It’s ironic that you’re looking at this from the same angle that you accuse Bethesda of. The Skyblivion team didn’t start this “labor of love”, as you correctly put it, to earn money. Yet all you can think about is how much money you think they’re missing out on. It really shows what your values in life are.
That’s a pretty shitty comparison, considering the Skyblivion team didn’t work on the remaster. And why don’t you let the Skyblivion team speak for themselves? Because they’re quite happy.
That’s also not what they said. They said there’s no successful second app store that isn’t tied to hardware, which is true. F-Droid exists, but by no metric would it be considered seriously by anyone as a successful competitor to Google. And if there is somebody who thinks that, then you should give me their number, I have this investment idea that is guaranteed to give double or even triple returns, all I need is a seed investment of, say, $20k.
Not Android specifically, I’m talking mobile games in general. I’m on iOS, and it’s not any better here. Mobile games are usually free for a reason, and that reason is that they are loaded with spyware, ads, and shitty monetization practices that I very highly doubt the majority of PC gamers on Windows, Linux, or MacOS would like to see become more prevalent on their platform.
And I while I don’t think Valve is some benevolent corporate overlord that’s looking out for what’s best for us, I do think they know how to extract a lot of value out of PC gamers for many years, and that’s by generally giving us what we want.
Yeah, when it very first came out, there was about four to six hours of content to be had. I don’t think two years in EA is that short of a time, you’re just used to games existing in a perpetual EA status so that they can excuse their bugs. I played Forever Skies, and I would say it deserves the Very Positive review status it has. It has a mournfully lonely feel to it, a sad sort of resignation at the fate of a humanity that didn’t go out in a bang, but the last wisps of which sputtered out like a candle dying in the ever present winds.