I wonder if the real reason credit card companies have been responsive to these groups is the potential for lawsuits that drag payment processors into them, which is a result of various shitty laws that have been passed to generally empower these sorts of regressive trolls to do so. If so petitions from the other side might not be as effective, because they can be sued for providing services to the wrong people but not so much for cutting off service, and there’s not much actual risk to them even if a lot of people are mad about the latter.
What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible
The article brings up good criticisms, like all the minors getting molested due to the platform being negligent, and manipulative in game spending options. Paying for online content creation work doesn’t seem as bad as that to me though.
Here’s an idea: gameplay sort of like Goblin Cleanup, you have various chores you have to do cleaning and arranging the various levels of the tower at night while the dragon is home, and your work has to pass an inspection. Then during the day you are locked in your room, and have some ability to watch a prospective rescuer attempt the dungeon crawl without your direct input. But you can strategically arrange items, enemy spawns, and Dark Souls style hints to try to tip the scales during the chores phase. So kind of like a tower defense game in reverse where you are trying to lose.
If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.
I disagree about Soma being an isolated setting, there are actually lots of characters, it’s just that they’re all insane cyborgs who mostly happen to have their own personal reasons for attacking you.
I can’t seem to find them, but before the game came out there was a series of live action video shorts made in association with it to help establish the concept and setting, I’d imagine a show being along the lines of those but fleshed out more.
There reaches a point with vaporware projects where it’s like, actually release something or I don’t care anymore, it doesn’t deserve to keep getting press