cybernihongo

You can still just play the game, nothing has changed.

I just explained how things have changed and how the casino earns money out of thin air with little effort on their part. Better yet, you just gave more examples of this House doing just that:

All the other stuff (emoticons or wallpapers) can be bought directly in the Points Shop.

These are all ways in which users get milked. Don’t forget the lootboxes.

I acknowledge that it’s important to raise awareness of bad practices, demanding change and highlighting alternatives where available.

Why yes, this is what I already do. But instead of it being seen that way, it’s instead seen as

grudge-holding

All I ask is for one corporation, working in the capitalist hellscape that is the US, to be held to the same standards as the rest within its same field. That’s apparently a bridge too far, equal to the strawman of suggesting one play only Super Tux Kart.

Before, you just played the game. Now when you play the game, these things fill your “inventory” out of thin air, and you can make transactions with them including buying them (to complete your collection out of FOMO, etc), of which Valve earns a cut out of them, again, out of thin air. Now scale that up to millions of users. Hmmm, it IS milking! Can’t expect any less from the House of Valve.

while Valve is simply less so

Which company was it that popularized the lootboxes so bad that Notch made a parody of their game in Minecraft’s earliest April Fool’s version? Oh it’s Valve. Which company has been extremely instrumental in killing the ownership of games, making the idea of having to be online and connected to an unaccountable corporation based in the USA to play a single player game so much more palatable? Look, it’s Valve again. Even their quaint “”“wonders”“” for Linux are such a naked embrace, extend and extinguish effort going very smoothly because they’re not Microsoft, despite being quite literally of Microsoft origins, down to the anti-trust saga.

Valve isn’t doing nothing. You think so because like you’ve noted, itch.io went into this payment processor kerfuffle, despite Valve also going into it but nobody else. Plus, GOG themselves aren’t helping matters with their own actions, not just the double sig runes and their strange and ineffective apologies, but also the obsession with LLM generated art among countless moments of getting caught with their pants down. Meanwhile, Zoom-Platform is relatively quiet, for better or worse, and I never hear anything from Fireflower Games.

I actually wanted to mention that and the “trading cards” that literally milk the users out of thin air, but I didn’t find a good place for them in my post. Thanks for mentioning them.

“winning by doing nothing” They do stuff. Like killing ownership, buying tons of yachts because their owner is a literal billionaire, and squeezing every last cent while gaslighting everyone into thinking they’re somehow “pro-consumer”. This is how they got here in the first place. They also appear to have a growing hate problem, but I haven’t yet read the links I’ll be sharing here, so take these with a grain of salt for now: 1, 2. They get away with all this because they have a captive audience, each user doesn’t want to give up their library, or each user has already bought one of those steam devices becoming even more captive.

GOG doesn’t have a captive audience, and this is by their own design. We take their DRM-free, launcher-free nature for granted. Yet it seem they don’t understand that themselves, and continue burning the good will they earned on things like this, or continuing their obsession with LLM generated art. They can’t keep tanking controversy after controversy.

DRM-free can continue without GOG, but it’ll be handicapped severely without them. Is this what GOG wants?

Good thing I never subbed to them, or other streaming services.

How many more memes are like this? More popular than their original show? The Office memes maybe? Dinkleberg or Mr. Turner’s trophy if he had one? That new show about superheroes with one of them called Homelander?