My understanding is this has been the price of thousands of gaming communities enacting a “No politics” rule - people want to keep it external.
“This fucking piece of actual trash! He’s using the most broken character this game has ever put out, and trash talking over it like he’s ever fucked a woman. Literally eat a dick. What do you think, chat?…Oh. Holy shit. Sorry, I just saw some stuff about Trump, listen, I’m sorry, but we don’t talk politics here. It can get really toxic.”
I’m not even mad that we didn’t get the multiplanetary open world new-tech live-experience cooperative second coming. I’m mad we didn’t even get a simple, short singleplayer experience living off of the charm of the first one.
Although we still number consoles, in a lot of ways we did get our “tiered” console structure.
Take most people’s daily plays, and I’d say about 90% of them or more have an edition available on the prior gen console. And it makes sense when so many of those games have relatively basic graphics - and when game engines have gotten better at scalability.
So, those consoles are neatly serving as a low budget option for a lot of gamers that can’t follow all the latest and most expensive games. Yes, some newer releases will be fully excluded; but even then, getting a brand new or used Switch or PS4 can introduce someone to a huge number of games if they haven’t been exploring options.
I think your voice could actually be better than your wallet on this.
For one, these games are free. So, are you harming the world by playing them and just not buying loot boxes? Minimally, at best. I also advise people enacting boycotts to represent vocal action around them. For instance, I called Target directly about my boycott when they ended DEI hiring.
You can also help lobby politicians to make clear how you feel on the issue. That can put a lot more panic on publishers. Politicians don’t have a strong reason to defend them - often it only gets ignored because they don’t think voters find it a significant issue. Even if you don’t get a federal ban, sometimes you can get state laws like limiting physical advertising; which can also sometimes spread to other states.
Basically, boycotting as a form of inaction, especially when it makes your days boring, isn’t necessarily an effective approach.
You misunderstand the relation of minimum wage to game prices. Video games, compared to other things like theatre, cool cars, fancy restaurants, are relatively cheap and high-longevity entertainment to be consumed at all income brackets; even if that means a single mom buying a used PS4, and one 140-hour Assassin’s Creed game a year for her son.
So raising the price in a country with such a HUGE low-income population can price out far more people than you realize. Even if inflation has grown, the budget has not changed for many of these people. It’s a broken financial system, yes, but that’s the situation.
I agree that, on paper, that is a reason for game prices to go up. However, I also think that on paper, there are reasons for it to go down at the same time.
For one, game budgets really should be controlled. A great many indie developers have put out superior products using the better technologies available. This often coincides with longer development time using a smaller team. You even see a disjointedness in AAA games now where it very much feels like 8 teams lumping their portions together.
Two, minimum wage has not gone up in the USA; and the reach of these games has expanded to many countries that (in part due to import laws) can’t even pay what were considered normal prices elsewhere. Many of these games they’re selling only hit viral growth when a lot of people are playing and talking about them, and we’re in real danger of big, expensive productions being completely out of people’s reach and thus dropping entirely off the radar.
This whole thing has erupted on my radar in the past month ever since they abducted the girl from Tufts.
HOW does this genocidal state have such an insane stranglehold on our country?
Now I’m getting YouTube ads to demonize Hamas; apparently their effort to “pull people back” and get people sympathetic for October 7 hostages. I AM sympathetic to the hostages!…So why is Israel bombing them??
Between trains and large ships, I love the feeling of operating large vehicles with multiple rooms. Bonus points if one large vehicle can carry a smaller vehicle.
Examples: Sea of Thieves, Subnautica, many JRPGs with airships, even something like The Last Express.
I know of that site, but in many ways I can’t stomach following trial-and-error debugging steps to try to get a perfect experience. Very rarely has it been one command line option and then the game runs as perfectly as Windows.
I mean, if they find actual artwork, audio, or code stolen, much of which goes into UI development, that would definitely make for a fair case. I’d presume that Schedule 1 devs would never do something so stupid though.