You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…
Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.
Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.
Don’t be fooled. The real issue here is that Nintendo is trying to use this case as a wedge to eventually outlaw or effectively ban all emulation software because they think it somehow massively affects their bottom line, or they want to have a scapegoat for weak profits.
I’ve never once in my life had a Gamecube, for example. I never will. So if I wanted to pirate Gamecube games and play them on my computer, it is literally victimless, and has zero negative affect on Nintendo’s profits. In fact, I might love the games and decide to buy official merch. Same with the Swtich. I haven’t pirated either, but you get the idea.
Even if you can somehow prove how many people pirated a game over the years, that tells you absolutely nothing about lost potential profits, because people that pirate probably never had the money to buy your hardware and games to begin with.
This is all just corporate propaganda.
It could be an interesting idea, but would be terrible to implement for anything where accuracy mattered.
Generally when you’re doing video or image editing, you don’t want the image to change after you’re done saving it. That would be a loss of hundreds of hours of work in some cases. And if you’re working on something where, small details matter, those might get lost in translation.
This is the exact reason I don’t trust anything hosted online. If it’s something I want to enjoy more than once, I download it.
Companies hosting things online tend to become authoritarian dictators in all but name, which is their right as they own the services and hardware. But it almost always makes the end user experience shitty and overly complicated, or filled with spyware, or requires you give away your rights to privacy or lawsuit, etc…
So if there’s a song or something that I like online, I’m downloading that and keeping it on my computer to listen to whenever I feel like it. I don’t have the time or energy to play games with these greedy ass corporations.
And the ironic part is, that while they would absolutely froth the mouth about me doing this, they’re the ones that drove me to it. It feels like an emotionally abusive relationship, are they keep making our just a man some gaslighting me, then getting angry when I fight back or tell them no.
I feel old. Remember when a brand new, highly anticipated, AAA game was like $40?
Not they are $70, plus $20-40 for preorder deluxe directors cut extra content bonus versions. Plus $10-30 for “season passes”. Plus online subscription services for the game itself, the online service the game runs on, or both. Oh, and don’t forget ad placement in the game. A giant billboard for house insurance in every cutscene. Drink your monster energy to refill your sprint meter…
That doesn’t include greedy mobile games that require vast amounts of money to remove artificial restriction, such as daily energy meters to act. Or cosmetic DLC that costs half the price of the game itself.
And don’t even get me start on the constant tracking, spying, or actual malware some publishers implement in their games.
A bit sad, but not surprising. It was always something that felt forced and only propped up by companies trying to create a new market in order to monopolize it.
If the NFL didn’t exist, then suddenly just sprung on the public as it exists now, I think it would have also suffered a similar fate.
On the player and even team level, I’m sure it felt different, but as a spectator, it was hard to ignore the top down, corporate, ad filled, “fellow kids” feel of the thing.
I think that’s a fair point.
A lot of my favorite games are indie titles or from small dev teams.