I bought Diablo 3 in a physical DVD in a local computer store. This is Brazil, so the mere idea of managing to line up and buy a game at the same day as everyone else in the world was huge at the time.
I get the game, I install it, and despite not having the best PC it did run well - I also don’t remember suffering with the server issues most people did at launch. However, I need to take a break to study for some tests, and after that, I moved cities so this meant I took a break from the game for a few months.
When I come back, my account is locked. Why? Well, I was playing everyday, but then I was not, and they interpreted this a “suspicious sudden change of playing habits”. They wanted a picture of my ID to unlock my account. Guess what though, their support wasn’t equipped to deal with a Brazilian ID. Of course, being brazilian, my only ID is this one.
So that was how Blizzard locked me out of a game I owned, a game I could physically hold in my hands.
And that’s the story of why I’m never buying a Blizzard product, regardless of medium or store, regardless of quality or hype, regardless of promises or support pages. The game could literally make my computer start ejecting gold nuggets out of the USB 2.0 port, and I would not play a Blizzard game.
They invest into developing a game and get all the sales within their own game store, plus the exclusivity boosts the sales of the console itself and next titles in the franchise. Then, after all this effort and cost is long gone, they get to invest minimal effort to sell and hype the same game all over again to another audience and, again, try to hook these players into the franchise perhaps even selling a console to them. There are no downsides, only extra money.
If these platforms supported Linux, they’d be able to compete with Steam… 15 years ago.
Nowadays Steam offers so many solutions to PC gaming that other clients simply would take ages to copy. Steam Input, cloud saves that actually work, Steam Link, Remote Play Together, etc
Are there other open source projects near feature parity with GIMP, though?
There are certainly other commercial software, like Affinity, and certainly some shady Photoshop clones like Photopea (and it does work really well) but nothing like GIMP, as far as I’m aware.
I wish GIMP had a full UI redesign like Blender, it could work as a Photoshop replacement for many use cases but… Jesus it’s non intuitive, flawed and it mixes opposing design principles all the time.
There was a project that renamed it to a less controversial name and updated the UI to more closely resemble modern photo manipulation tools, but they’ve stopped working on it before a major release.
EDIT: There’s PhotoGIMP by Diolinux, a Brazilian Linux YouTube channel with a really nice host. This is a set of plugins and configuration files that try to ease the transition from Photoshop to GIMP for newcomers. It’s certainly good, but as an add-on, it can’t actually fix all issues with GIMP.