‘No, see, he meant exactly what you thought he meant.’
Again: I know the difference between individual property and intellectual property. I am condemning the corporate word-games that would deny one of those exists, and the the tutting of people who take that for granted. I don’t need a fucking primer.
Blah blah blah. Shove that copyright-maximalist take. You own things, god dammit. Even if you only own your copy of a book, it’s not somehow an ink-and-paper license to a copy, it is your copy. That’s what ownership means.
If you don’t know the difference between individual property and intellectual property, stop spitting at people who do.
Or lean into that passive-aggressive vibe the actress took. She got assigned to some half-naked cat who stumbled into town smelling like an execution, five minutes after he killed a creature of legend. There’s a bit of Commander Kiff in that “I am sworn to carry your burdens.”
On the other hand - I don’t do tagalongs. I sat her ass in Breezehome as it got larger, fancier, and piled high with obscenely rare weaponry. It was kinda sad every time she stands up like we’re gonna go somewhere. Lydia, honey - this is your house. I use the chests, the bookshelves, and the gratuitous enchanting table that might actually be a mod. Go hook up with Farkas in one sense or other. I should come in and find you drunk on mead, out in some dungeon, or improvising whatever a sock on the doorknob is for a culture that has neither.
On the contrary, I’d expect individual NPCs to be refined first. Like if the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 was mostly improvising. Or if you had a halfway genuine friendship with your buddy Superfly.
Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.
That’s why it’s spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.
Those victims “voted with their wallets” and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They’ve got your money. They want more.
This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people’s job.
No kidding nobody should throw money at that.
But I don’t know why anyone defends its continued existence.
‘Why are you ignoring the problem?’ cannot be answered with ‘why are you ignoring not the problem?’ The existence of things outside a growing issue don’t make the issue go away.
This is half the industry, by revenue. ‘But it’s only half!’ is aggressively missing the point.
I’d be fucking thrilled if this all just rolled back of its own accord. But it’s not gonna. Outright boycotts accomplished very little - and then dried up. These companies are throwing millions at this crap because it makes billions.
Some of the alleged “retreat” from wallet siphons with no cover charge are just games that will instead have a cover charge. They’re not changing the part where you can pay real money for fake hats. They’re not changing how much of the game is built around shoving players toward that decision, as often as possible.
Sega’s $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn’t ruined the company. Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.
Games built around this are a gamble, but slapping it on whatever’s already coming out remains cheap, low-risk, and alarmingly popular. It’s in full-price, flagship-franchise titles. It’s in subscription MMOs. There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, ‘but what if more money?’
Yeah sure, it’s my fault for describing a problem, that’s what really causes the problem. Not a multi-billion industry where an ever-shrinking sliver avoids this psychological manipulation to attach a siphon to people’s wallets.
Pointing a finger at me, personally, will do less than nothing to fight this trend. Do you want to address that objective reality? Or do you want to project more accusations onto the person describing it?
‘Ignore the systemic problem and there is no systemic problem’ is never sound advice.
No kidding there’s always going to be some games that don’t commit this abuse - but anything with marketing and payroll will be tempted, and damn near all of them will go for it, because the downsides are fucking slim. The market brought us here. The market will not magically get us out of here.
Again, not a Netflix problem. This is becoming the entire industry. More big names are using it than avoiding it. There is almost no cost to adding this greedy bullshit.