It’s not about literally proving that piracy is morally correct - it’s about getting your average person to rethink their gut reaction to the idea of piracy. It’s the same as pointing out how it’s estimated that more than 50% of all games are now lost forever because the companies who made them never bothered to keep the source code. Or how many early BBC recordings only exist because of people who taped them at home and sent copies to them after a public request campaign because the BBC reused the tape reels for newer programming over the years.
The more people who reconsider their first opinion of piracy as a bad thing, the more people who support it and actively participate in that kind of preservation there will be.
Even the first Dark Souls had game ticks tied to the FPS because consoles had been standardized to 30 FPS for decades.
On the PC port, it was locked to 30 FPS, but a super popular mod unlocked the FPS, and at 60 FPS DoT effects ticked twice as fast, and at even higher FPS could kill you before you had time to react.
The idea of the whale is a false narrative created by the companies who run these scams to justify their unethical business practices.
The vast majority of people who make up that demographic are people who really can’t afford to spend money like that, but do because the companies hired psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s brain chemistry to extract money from them. This mostly includes people who are biologically wired for poor impulse control and an inability to perceive how much money they’re actually spending. People like: gambling addicts, people with adhd or mental health issues, and children.
There are people with more money than sense buying this stuff, but for the most part, it’s gambling addicts and kids emptying their parents’ bank accounts for that dopamine fix.
Just another story they’ve spun to hide how scummy they truly are.
For me it’s not about the singleplayer lasting forever, it’s about it being completely abandoned. I agree with the idea of them making a great singleplayer story and using the online to fund their next game, but it used to be that you would see other stories told in those worlds with dlc like the Ballad of Gay Tony or even the wacky fun of RDR’s Undead Nightmare. Today, that kind of stuff is relegated to online mission packs and seasonal events. They didn’t even bother to do simple stuff like put new guns introduced in the multiplayer of GTA V and RDR2 into the singleplayer. If you have no interest in the online component, you have nothing more to do with the game until they release the next one in another decade.
And this isn’t to say that I’m over here being angry about GTA Online. I have my issues with Shark Cards and I had my complaints over how RDR2 Online was handled, but it’s been many years since I cared about that and my Shark Card gripes are about the predatory nature of how mtx are used by the industry at large, not with Rockstar in particular.
I’m mostly just feeling like I missed something. I think it looks like it’s making a big step forward for graphics in games (hair physics has always been incredibly difficult to get right, for example, and the hair in this trailer looks really good) and nails a perfect vibe for a Miami based city, and I’m sure the story will be fantastic. I never finished GTA V’s story, but RDR 1 and 2 are some of my favorite game stories of all time. But I saw the trailer and went “This looks like another Rockstar game, neat” while the trailer was getting 7 million views an hour for at least the first 5 hours after its release. I just don’t understand why this has record-breaking hype surrounding it. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get pulled into GTA V’s story and got turned off of GTA Online almost immediately, but this is falling squarely into “I’ll pick it up eventually I imagine” territory, not day 1 purchase hype.
I feel like a nutjob in that I just…don’t really care about GTA VI. The graphics look great, I’m sure the world will be awesome, but…after what Rockstar did to GTA V’s singleplayer and RDR2 as a whole (abandoning both in favor of printing money through Shark Cards), plus the whole “Rockstar Magic” working conditions thing from awhile ago (and I even forgot about the whole GTA V PC issue), I’m just not really excited for this.
Maybe I’m just disillusioned, but I was much more excited when the Armored Core 6 teaser dropped - a series I had never even played before.
No, they’re mad that any singleplayer content planned for GTA 5 (and RDR2) in the past decade was abandoned for the money printing machine that is GTA Online. There’s issues to be had with premium currencies (more specifically the stuff that usually goes along with them like lootboxes), but that’s not just a GTA thing.
Also, just because other people created content for a game through mods doesn’t mean we should give the company that made the game credit. That’s like praising a Bethesda game based on a total overhaul mod somebody made.