leaks, not for me being a pirate, but for seeing what’s under the hood and how things changed for my favorite titles like Stalker, the game that has a very weird development cycle and had many traces of feautures devs either couldn’t realise or didn’t have time to do right.