Signtist

Yup, and it’s more fun when you let yourself have challenges. Sure, it’s easier and more efficient to stealth behind an enemy and stab them in the back, but it’s more exciting to go in swinging, even if you’re only wearing leather armor and haven’t trained your sword skill very much!

Yeah, I appreciate when my grocery store has an awesome sale on the products I wanted to buy, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to pay them more or anything. To your company, you’re just a product.

Unfortunately, the government was never the good guy, either. It’s meant to be a voice for the people, but it almost never is. We need to become educated enough as an entire population to keep companies in line ourselves, because governments side with corporations more often than not.

I’ve had to specifically put a hard stop on my usual thought process while playing games, in an effort to get back to how I played as a kid. If I catch myself strategizing too much to the point where I’m not even playing anymore, and am just going through the motions I already planned out, I purposefully make myself do something completely against the plan just to put myself in the kinds of situations I’d be in as a dumb kid who did the wrong thing, since that was the last time I had real fun playing games. It doesn’t always work, but I do have more fun than I did earlier in my adult life.

We as a people have been lulled into a false sense of security by corporations claiming “It’s okay, we can both get what we want!” as they play the long game that ended up resulting in the global situation we have right now. We have to reject capitalism in all forms as much as we can, and truly embrace only what few products were made for the sole purpose of creating something, not for profit. It’s no longer about only following what few companies use the power we’ve given them responsibly - the troublemakers ruined it for everyone, and now nobody can be trusted with it. Companies aren’t just not our friends, they are our sworn enemies.

But are you? Literally the only people who could possibly make a gamer-first video game is an organization that isn’t money-first. That was my whole point. You have never played a game made by a for-profit developer that wasn’t specifically money-first, even if the gameplay ended up being good in spite of that. Indie devs are the only people making games that sometimes break that mold, and while I wouldn’t exactly call an indie dev “nonprofit,” it’s a lot closer to the truth for the ones that truly make gamer-first games than grouping them with a for-profit corporation.

It’s not all that shit of an argument. All companies exist to make money, not products. If they could make money without making products, they would stop making products altogether. Some are more egregious about that fact, but it remains a fact for all companies, even the ones you think are your friends. It’s possible for a company to do what consumers want and still make money, establishing a good relationship that makes both enjoyable products and decent profits, but even those companies are just one leadership change away from short-term profit-driven decisions that run the company to the ground.

We could easily get a lot of things, but we don’t fight to receive them. We think that the laws are supposed to be made to benefit us, but that stopped being the case as soon as we allowed corporations to influence things in their own favor instead. Everything in capitalism is a battle - you’re either fighting to win, or letting someone else win by default.

At this point things are so bad that we’d have to band together and fight like hell even for a minor win, and few people want to do that. Stop Killing Games is the closest thing we have to what we should have organized as soon as digital media started becoming common.

In a legal sense, media is media. The laws were established for music before digital games were mainstream, and were then applied to games.

Oh, yeah, that’ll happen. The tried and true method of making massive profits is to sacrifice long-term stability for short-term revenue, then abandon ship before it sinks.

You’re right, we don’t know. Hopefully everyone will collectively agree that it’s not worth the price, but I’ve unfortunately seen too many companies blatantly fuck with their consumers only to have record profits to think this is going to be any different.

One major misconception people often make is that they assume they represent the average person. You won’t pay $1,000 for an all-digital walled garden console, but there are a bunch of people who just buy the next console to keep playing Fifa or Madden or whatever, and don’t pay any attention to any of this. Sony is banking on those people continuing to buy their products regardless, allowing them to make more money charging more for cheaper products, even if they lose some of their more well-informed consumers in the process.

They’ve always prioritized anti-consumer practices, they just used to have to hide them and hold themselves back because there was a chance we might actually stop buying their products if we got too mad. Now they’ve pacified us to the point where we’ll complain even as we pull out our credit cards to consume more of their wares.

It’s literally the same issue we’re having in politics; they’re not your friends, and they have never been your friends - they only care about improving their own situation. They won’t care about someone who doesn’t stand up for themselves, and things will only get worse if we don’t come together to do something to stop their gravy train.

At least with corporations it’s easy - you just have to stop buying their products. Even that’s too hard for everyone to coordinate in this apathetic day and age, though, so they keep on profiting.