No, I didn’t miss the independent studios being bought up, nor did I miss the countless others formed in their wake and free from corporate control. I’m not ashamed that I have a realistic view of the world, and I find yours to be childish.

I can’t dictate whether or not you pirate; I just think you can help influence the world in a more positive way if you don’t. There are games made by people who worked hard and aren’t employed by a corporation. I would encourage you to buy from them, because you can show that you value their hard work and want them to keep doing it. Games have the good fortune of being more democratized than other media, so even if they have the lion’s share of the market, you can go on enjoying video games, even paying for video games, without giving those corporations the time of day.

Being frank, nothing will come of a movement about consumer rights if it looks like you just want to get things for free.

Plenty of them aren’t. Pay them.

Most but not all of the survival crafting genre will allow you to host your own servers. Others still have LAN using listen servers, but both are rare.

To each their own, but I’d say none of those compare to Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Skullgirls.

No, they typically don’t. That’s more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.

You’ll find far fewer of them creating when they need to spend more of their time at a job that will allow them to feed their families. And I don’t think the games I’ve found for free (actually free, not given away for free once as a promo) have tended to be better than the paid ones.

The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn’t sell, they won’t have a job anymore. And I’ll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That’s 35 to 65 hours that you weren’t spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you’d part with your money to play. Maybe that’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there’s some other game that also didn’t get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead, and I picked those three examples because they’re recent and run a range of different developer/publisher models while still being DRM-free.

I agree with the first sentence, but that’s what I feel this slogan does a poor job of reinforcing.

If you’re endorsing piracy as a political stance in any way, I don’t see it gaining traction. People need to be paid for their work; especially those who built a product for you that’s meant to last and can’t be taken away from you. I don’t know how you convey that in a three- or four-word slogan, but I don’t think this one does it.

It is not self-explanatory. You needed to explain it. On its face, it sounds like it’s saying to just pirate. I can get behind the message, but these three words aren’t it. I know that coming up with effective, catchy slogans is hard, but this one’s not going to do well.

The scope of a game project is not measured in how many hours it takes the player to finish.

Drive-by spoilers haven’t been a struggle for me to avoid for about a decade now. There’s just too much to watch, and hardly anything gets that groundswell of people I know all watching the same thing. The last time it happened was probably Game of Thrones.

I had one friend recommend Ted Lasso to the rest of us; most didn’t bother checking it out, but it does in fact rule. I’m still waiting on season 5 of The Boys. The Boys, btw, was one of the starkest differences in quality between streaming and disc. I’m not even on HDR or anything, but the blacks are so much deeper than whatever Amazon is doing to wash out the image. They did kind of half-ass the subtitles though, so the defaults aren’t set properly when Kimiko starts doing sign language.

And it’s nice that I can rip my discs, but whose idea was it to make ripping them this much of a pain in the ass? MakeMKV feels like a hack, probably because it is. It’s only Blu Rays made in the past few years that even bother to put labels on the tracks so that you know what each file is, and even then, it’s probably only because it fits some standard with LCD readouts on modern 4K players meant for the living room.

Plenty will take this as an excuse to pirate, and I understand completely. I think it sends a stronger signal to spend your money where you actually get to own stuff. In this case, in a world where there is no DRM-free movie/TV show store, that means buying the discs. And for what it’s worth, having recently gone back to Blu Rays, it’s been a nice reminder of how much better the quality is off of the disc compared to the compressed image they send you.

I’m not in that big of a rush, and I like having Steam’s refund policy at my disposal. I’m sure both Pragmata and 007 will have a sale by the end of the year.

I knew a discount on 007 First Light would be a long shot, but I’m not paying full price on it given the arbitrary locking of functionality behind an internet connection. I thought Pragmata would be on sale by now for sure, but it isn’t. So I only ended up getting Death Stranding 2.

Bungie has now been both.

Halo was for sure smaller scope. The amount of work that went into it was less than what went into Destiny. The size of the thing they produced was smaller than Destiny.

Halo was so broadly appealing in part because it was single player, co-op, and competitive. I wouldn’t want them to just stick to single player.