I very much agree, it’s hard. But I also think that older games are still just as fun. There are whole emulation communities that just play retro games. That’s an extreme example, but gaming is a very wide hobby and whatever your budget it, you can probably find fun stuff to do.
And if you want to play the latest title
Well there is your problem, you can’t compare that to gaming as a whole. That’s like saying photography is only for rich people because good lenses can cost thousands, before you even get a camera to attach them to. Which is true, but you don’t need that.
They still are, just not from these corpos. I am still excited for launches from small teams of maybe 3-10 people working on their passion projects.
Gaming is for rich
Have you looked at any other hobby? Gaming is still one of the cheapest hobbies. You can buy a game for $5 an have fun with it for a 1000 hours. Meanwhile you aren’t getting anywhere close to a cinema ticket for that, which would only entertain you for 2 hours.
So if the stop sign tells you to stop even though you didn’t want to, this is asking to produce slop?
If you disagree, feel free to discuss, no need to be dismissive for no reason.
Really? The internet is always so quick to jump to extremes. Someone making a mistake at work doesn’t mean they need to be fired. Yes they are responsible, but if they didn’t do it on purpose then why do they deserve to lose their livelihood over a stupid email? Some compassion could be in order here, they will probably never hear the end of it at the work water cooler anyway and to me it seems like enough of a punishment. Assuming this was some deliberate dog whistling is just bad faith.
Fact is it wasn’t sent in Germany where Nazi symbols are a criminal offense and that tells you whoever did this knew.
Does it? Somebody wrote the email, then the email was sent to translators for different markets. The German translators noticed the problem and decided not to send the email, but didn’t report it back, or reported it back too late. What makes you so sure the person who wrote the email was made aware of this? Maybe they were, I don’t know, but you can’t just act like you are sure. I worked at bigger companies enough to know that things fall through the cracks all the time and trying to reach a department in another country is often a multi-day effort with no guarantee of success.
the company is run by Nazis
Be real, again I agree this is an egergious mistake, but do you honestly believe the company is run by literal Nazis and they secretly send Nazi symbols on purpose as part of their secret Nazi agenda? Do you actually believe this? Isn’t it a much more reasonable explanation that an employee was incompetent and a big company has broken processes and didn’t catch it in time, something that commonly happens everywhere? No, the more likely explanation is that the company is run by Nazis?
How is this a history of transphobia?
Link 1: They made a pun using a trending hashtag without checking what the hashtag meant. They apologized when it was explained to them. This is an example of cluelessness or laziness on the part of whoever was running the Twitter account, not of transphobia.
Link 2: In their video game, containing themes like murder, rape, torture, and the abuse of society by megacorporations, they included a megacorporation misusing an image of a trans person for advertising. When asked about it, they confirmed it’s part of the evil fictional world that they have created, and obviously they don’t condone it, just like they don’t condone murder even though the game features a lot of murder. Is it transphobic to include themes of transphobia in a game, even though it’s shown as a bad thing?
Link 3: They didn’t like a fan’s assumption that only men work for the company, and used the “Did you just assume their gender” meme. They apologized when they were told it can be offensive.
I don’t see a single example here of them being transphobic on purpose. And speaking of Cyberpunk, it features a major trans character whose struggle you are supposed to emphatise with, so they clearly care about the community.
I agree they should be more careful about what their post, but I think there is a big difference between being transphobic, and accidentally posting something transphobic without meaning it 8 years ago and then apologizing for the mistake.
The point is, the game portraits a terrible world. The game contains people killing each other, that doesn’t mean the developers condone people killing each other in real life. The game contains megacorporations misusing images of trans people for advertising, that doesn’t mean the developers condone that either.
I think it’s usually well understood that something being in a work of media doesn’t mean it’s representative of the views of the authors, in fact it’s very common for media to contain themes like violence and abuse, not because the author is condoning it, but because the author is building a dark world for their piece of fiction.
I am aware they offer a feature. It is up to the game developer to implement it though if they choose to, Steam does not force DRM onto anyone.
You buy a game in Steam, you can’t play it without Steam
That’s not true though. For many games, after you installed it you can even uninstall Steam or copy/backup the game to another computer without Steam and play it forever. Yes, many games have DRM that will prevent you from doing that, but that’s the game developers doing. Steam does not have any DRM by itself, nor does it require to be running or even installed to run games you originally got from it.
Again, unless the game developer went out of their way to add DRM.
You are just making an argument that it’s possible to spend a lot of money on gaming, which is true. It’s possible to spend a lot of money on most hobbies. The question is how much are you required to spend to take part. In the current AI bubble it is more expensive than it should be, but I bought a Steam Deck for $399 when it launched, and there are so many free games you never have to spend a dollar.
Yeah, keeping up with new hardware and latest games will cost you, but you don’t need to do that. Since you bring up fishing, a fishing license you have to renew every year, fishing rod and all required gear, will already cost you many times that amount.