Except that’s entirely false. Even now they are pretending they do nothing, it’s the intermediaries who force things.
Mastercard sells absolutely nothing. And they have no responsibility for anything sold. And no one ever thought it was mastercard selling or even allowing to sell illegal things.
In fact, most people will believe no one sound of mind will buy something illegal with a credit card because mastercard and the likes will give your identity to the police.
So it’s not about illegal things, and it’s not about their image.
What I read is that it is not about illegal content. It is about the measures taken to prevent illegal content from being sold. It’s much more devious than simple censorship.
It’s much worse than that. How they word it is “if it may damage the public image of mastercard”. And they don’t review the content, they review the means used to prevent the damage to their brand.
So valve doesn’t even need to have anything that actually damage mastercard brand, it just need to be that mastercard is not comfortable enough with the measures used to prevent it.
Censorship is always the first step. Genocide is the last step. People getting mad when the first step toward fascism is crossed is a very good thing to fight fascism and try to prevent a future genocide. This is exactly what the poem is about : react on the first step, because it will be too late when the genocide starts.
We do have a problem of polarisation. But on the other hand we also have a problem of too many games, so we simply can’t play them all. This leads us to a need to choose which one to pick. And a bad choice is very bad, because games are expensive and time consuming.
Now the real problem is when a community mistaken a new game for another. Like avowed was considered a terrible game because the leader scroll fanboys thought it would be their next game, and it wasn’t. Anyone who know what old school bioware games were will certainly love avowed.
Now while veilgard is not a bad game, is it actually good? I’m not informed enough yet about it, but bioware has been terrible in the last decade, so I am clearly very wary of what they’re doing.
I will wait for a discount for both those games, and I’ll play avowed first because I’m informed and careful, and I have other games to play already.
On the side there’s also the problem of fascist propaganda that will brand a game woke a try to destroy it.
There is no chance it wasn’t meant to be an open world. The witcher 3 was a very successful open world they made.
Also, CP77 actually is in the style of elden ring that was praised for it, but CP77 came long before it. Most critiques of CP77 missed that part because the game doesn’t throw it at your face.
Nexus: the Jupiter incident. It is a now a bit old tactical space combat game with a big focus on the narrative. It’s awesome, but I never see it mentioned anywhere.
Sometimes I wonder if these people understand that no player ever wanted exclusivities on a game store. Instead of providing a decent service, they’re litteraly trying to kidnap customers with a choice between waiting for months for this big release or taking it on a subpar platform.
They worked hard for decades. They’ve been betrayed and hampered by editors in the past until kick-started. It’s not a lucky situation, they built this luck.