While it’s good to empathize with people receiving death threats, I would caution against it when the person claiming death threats is not doing so in good faith. That entire statement is directly followed up by implying that db0 is systematically sending people death threats, which is a massive accusation without providing any evidence for that. Which sadly means, acknowledging the threats means implicitly accepting that premise. It’s a loaded question, and a common tactic by cornered scumbags to silence criticism.

Louis Rossmann made a great video on it. So you’ve been accussed of “death threats” - how do you respond?

I hear this more frequently nowadays, but it really is kind of misplacing the blame for this change. Steam went for this model precisely because many of the bigger game companies to this day refuse to sell their games as anything but a heavily restricted license. And Steam as a storefront does have to cater to them in that regard, especially back then. Even physical disks as others pointed out were technically not something you owned, but rather that resale and such was not enforced or enforceable. (You would definitely get some stern letters if you started copying and selling those games at larger scale, even if you ‘owned’ the original copy).

People do still sell DRM free games on Steam that you can copy and distribute to essentially your hearts extent without Steam ever getting involved. The license you have is for Steam to provide you the download service so you can get your digital copy (and a bit more). If you care about people owning games, then it’s up to you to support and buy from the kinds of companies that don’t provide you a license or (more likely) where the license is unrestricted enough to fit your description of ownership. The middleman like Steam you buy it from shouldn’t matter if they don’t exert undue control beyond that. And at least being on PC if you really must buy something with DRM you have options to remove it.

Installing Linux on PS5 is an exploit as far as I understand it, and requires specific software versions that are already long outdated at this point. But PS5 already runs a Unix like kernel as far as I know. So yes, it would be possible to do it on them if Sony or Microsoft allowed it. Though I doubt they ever will since you could not run Playstation or Xbox games on Linux without huge investment from their side. It’s a solution for those looking to jump without the hardware cost, but I am a little anxious in recommending it since Sony full well considers it still their device. And Nintendo has recently shown they aren’t shy from just bricking banning your device from their services if they think you’re not using it the way they want, I would expect the same from Sony. But if you do it right, probably no way for them to find out. But you could never go back to it just being a Playstation 5 too. In the end it’s essentially the same path as my first proposal.

I also notice that when there is a discussion or video regarding modding a console, it’s to “preserve” its longevity rather than having a practical use.

I think that’s in part because it’s an attempt to tiptoe around the ‘red lines’ of console manufacturers. It’s trying to stay as inoffensive as possible so that it doesn’t get put into the same bag as emulators or third party tools to circumvent DRM.

EDIT: The switch example wasn’t bricked, but it was banned from using the official services, which isn’t much better, but still a distinction to be made.

Your point being? I’m well aware these are because of piracy, it doesn’t change my point. If you’re a shitty company intent on abusing your customers to extract as much money from them, of course you’re going to find any way to do it and take away their forms of protest. But in the end, an artist still gets paid for whichever game they end up greenlighting, and not for the amount of copies sold afterwards. Hell they might not even get paid at all since these are the same kind of companies that would rather fire them for AI.

And for the not so shitty companies, they simply make sure people have no reason to pirate them, and there’s a hell of a lot more of those. They just don’t make unreasonable amounts of money, almost like that’s antithetical to treating your customers fairly.

I mean it really depends on what your wishes would be. If you’re thinking big and long term then someone could really go all in on capturing the console crowd with an entirely new console ecosystem. You could definitely simplify an OS like Linux to be a lot more to be more console oriented, such as what SteamOS is already trying to do for Steamdeck and the Steam machine. Even though that will be a balancing act with the openness of the system, since ‘making sure you can’t easily break this’ also makes it hard or impossible to break out of it in case of a change of heart.

But the whole thing with open systems is that they can do very similar things to other open systems. Which is why Linux and Windows (and sometimes Mac) are packed together under the same umbrella. So it would have to content with those three and provide clear upsides to developers, businesses, or players over those, which is hard. That’s part of the reason why the big businesses love consoles, because the freedom they take from players, double as tools for them to earn more money.

Most realistically in that route, would be for either Sony, Xbox, or Nintendo, to change their tune and go down that route instead. But that would require immense force from the players to offset the profit lost from changing the status quo. So it really isn’t that realistic sadly. Xbox wouldn’t do it anyways because it’s essentially already even more locked down Windows. Nintendo relies on their exclusives to sell their consoles. Sony would be least unlikely to do it but they recently stopped selling their exclusives on PC because (almost) nobody jumped ship back to Playstation.

The closest and ‘easiest’ jump in the short term is probably to small formfactor PC hooked up to your TV using eg. SteamOS. Controller support is pretty widely supported nowadays. And since most console game developers also develop for PC, you won’t have any issue missing out on your games unless it’s Nintendo or exclusives (but that’s probably another reason to jump too). With some technical knowledge you could do it without spending a single cent on Steam / Valve if that’s your concern. Since you could just run a Linux based system on a mini-PC or console formfactor with eg. Brazzite or another console OS lookalike.

That’s fair. I just think like your second part, most people have their reasons like that. But you’re correct the culture does also simultaneously allow people that pirate just for free stuff to have it easy. But If the companies don’t like it, they can fix that. Currently to them it’s just the cost of doing business their way. People drove to Netflix and Steam in hordes when they made a service that was easier and better than pirating. Netflix regressed since then, but Steam still shows it’s possible. It just takes an industry as a whole willing to avoid the dark patterns that lead people to piracy.

Not lots sadly. There are certainly some that have a big enough public profile to demand a share, but those are few and far between, and are often doing pretty well for themselves already. To 99% of the people in the industry the response to “I want to get a cut of the game’s profits” is “you can find another place to work then.”

I don’t entirely disagree with your bigger point. At some point you have to just step away from companies that are set on abusing you. But I don’t agree that it’s immature or skinflinty. That seems to be a rather uncharitable take perhaps lacking in understanding and perspective of why people pirate. There are pirates that take for the sake of it, but that’s not mostly the case. Piracy is trackable to a certain degree, and so it is feedback that people want to give you money, but are protesting your decisions. As has been said, piracy is a service problem. People tend to have no problem parting with their money in a fair exchange, and so they often don’t, even if they could.

Wanting to be treated fairly and not taking abuse is the opposite of immature in my opinion, how much it costs doesn’t even factor into it. Some fights you fight on principle. Too many people accept being taken advantage of in this world, making it worse for everyone else. And without those people piracy would also have been unneeded, because these companies often opt to not fix their issues and instead enshittify harder to squeeze more out of the people that keep paying.

There’s also a huge psychological aspect to it. Pirates often still bond with friends over games and those friends can end up buying, and pirates often still contribute to fan communities. Both of these are hard to let go of. They also happen to still help the original game stay relevant despite pirating, so yes, quitting entirely is more effective of a boycott. But also not being able to sell the experience to someone that has already experienced it is also more permanent, and allows that person to remain in their respective communities. Piracy just hits the sweet spot between quitting and no longer directly supporting, which is why people often end up there. And for creators that have to live under the thumb of executives that sabotage their success with hostile business practices, they would much rather you be there than somewhere else, while they try to improve the situation from the inside.

A bonus is not the same as a percentage cut of sales. Yes, bonuses exist and they can correlate with the success of a game in the best case, but they can (and also often) completely do not, plenty of stories of people getting laid off even if the game does well. These companies are so big they do not hold onto their staff as valuable assets, but as replaceable cogs. And it’s also why a lot of artists work on a contract basis and just don’t get any bonus to begin with.

And ‘to make up for extremely poor baseline salaries’… That’s not a thing as far as I know, and if it is where you are, it shouldn’t be a thing. It would be the game industry equivalent of tipping culture. Steal from workers ahead of time so you can punish them if the suits’ stupid business decisions don’t work out, awesome.

EDIT: Perhaps you’re referring to the fact that artists get paid badly at all, in which case, sure. But those bonuses aren’t to make up for that.

I kinda hate to say it, but consoles are designed with these companies in mind. The whole idea of locking the ecosystem to only companies Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo approves of and making the process to get in expensive, time consuming, and often hostile to creative autonomy, incentivizes exactly these kinds of companies to go all in, since they have plenty of money and know with a captive audience they will get more out of it.

Prices kind of suck right now, so there’s no easy solution. But the only real long term solution is to move to an open platform where you have the control, not them. And that’s going to require sacrifice, because the deck is stacked against you. Or if you have enough faith, for enough people to stand up when they need to. Because the power for you yourself to resist was intentionally already taken from you.

Your two statements have nothing to do with each other. Artists don’t get paid for the amount of copies sold, that’s executives and shareholders. Unless you’re talking about an indie company with shared ownership, which the companies in the post decidedly are not. Artists just care about their game being played and enjoyed, something the scummy practices of these suits actively prevents.

Avatar really is a case study in mismanagement. At it’s core an engaging story with deep characters and lore with many parts unexplored, with a special place in many hearts after the initial series. The perfect ingredients to turn into a lifelong franchise. Yet it cannot seem to shed the curse of rights holders and suits smothering it’s potential success.

People view the image in different conditions. There’s so many factors involved. How bright your surroundings are, the make and size of your display device, how you perceive colors. Professionals perform color grading to avoid ambiguity like this in movies and such. Even your cultural expectations are hypothesized to change how you perceive the dress. (Eg. living in a desert environment can make you expect more yellow shading)

There’s a similar illusion called the spinning dancer, where some people simply cannot see the image spinning one way or the other, while some can even switch between them. There’s more information in the dress to make an objective assessment, but if that information isn’t observed or obscured by the aforementioned reasons, it’s totally understandable. That’s what OP’s image is showing.

But if you understood what they were trying to say as you said you did, you would understand they’re not claiming that is de facto what NK is. They’re just saying what NK is on paper. Even sham governments frequently live in the shadow of legitimacy cast by what their system does on paper and still follow protocol even if parameters are tightly controlled for a certain outcome. So a lot of this could have been avoided by not fighting that premise and reiterating your point differently. Such as with Xi, you did not mean to deny he wasn’t elected by the NPC instead of the people, but you wanted to deny the legitimacy of the entire process including the NPC. So say that instead of denying the former. “Even if he’s indirectly elected, the process as a whole is a sham.” or “You’re right, he is indirectly elected. But that doesn’t change my point, the legitimacy of that election is also a sham.”, and none of this would have been necessary.

You say that, but you also claimed out of nowhere that they said NK holds fair elections. Which they clearly didn’t. So if you aren’t misunderstanding what they’re trying to tell you - why are you putting words into their mouth and being combative?

You really should know how silly this makes you look, even to someone sharing your judgement of how democratic those processes are in NK or China. They’re just explaining how things work in the political systems of those countries objectively.

If you’re from the US - someone can explain to you how the electoral college works without making a judgement on whether or not that’s democratic or not. If you’re not from the US, many democratic systems have such mechanics like indirect appointments or indirect voting, whether good or bad.

Objective knowledge gives you the power to form better opinions and take action, including for those systems of power that you are a part of. Rejecting such knowledge unconditionally because it’s about a country you don’t like (or anything you don’t like) is incredibly self defeating in the long term. It makes you easy to manipulate.

As someone without aphantasia, I don’t always quite get it either. Reading is often a last resort medium for me, but it does have it’s place. Plain text primarily engages my narrative imagination (where is the story going) and only a little bit of visual imagination (since it’s kind of hard to convey certain things like body language in text without being very boring), while for example a video might invoke narrative, visual, and auditory imagination. Video games are even better to me, as they engage narrative, visual, auditory, and decision making imagination. It’s about stimulation to me, the more coherent the better, and books just don’t seem to stimulate enough for my imagination to kick off to where it’s enjoyable to read.

Outright bans never work with vices.

It can’t be taken 1:1. Vices being banned in the past was typically because legislators saw them as productivity drains, despite the pleasure it provided. Therefore making those bans inherently tyrannical to habitual users and certain non-users, incentivizing disobedience.

But this time, it’s being banned for a group that’s not habitually using already, meaning extraordinary reasons would require them to become habitual users in the first place. And smoking is typically not very pleasant at the start to begin with, so there’s little incentive to start. And, unlike in the past, smoking is no longer present everywhere. And of course there’s the knowledge that it will give you cancer and cut your lifespan.

There’s just not much enjoyment left, so even if 1% of those affected by the rolling ban slip through the cracks with an underground market, there isn’t the room for growth that sustains or spreads an illegal market like for eg. recreational drugs. Which is why those bans need to be enforced to perfection to have a chance to work, which they never do, and which is why they never work.

There are so many ways for people to harm themselves that we don’t need to ban because they come with severe risk to the person, so they self regulate. The only reason smoking needs that ban is because of how widespread smoking was, and so even if way less people start smoking than before, that’s still way too many people. A ban just needs to be successful at getting far less people to start, not absolutely halt every single usage, and eventually it will fade from culture on it’s own.

EDIT: Slight corrections. But kinda wild to get overly downvoted for the thing pretty much everyone else is saying in this thread, just with a little more in-depth analysis. Come out and tell me where I’m wrong, I don’t think you can.

The brain worm is already at it

Most if not all of the donation services allow you to use Paypal though. Ko-Fi does for sure.

OP got banned from the US news community because they made some pretty controversial statements and (from their personal PoV) questioned if MAGA cult followers exist. That’s the only community on LW they got banned from, cited as being for “rage baiting / trolling”, which yeah it very well could be, even with a benefit of doubt.

But that’s hardly an echo chamber. It’s just one community, and moderators are typically completely unaffiliated with the server and can pick and enforce their own rules, nothing stops them from making or joining another US news comm. They even boasted that blocking that comm made their feed better, so it’s not like they wanted to be there either.