I mean, it’s fair to say it’s a gamble. We just often remember the successes. Team Fortress was known as an intense Quake-style game, and there were some reactions at the time of the TF2 trailer that Valve had lost the sauce. Bioshock followed the future cybernetic style of System Shock. Prey went from native Americans and aliens to being a child predator. wait, might’ve misremembered the last one.

Could be an echo effect. 90% of people don’t really pay attention to gaming media or hate trains - they just see a cool new game in stores while most of their attention is elsewhere.

The “echo” element would be that if most of their knowledge of gaming is from playing things, not reading about them, they may decide “Wow, Sony usually makes great stuff, but last one I bought wasn’t great. I may sit this out.” I sort of saw that with Assassin’s Creed Unity / Syndicate. Unity was shitty and released with terrible bugs, but Syndicate was sort of okay - and Syndicate was the one that saw lots of lost sales.

Ok, to be fair, this is one way-too-easy game in a general release cycle of really good hard ones. Let’s not stretch one bad point out to a huge trend.

Something I realized pertains to the first car crash.

It’s likely a LOT easier to animate if the devs don’t need to account for exactly how fast the player is slashing up tires. Plus, they don’t need magic tricks to account for a 1…N long stretch of road that accounts for however long the player needs to chase them down (eg, Uncharted 2’s fantastic train level)

So you can definitely see that laziness and a rushed development timeline would just shove out something that looks okay but has no actual gameplay because it’s a cinematic moment playing itself.

I’d love to see more commitment to actual digital products that enforce consumer-driven digital ownership. GOG would be a good example, but anything could be if legislation forces any web product marked “Buy” to follow a certain standard.

No matter how much pirates try to push the point by repeating it, I have never agreed with the sentiment that intellectual property is bullshit. Has it been co-opted by large businesses to stifle forward movement? Yes. Does it still have a place that can protect genuine creators? Also yes.

But it’s very hard to convince people of this position if they’ve never had the experience of investing (equivalent of) thousands of personal dollars or man-hours into a work where they had some investment, monetary or emotional, in its success.

The universal anti-state-violence argument is also so circular. Do we believe state cops should murder black people? Obviously not. Who do we think should stop them? How about internal affairs peacekeepers and court-owned marshalls. Oh, so now we’re back to promoting state sponsored violence against preferred targets?

I think I understand the approach.

Pro-consumer data/service companies have privacy policies where they don’t share someone’s info. The sole exception is when that person has used those services to break the law. The suit may have the intent of establishing that fact so said services consider providing the user’s info.

I don’t necessarily think them withdrawing and going offline is strong proof that accusations against them are true. Sometimes people do socially withdraw when they think they’re being witch-hunted.

That’s not necessarily saying the accusations of AI were false, either. I only saw them briefly and am not great at picking out AI indicators. Just warning that we sometimes self-select signs of resistance as “My hypothesis is correct!”

Are you prepared to assert and prove that every single company over a certain revenue is exactly the same?

I’ve come into conversations with preconceived “large company slop” feelings towards a large brand, only for a person there to remark “My brother works for that company. He says they get great benefits, and are generally treated very well.”

Sometimes the bullshit is only on the consumer side, in which case it only makes sense to avoid them because you’re getting a bad product. If you insist the product is bad, and that you’re stealing the bad product that you somehow want, in order to support the mistreated employees, who are actually being treated okay, then maybe it turns out there’s not much logic behind the protest action of pirating?

I’ve seen pirates use the same generic excuse for midsize indie publishers that have no such reason to be hated - so it’s disappointing to see people don’t actually think those things through.

I find he’s dramatizing the dichotomy, but I always found this arranged argument lacking.

Imagine you have a budding farmhand, a hard-working local, in mind when you go to the local farmers’ market to “support local farms”. But that’s wrong, isn’t it? Because the farm owner pays that hand a static salary. Their exact success or revenue off one extra bag of apples isn’t going into that hand’s pocket.

But it’s also related; that farmhand has better job stability, more chance of a bonus, less pressure to advertise well, if the farm is making a comfortable salary.

Now, the one part I’ll admit is this logic doesn’t work as well in corporate atmospheres; where CEOs fire as many people as possible, reward no one for good performance, and would rather fudge numbers than sell a good product.

But I’d also wager a lot of commenters shortcutting their logic to “company bad, pirate games” aren’t always taking a critical investigative eye to how companies treat their people. After all, “I get free game” is a strong motivator to believe a certain way.