Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I did that when the Oblivion horse armor dropped and I felt strength and community in my little rural highschool of like-minded gamers that aligned on the "world we want to see".

fast forward 20 years. our sacrifice doesn't matter, companies run like big ocean trawlers and some retards will swim into the net and make it worth their while 😞

I see your point but it's pointless when most people are sheeple. The 1% of power users never make a difference in the world of today.

The amount of companies that I've seen dive face-first into walled gardens because "they wouldn't screw us over, we're paying customers!" is mindblowing.

2 years later, and those same CHUDs have and are yelling at me because prices have gone through the roof, and there's no way to get out of the stack without a complete redesign.

How do the idiots that make these decisions keep failing upwards?

While I agree, the average person doesn't consider things like this (even though they should), and we should avoid getting close to victim blaming.

you can still play chrono trigger

Well done. I finished my degree once I quit drinking

I'm still a couch and controller gamer primarily, I just use a PC to do it lol. Honestly, with Steam, it's really easy to just change Steam Big Picture mode as the default shell for Windows, so even if you don't want to install SteamOS, you can still have the console experience of just turning the machine on and booting right into your games menu.

I'm a gamer from back in the days when a "games console" was a ZX Spectrum or an Amiga, not an open standard like the PC mainly because back then nothing was standard, but far more open than modern consoles.

Then came the PC and for a time it was the dominant platform for games (basically the good old days of Shareware and a few years after).

Then consoles were reinvented, with the modern console business structure and tech stack which most present day gamers are acquainted with. This time around consoles were a locked down tech and the business was a walled garden model.

At that point I was so used to PCs and to piracy as an alternative to source PC games (or even just a way to unlock purchased games by cracking their DRM), that I never really jumped into modern consoles as it was too locked down. Also by then I was already a Tech professional and aware of the risks of jumping into a tech stack wholly controlled by a 3rd party.

So, yeah, here we are now with the closed down walled garden tech stack were there wasn't even a proper piracy culture to disincentivize abusing locked-in customers having enshittified to extreme levels.

This shit was entirely expectable already back then.

I hope that the whole modern day business model for game consoles dies a horrible death, though people being people I expect that a decade afterwards they will get swindled again en masse by a reinvention of this console model.

It made plain something that was true from the start?

“Designated free speech zone”

Was curious about how corporate compromised Reddit has become.

No, the games are also worse.