“Help me build my echo chamber.”

That’s literally when I did most of my PC gaming. What was even wrong with visiting a website to download a patch? It was way more convenient to update at your own leisure instead of having to log onto a service that would randomly install updates every week before you could even start the game up like nowadays.

You could even save the patches locally and when you had to reformat Windows, you could have your games installing before you even had the internet back up, hah.

There was literally nothing wrong with downloading updates from a “shitty dev website” because they worked just fine and the worst thing you had to do was decide whether you wanted to run the install wizard or not lol

I’m totally cool with just downloading it from their website. Or they could send me a flash drive. Wasn’t Steam originally the cheaper, easier option instead of designing a box and writing a bunch of disks?

Yeah, it’s silly. It’s an entire industry built on “frivolous”, optional consumption. They are making a killing even WITH piracy. They (the studios, etc.) make so much money that they can afford to selectively offer their product only to certain streaming services, region locked, and some of them have even paid to develop their own streaming platforms just for fun.

All they have to do is put their product on the real market, let any platform stream it for a licensing fee, and offer things that people actually want to buy: physical media and silly trinkets.

They’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone. If they were struggling, they’d just let me buy their product for a reasonable fee instead of making me jump through hoops and watch commercials.

But they are telling us we’re “buyiing” it while hiding the truth 100 pages deep in the fine print. Screw 'em

Yep, Steam is my “video game piracy canary”. The day I lose access to my games on Steam will be the last day I ever buy any video game, and probably any non-physical piece of media for the rest of my life.

How can I ever give Nintendo money ever again after being brazen enough to attack somebody like this? Costing a company a bit of unrealized profit can never be a good enough reason to financially ruin an individual–anything less than this is simply admitting subservience to our wannabe overlords. If a company or entity wants to make big money, they are going to have to come to terms with the fact that this sort of thing is going to happen, and get over it.

Aw, I thought this was about actual Mastodons.