Microsoft was never going to make gaming affordable. The entire goal of GP is like any subscription service, to get you hooked so they can increase the prices. Microsoft is not and never was a pro consumer company. And GamePass is Microsoft’s attempt at making a hardwareless console. It’s a BYOD walled garden. It’s bad for consumers and bad for developers and publishers. Consumers will own nothing and studios are beholden to MS gatekeepers. Some account manager basically decides how much the devs will be financially compensated before the game is even released, instead of letting the market decide. Remember those court documents which showed how much they under valued Baldur’s Gate 3. If you think the standard 30% store cut is outrageous GamePass is on another level of bad. Sure they are currently showering devs in cash, but once MS has a significant chunk of the market they are going to turn off that tap. We’ve seen it with Netflix and Spotify. Like even the most popular artists earn fractions of cents per user.
Mmmhhh, The FIA president, an Emirati, recently consolidated all power and made himself dictator of the association. Now the Saudis bought EA, the publisher that releases the F1 game. Bet the next thing to happen is a Qatari will buy Formula One, the current owner has already stated that he is willing to sell for the right offer.

Because Mister Bone Saw is a gamer bro. And they are trying to diversify their economy.
Also probably a way to spread propaganda, like the US has been doing with CoD, and whitewash their image. Just look at the last 10 years how feeble minded a large number of cis male gamers are. The angry gamer to radical right winger funnel is a real thing.

Yeah seems like the writer of the PC Gamer article doesn’t understand what VAT is.
To laymen like you and I, this situation probably seems pretty open and shut. If you make money on something, you pay taxes on it.
Yeah VAT is not a tax on money made. VAT is a tax that is applied to a transaction for goods and service between a business and a consumer. VAT is a tax that the consumer pays. The business only collects it and has the obligation to pay it to the tax services. So even if a business makes zero profit they still need to pay the VAT they collected.
The question here was if RuneScape gold is a product or if it is legal tender. If it was legal tender then you don’t pay VAT on it, similar to when if you trade one currency to another VAT is not applied.

Yeah it’s straight up the big tech playbook. Undermine competition with low subscription prices and a lot of content. Lure in developers with deals that are too good to be true. And then once the customers are invested in using GamePass and stop buying games, increase subscription prices. And since MS is by then the gatekeeper to the market they don’t have to pay out so much to the developers anymore. It’s basically what Uber has done, once they killed the taxi market in a city they increased prices and lowered payouts to drivers. And since customers are used to those ride hailing apps the normal taxi market will never bounce back and drivers are basically forced to work with Uber or change jobs.
Also once Microsoft has a large chunk of the market in hand they basically decide before hand which games become a success or not instead of letting the market decide. So yeah games critical of their customers like the Israeli government will probably never get on GamePass and thus never reach a large audience. We’ll be seeing way more censorship than what we’ve seen with Steam recently if GamePass becomes the default way to consume games.

Probably people who are losers and haven’t accomplished anything are his audience. You know like teenagers. His loser vibe resonates with these type of people and at the same time he puts up this fake authoritative personality and people with low social skills or little life experience can’t see it’s a facade. So they treat him as some sort of expert in the game dev field, because they can’t see it’s all just lies.

You will never see 18+ only games that comes close to Cyberpunk or BG3 in scope. Because most retailers won’t stock A/O games, and these publishers still get a significant portion of revenue from these retailers selling physical games. And these games are simply too expensive to make to ignore those retailers.

It’s not just the media companies even the studios are full of leftists/progressives. Like Blizzard should have a fucking hard time to find workers. But nope. The blue hairs still line up to apply or never left. Remember the loudest progressives are just virtue signaling. And they just appropriated punk esthetics but never embraced the punk ethos.

That’s straight up the behavior of a company that wants to create a monopoly. Buy up the smaller companies so the competitors can’t buy them up and then just shut those companies down so their products can’t compete with the existing money makers. The money they put into those studios for game development is just a charade to please the authorities. Cause if they would shut those companies down immediately after purchasing that would be undeniably anti-competitive behavior and illegal even in the US.

You can also do it like Dunkey does. Just record gameplay first, edit it to make an interesting or funny video and then later add the commentary and act like it’s given live during the moment. It’s easier to do if you aren’t used to giving off the cuff commentary during a live let’s play video. And you don’t have to be a live streamer to be a gaming YouTuber.
Maybe just focus on creating short videos first so you learn how to edit, give commentary and create little stories (yes even Let’s Play videos need to have some sort of “story” and theme). Remember the first dozens of videos will suck. Don’t focus on viewership or subs focus on honing the craft first. You also need to figure out your unique selling point, the thing people watch your videos for instead of the millions of other gameplay videos, and you will only figure that out if you start making videos.

maybe it’s because itch mostly sells non-porn games so they probably flew under the radar since they could have less fraudulent transaction or chargebacks as a porn site. Or the payment processors didn’t care too much that itch broke the compliance rules until someone reminded them of their duties. Like PornHub was showing illegal content for years and the payment processors only gave a shit about it until someone went to the news.

It’s not about morals. It’s purely about money. Porn sites are labeled as high risks because things like chargebacks, stolen credit cards etc happen more often at these adult websites. Not to mention the thin line between legal and illegal content. Therefore payment processors charge companies in the high risk category a higher fee since they need to audit these companies more frequently and deal with these chargebacks etc. more.
So either Itch.io goes into the high risk category and pay more for transactions or they remove porn. Maybe itch.io should just create a separate company to host these adult games.

Porn sites are categorized as high risk at these payment processors. So probably itch has to fall into the high risk category and incur higher fees or remove all porn content. If you fall into the high risk category the payment platform will probably audit you more often and thus charge higher fees.
OF probably had these same issues because they didn’t start as a porn site.

Holy fuck why did Collective Shout go full nuclear and go behind the platforms’ back and straight to the payment processors. Like they could have at least talk to the Itch.io people.

Didn’t know Krafton was Korean. Now it all makes sense. Corporations in Korea are even worse than US corps. They hold so much power. Korea is basically a Cyberpunk country. On the other hand they shouldn’t have sold their soul to the devil. Like that deal was definitely too good to be true. Like half a billion + a quarter billion in bonuses for an indie studio. That’s probably more than the company made in their lifetime.

I think it has blown up in popularity because many more people nowadays have divorced parents and grew up in a blended family. I bet many guys have fantasized about fucking their step mom or older step sister and I bet even dads have fantasized about fucking the oldest step daughter who was already an adult when he married her mother.

Wasn’t it obvious when that datasheet was released in one of the lawsuits. They paid Rockstar hundreds of millions for GTA V. Of course it’s unsustainable. Not to mention the pricing of GP is too good to be true. MS is hemorrhaging money on GP, on purpose. They basically play the standard Silicon Valley play book. Instead of making things yourself just sell access to customers to producers and price out the competition by undercutting them and incur heavy losses, so you become the only gatekeeper in town. And instead of a store like Steam where the studios and publisher can set their own prices they use a subscription model so they can not only gatekeep access to the customers MS can decide what they want to pay these game devs before the product even hits the service. And if they ever achieve a monopoly the game devs basically have no choice but to accept whatever MS offers.
This is just PR talk, they will 100% release exclusives on GamePass when the subscriber numbers reach some sort of critical mass.