The line must go up. Forever. Infinitely.

The goal of AAA companies isn’t to sell games, it’s not even to sell MTX, it’s to sell the idea that they’re a perpetual profit engine to the stock market.

Ugh, that sucks. Totally understand. I’ve been considering and looking to switch environments myself at some stage, spurred on by the SteamDeck developments, but stuff like this is off-putting. I expected better of gog.

While I understand how nice a central client is, can’t you still just download them from the site and play them?

I didn’t know that. It’s good to know. Thanks.

No, I meant what I said, I was wrong and have been corrected.

Steam is DRM. Note the warnings all mention third-party drm. Eventually your login to steam expires and you can’t play your games, and steam can revoke games and your access to them at any point for any reason.

Steam is good, but let’s not imply it’s providing a DRM free experience.

You’re still missing the point, the players don’t play in the environment of a specific faction, they play in the space of all factions and their interactions.

Many changes caused even pro players to change what faction they mained. I’ll concede some pro players managed to win matches in environments where it was considered a terrible match up for them. They’re also pro players.

I do think there’s a tendency to be over dramatic about the changes but the comparison with Starcraft is a bad one. Nerfs can remove all solutions to a given situation, and no adapting can solve that.

Starcraft is a symmetrical PvP game. Helldivers 2 is an asymmetrical PvE game. It’s harder to adapt when your opponent isn’t effected by the same changes.

Dismissing out of hand is the same kind of blindness as buying without checking the reviews. You can get the premium currency through play and there’s no time limit to the “battle passes”. It’s about as good as it could be implemented.

They recently rolled what used to be called Xbox Live into the service. This is actually really low numbers considering.

You need to bump to ultimate level for access to the console version, but you can already set this up. It’s not trivial though. Not sure I’d recommend it though.

Jan last year they were going to destroy the 3rd party D&D content creation ecosystem (it was legally debated whether they could anyway) it caused a mass boycott of D&D content and all 3rd party creators (including Critical Roll) to start diversifying. It went on for two weeks, only finally causing them to rollback on it because a campaign to cancel all ongoing D&D beyond subscriptions made them take it seriously.

They’ve been pushing to make a closed garden platform vtt for all their first party digital content, that it seems they’ve just started to rollback on.

Prior to that they’ve been consistently milking and trying squeeze the D&D playerbase and MTG community in more and more shitty and exploitative moves.

To say that community good will and faith in them is below zero is not an exaggeration. The main hardcore community have a very jaded and negative view of Wizards and Hasbro. Really to learn more I recommend crawling through YT of all the news. There’s just no way to do it justice here.

There’s a few of these. Not mentioned here is Project: Eden’s Garden which is one I’ve been following for a while.