A chance to win the access to use a fictional character/weapon that will be revoked as soon as the game closes. Seems like even more of a scam than regular gambling, and that's already pretty iffy.
In principle I agree that it's preferable to have the old game as a visible download on the store but you should understand that it's unusual for evolving online games to offer older versions in any manner these days, nevermind let players host games independently. That Valve provides this possibility at all, even if in a convoluted way, already puts them miles above Blizzard.
CS 2 even allows for players to carry over their whole collection of skins, which is something many players care deeply about and even invested significant money on. Which is itself a questionable matter but I can't deny that this is important for the players. Maybe this is why it was made into a new version of CS:GO rather than a separate thing.
I think it's fair to demand that old CS:GO is added to Steam in a more transparent form, but it's a matter of convenience rather than them taking anything away from the players like Blizzard did.
Some companies still manage to offer regional prices. It's more of a matter of poor implementation or even plain indifference. The latter especially when the platform offers that option but the publisher maintains the prices high.
Eh, I won't speak for that person's habits but for me piracy was not the last possible resort but rather the entry point that allowed me to develop enough interest that I do buy them today.
And when today the "free" options peddle gambling to children, I cannot take the moral argument seriously even for a second. I would much sooner have people pirate than develop gambling addictions, the publishers be damned.
I'm from a third world country. I still buy games as often as I can, but I also get that these price hikes are stretching people thin. A $70 game is like a third of our monthly minimum wage, it's a huge chunk of money that people need to live, and most companies don't bother to adjust it proportionally to our financial situation, even though there is no reason not to do so when it comes to digital media.
Alright, I see the issue. Even then that's not technically true. I would say it's not user friendly, but CS:GO is still counted as a previous version of CS 2, and you can access and host older versions of Valve games. Here's a guide for that.
Not only Counter Strike: GO is over 10 years old, Valve games can be hosted with Valve's official blessing even when they drop support. There are still people who play Counter Strike 1.6 today. This is nothing like what Blizzard did to Overwatch.
Unfortunately people's wages haven't kept up with inflation either, so that would just be a double whammy of making people who already struggling to pay for essentials pay more for entertainment as well, and at that point I'd think some people would just decide they can keep playing their old games.
You can come at me however much you want. It doesn't change that Hellblade is a acclaimed, beloved game, and so were many of the Telltale games until they oversaturated the market, really. You can not like them but insisting that they are bad doesn't make them universally bad.
What makes Hellblade good is putting the player in the shoes of the protagonist, and for that it's better as a game. A movie wouldn't cut it for this. Frankly to me it doesn't matter as much if the combat is not as fleshed out as God of War. The point is not doing sick combos at the enemies that we don't even know for sure if they are real. But the struggle matters.
There is no point in making a fuss about how extensive the gameplay aspects of a game should be, unless you are writing game design theory that uses these concepts in a helpful practical manner. I wouldn't really call "the game is bad if the game part is bad, make it a movie" a very helpful one. Even as a critique it's pretty lacking.
Comes to mind that something like Phoenix Wright has very minimal game elements in a story-centric format. Would you call that bad?
We are talking about people that handling billions of fund and try to make their career looks good, not worse.
Yeah, and it's because I see what investors do that I cannot trust their good sense. They make stupid mistakes out of not understanding the market, or callously profitable but ultimately destructive decisions for short term gain all the time, and it only got worse in recent years. If investors thought long term and were easily satisfied, we wouldn't see nearly as many companies declining in quality as we do. A chief concern for them is always making a greater profit than before, and there is only so far that can be pushed without negative effects to the customers.
Too many live service games are not viable? That definitely doesn't stop their publishing arm, and again, I see no reason why they would be so separate in stances. They know how to make that work best, after all. I agree with you that it wouldn't be wise, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't do it.
Thankfully, so far Tencent hasn't done that yet. But people also had a lot of hope for Embracer Group reviving neglected studios, only for it to fall apart and close a bunch of them. I wouldn't put that much hope on financial interests swooping in and saving the day. It's not what they do.
These days, it's simply a fact that overly monetized live service games make more money than simply selling a good finished game. It has been years already since mobile gaming surpassed the earnings of consoles and PCs combined. Tencent knows this, it's how their publishing arm makes most of its money. It's how they became the 2nd largest game publisher.
Frankly, I can't see that side of their business staying uninvolved as they invest on other gaming companies. I can't see them just being happy they don't have to do anything, if they could pressure them into more monetization for more profits. To me it seems just a matter of time that this investment will have its cost.
I find it difficult to discuss productively when you come up with such overblown analogies like that. I could even argue that artistically there could be merit to the equivalent a book full of thumbtacks, and Fear & Hunger comes to mind as a game to be described like that, One where a myriad ways to suffer is central to the experience and themes. But to say that Hellblade is like that is so uncalled for it makes that whole angle of discussion pointless.
You may have written about what a game is and if it has to be fun, but you are not staying true to what you preach. You can't even seem to acknowledge merits in games that you are not personally entertained by.
To judge Hellblade for being linear is several decades too late to start that argument, and there is no reason to single it out. Loosely half of all games today are games where you perform as expected in a predefined context where your choices don't matter, but most people still think of them as games. What was the benefit of that semantic argument then?
And even if you were to say that Hellblade, like Spec Ops The Line, is more like a "theme park ride" than a "game", to compare it to "a book full of thumbtacks" says absolutely nothing about how it's constructed and what may be issues in that. It just says that you really, really don't like it. If that's what you have to say, then there is no point in even talking about it. I can acknowledge that you don't like it and that's it.