I’ve heard this one before.

“This new technology has been great while the wealthy early adopters could use it to exploit the masses, but now that it’s becoming more widespread and democratized, we must regulate it carefully, introducing rules with which only the wealthy and well-established can realistically comply, to protect society.”

Trial by Fire. I just looked it up and one of the first handful of screenshots looked almost exactly like this.

I’ve never played it and never would’ve thought of it, so the W goes to you IMO. All I was confident of was that the graphics and UI screamed “early 2000s PC game”.

For VHS, it was much more common to record things from broadcast. Even if someone had multiple machines, copies using standard consumer VHS degraded noticeably even in one generation.

For DVDs, writing drives were expensive and uncommon for a long time, and most early players didn’t like burned discs, so you were limited in how you could watch them anyway. I know that some people got into the mindset of physically cloning the discs, but I feel like it was at least as common to rip, re-encode just the main title with a more modern codec to shrink the size, and store that smaller copy electronically.

Ragebait, pure and simple.

Most of us interpret “a hill I will die on” as holding an opinion that we know some people disagree with, but that we believe so strongly that we’ll fight for it.

Many of the articles in this series seem to interpret it as knowingly taking the stupidest, pettiest opinion that has ever occurred to them and deliberately overstating it so that others want to kill them.

Also, even as an Aussie who prefers Vegemite to Marmite, that last article in the list can burn in a dumpster fire for multiple reasons. So job well done, I suppose.

“Of course, consoles are important, but the proportion of people who play on PCs is steadily increasing. Even in areas where consoles are not widely available, there are many people who say, ‘I can play it on PC.’”

This quote hits a little different when you know that Sega sells almost everything digitally for PC in the Americas and Europe, but virtually nothing within Japan and other selected countries.

They do not care about making their games available to customers. They care about profits. Overseas, the PC segment is big enough to be worth pursuing. In some countries it outstrips the console segment. But in Japan it’s small enough that it makes more sense not to support PC, but rather to try to keep customers locked in to consoles, where they have tighter control and less competition.