But then how would we spy on people? Think man, think!

Oh I’m right there with you. It’s perplexing to me, like watching someone you used to respect repeatedly punch themselves in the face. They don’t need to do it, they don’t like it, but they won’t stop either. It’s bizarre.

I was going to argue but actually yeah that’s about right. That’s a real shame.

Oh fuck off. You can’t build a foolproof solution and you know it, you’re just asking for more power over our data and I’m so tired of it.

As far as I can tell that’s a very popular myth. If you can point at an actual law then sure.

But on the flipside of that, you’ve got the indie scene that can pull off multimillion dollar hits with simplistic art style and next to no budget. Not always, but the point I’m going for here is merit does not always equate to scale.

I’m not saying it’s necessarly bad to go big on projects, but there really has been stagnation in the triple a gaming space because they literally can never take risks at this scale, or at least risks as far as they can tell internally. It takes literal years to pop out something, and from most big studios you get something nearly identical to what came before.

I guess I’m speaking from a place of frustration because a lot of these studios rose from innovation, and to see them chained to the same process of letting the money lead, churning out half done products that run like garbage, and never taking a chance, it’s a bummer.

Like I get why, we’re being pushed along by the ghost of Moore’s law, but given the amount of difficulty and abuse the Devs go through to get some of this done, only for a lot of these projects to fail anyway, it makes me feel like it’s not worth it sometimes.

It was, back then. Companies hadn’t become the behemoths they are today, technology was moving too fast to take a long time on your game. You’d have 3 game full franchises that took maybe 3-5 years to come out as the regular thing.

Nobody is forcing them to spend a shitzillion dollars and ten years on this stuff, we were doing year long development times on far lower budgets back in the late 2000s and there’s some real gold in there.

Long term that’s possibly wise. Track record being what it is I think steam is broadly ok, but definitely less safe than something you can download and keep forever.

Depends on what you’re into perhaps, there’s a surprising amount of depth in most of the systems which keeps it engaging to me.

You know that’s actually pretty much correct

At this point I’d say only benefit is initial cost investment. Exclusives are rare, and a physical token of purchase in the form of a disk was the last straw for myself.

I mean I’m angry about both but yes it’s largely because the last bastion of guaranteed access to something you purchased is being removed.