And yet they are pretty much non avoidable for certain services. And some of those services are really neat.

My library subscription for example certainly is worth it. So is my public transportation subscription.

Oh well sorry that I took your “subscriptions suck” literally. I guess what that meant to say was “subscriptions with adds before them suck”. My fault for not figuring this out.

We’re talking about a gaming streaming platform. How do you think that concept could ever work without a subscription?

And frankly, adds for the free users really isn’t that outrageous or surprising either. I’m mostly surprised that this wasn’t the case from the start.

D4 really isn’t that different from current D3. In some areas it’s actually better. But of course both of those suck compared to D2 or PoE.

I’ve only seen people stream it and it looks… like a Bethesda game. Like, to a fault.

I’m reading that’s what a lot of people expected, and I’m honestly surprised.

With one massive, at least for me, flaw. Previous Bethesda games had handcrafted maps which invited you to explore every region. There was so much to find in the most unexpected places. Starfield doesn’t have that. I mean sure, even on remote desolate planets you can find objects of interest, but in the end they do repeat very quickly. In Starfield the world is much bigger but ultimately less diverse and well built. And to me that’s a less appealing game.

And another smaller problem is that they no longer seem to want to go into the darker stories. The game does have quite some potential of exploring darker themes like the despotic parts of the UC organisation for example. But it never does dive deeper but sticks to the surface. You can imagine that there’s much more going on but you don’t get to experience this.

But then… why does this system exist?!

Because it works and makes them money! You can bet that other publishers will take notice and you’ll see such money grabbing schemes becoming more and more common.

While I agree that it’s rather sad for developer not hosting their Wiki, I really never had any problem with the old hoster of the Minecraft Wiki. I certainly didn’t perceive it as a “crappy provider”. It did exactly what it needed to and there weren’t any intrusive adds or at least not to my attention. But maybe I’m just really good at ignoring adds myself.

Edit: Or mabye my add blocker did help, hard to tell since I haven’t seen the internet without it since years now.

I can’t imagine that it is.

If that’s the case then they could simply up the charge next year to $10 to get even more money for doing absolutely nothing. And then to $20 the next year and so forth. There’s no sane court anywhere in the world who would say “Yeah, that sounds reasonable!” and even the less sane ones would think that’s bonkers.

I’m pretty sure that even if the license agreement does have such language that it won’t uphold in court. And there are enough big companies using Unity for this to go to court if they try to come to collect.

I mean seriously, if that would be legally possible, nothing would prevent them from uping the charge to $10, $20 or even $100 per installation, applied retroactively.

Of course other communities are also talking about that. /r/PCMR for example certainly does. But that doesn’t change the fact that the people talking about it are very few and that they have little influence on the casual gamer in regards to their decision.

I mean look at how fucking hard it is for humanity to solve important issues where a lot more people are on board with. Compared to that, pre-order and the sorry state of gaming is utterly meaningless so of course a lot more people simply won’t care.

But hey go ahead, I wish you the best of luck. I mean this seriously. But you can be sure that I won’t bet any money on that side.

There are a lot more of us then you can fathom.

Where? Here we have 1.2k potential users. The video does have 24k views. For big studios like Bethesda that’s a rounding error! Skyrim for example sold 3.4 million physical copies alone at launch. I wouldn’t be surprised if Starfield already has sold that many pre-orders.

I mean it’s good to have such a discussion, but there are 10’s of millions of people who regularely buy PC/console games. It would be silly to expect that such a huge amount of people could be reached easily by grassroot discussions of a few thousand people.

After all this whole pre-order discussion is by no means new. I’ve seen such for at least 5-10 years but in the end, pre-orders still happen on a gigantic scale.

I miss the age of videogame demos, it feels like nothing but a distant memory now.

No it isn’t! With Steam you can try most (if not every) game for 2h and return it if you didn’t like it.

I don’t have the figures either but when I think which age group could have the money to actually preorder a game on a whim without knowing if it will be good, then it really isn’t kids but working adults.

I think it’s an age thing a lot of times.

I don’t have numbers but I bet that a lot of people who preorder aren’t kids but adults with a proper income. Kids as a group don’t have the income to uphold the current presale figures, that’s done by working adults who can afford to preorder a game and take the not so small risk that it’s utterly shit.

If I want I could preoder a lot of games that come out this year without having to worry about the waste of money to much. I doubt that any regular kid can do that.