Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.

It wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.

I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.

because surely he has nothing else to do right?

We should probably be thankful that that narcissistic manchild is so addicted to his social media. Imagine how much more destructive shit he could have accomplished if he actually put his mind to it.

To be fair GTA VI is probably not coming to PC this decade.

The manual for the original Elite was literally a novel, well one of the many volumes of printed documentation it came with was

Nah, in the 80s we had hundreds probably thousands of games for the commodore 64 and later the amiga 500, all of them pirated. The piracy scene was huge, and often the games were free as we just copied them from friends

Not really a microtransaction as much as a leasing payment

That only happened extremely rarely. Nowadays it seems to be almost mandatory, precisely because the mindset is that they can just fix it later

Blame WB Games. The devs just did what they were told by the publishers, and that was to make a shitty live service superhero game.

In fact it is pretty much the opposite.

Things improve.

It is not a natural law that things will eventually improve. It takes deliberate effort and money and an environment where this improvement is possible. Especially a video hosting site takes a lot of capital. And if powerful actors has a literal stranglehold on the market, then it can be virtually impossible even for obviously better alternatives to gain a foothold.