Seems pretty self-inflicted to pay the asking price for a product and then whine that you were “fucked” after the fact.

People can just not buy something if they think it’s too expensive. That’s always an option. I choose not to buy stuff all the time.

Looking at the amount of money gacha and other “free”-to-play titles are pulling these days, it seems like quite a few people have lots of money to burn on gaming.

The vast majority of the bonus was going to the leaders who were ousted.

In that case it wouldn’t be piracy.

What about in this case?

Why do people like video games?

It always seemed like a kiddie hobby that’s not meant to be taken seriously, but apparently a bunch of people in their 20s and 30s take it very seriously.

Yeah, PC gamers bent the knee to Steam decades ago at this point. This isn’t exactly a brand new issue.

Because myself and my kids like Mario Kart?

Because I like my OG Switch and this is a pretty massive improvement over that console?

On the plus side, the virtue signalers saved $ and can spend it on something that’ll bring them more joy and is hopefully more aligned with their views. And gives them practice and a mindset of “I’m the kind of person willing to boycott” for any other boycotts that might have a real effect someday.

It’s not really a boycott if you never really planned on buying the product. Otherwise, I’m technically boycotting Apple and Ford. Because I don’t buy Apply products and I don’t buy Ford cars.

When I say “please” and “thank you” I’m essentially just virtue signaling that I’m willing to play nice…

Those are specific actions you are taking in being kind and nice towards another person in reality. However, if you were to make a comment on Lemmy about how kind of a person you are because you claim you say “please” and “thank you” all the time, then that would be virtue signaling, because making claims about what you do or care about on social media is relatively meaningless without the specific actions being taken outside of that context.

So, in this case, talking about how evil Nintendo is for pricing a game at $80, what does that do exactly? Why should anyone else listen or care about someone expressing that opinion? Are you joining activist groups and spending time or money pushing for laws/politicians/etc to enact change to fight back against these actions? If so, then that’s not virtue signaling. But I’m unconvinced most people expressing these opinions and upvoting/downvoting posts and comments are doing anything beyond exactly that.

Of all the things in my life to worry about. Nintendo pricing and other issues barely move the needle.

And if they did, it would be hard to game at all because every company has at least a few “practices” that you can point to as making them “bad”.

It’s not really about boycotts not working.

It’s that a handful of people virtue signaling about how bad X game/company is on niche social media communities don’t matter if their opinions aren’t aligned with your average person.

Most people just enjoy games as a hobby and treat it the same way they treat picking something to watch on Netflix.

What I don’t understand is why do developers make bad games? They should just make good games instead.

Gamers want good games, not bad games.

Wow. I actually did back this way back in the day and I swear I completely forgot about it for at least the last couple years until this post.

Yeah, thankfully with PC gaming there are no large corporations involved.

The lack of price drops aren’t really caused by tariffs up to this point.

Tariffs will be responsible for price increases however.

Man, development times are getting pretty crazy at this point. Hard to believe that we are starting to see decades between sequels to titles as a normal thing in the high end of the market.

It’s no wonder more games are aiming for games-as-a-service style models.

No Man’s Sky was much more lacking at release compared to how they sold the game. And they basically went radio silent for quite a long time.

I don’t see how the two situations are similar.

And No Man’s Sky isn’t that much better now anyways.

Steam is actually pretty decent, by company standards.

They aren’t doing this because they are decent. It’s because they were getting reamed on fees through people choosing the arbitration. I believe it was a law firm basically encouraging people to request arbitration because they would get paid every time a claim was submitted, regardless of the outcome.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/column-mass-arbitration-target-valve-accuses-law-firm-litigation-funder-2023-12-08/

I gave a concrete example of an exploit using Steam, and you’ve provided a hypothetical while arguing that your hypothetical example is much more risky (and compared it to hang gliding vs Russian roulette).

Specifically how much more of a risk is it to have kernel level anti-cheat installed than it is to install software like Steam and games on your system? Since you are claiming in-depth knowledge I would actually like to know more specifics for future reference. I don’t find the hang-gliding/russian-roulette example super helpful personally.

…it’s hard to see what benefit I’m being offered by a notably cheaply made kernel level anti-cheat in a purely cooperative gameplay experience.

You don’t see how it would affect your enjoyment of the game to have someone insta-killing all the enemies in a match, or generating 1000x more rewards than you would normally receive, breaking the progression permanently?

My point was that I’m worried I’ll feel the same when I try to play the DLC.

Even worse, judging by past FromSoftware games, the DLC isn’t something you do right at the beginning or right towards the end of the game. So, it will likely require a decent amount of playtime to reach the content.

To echo what have seen other say, I’m excited about this DLC in theory because I really enjoyed Elden Ring on my first play through and some quick NG+ runs for endings. I actually got all the achievements, which is rare for me.

But after all that, I’ve struggled to play since. I’ll play for a few hours on a character, then take weeks or months before I want to play again. And I’m worried I’ll have the same reaction with the DLC.

There is so much open space in the game that it somehow is overwhelming once you have a rough idea that most of the content isn’t that important, but some of it is crucial to specific builds you may want to run. It’s almost like you spend most of your effort avoiding content because of how time-consuming just playing the game “normally” can be.