Hallelujah

Let’s be real, this should extend even beyond piracy.

History is full of examples of companies buying patents for good innovations and intentionally burying them because they compete with or are too similar to the company’s offerings.

Think about that - literal pieces of human innovation, steps in the ever-evolving game of technological development… just buried for no reason other than because some company thought they’d make more money without it and had the capital to force the situation.

It’s gross.

We as a people should absolutely reject the idea that which has been brought into our world through the creativity of humanity should be able to erased by the greed of monsters.

Free knowledge, free humanity.

Dude that’s not fucking fair.

I wanna see you try to look for evidence with all that bribery and police gang money obscuring your vision and see if you do any better.

Yes of course. But maybe we don’t have to stick only to specific bad example and can speak to the practice in general, perhaps?

But you can say “Just so you know, this phone call is being recorded” and if they continue to talk, they are implicitly giving consent

Which makes it kind of bullshit and not two-party, since in many cases this is effectively the only means of communicating with these companies. There is no real option to not consent, especially in the case of healthcare companies, since it’s not like a person can just choose to not have a body with real medical concerns (and in the US you legally can’t even go uninsured without penalty). Calling this “two party” at this point is a fucking joke.

“Funko did not request a takedown of the @itchio platform.”

Man, I fucking hate corpo-speak like this.

Yes, you didn’t personally make the request against itchio… But you hired this company to enforce “brand protection” and that’s what they did. So you did actually request the takedown, but you just did so by authorizing another party to make such requests on your behalf.

This is like a military General saying “hey I didn’t commit any warcrimes, I just gave the orders to my men to commit warcrimes!”

Did you forget that shame exists? Not all, hell not even most calls to name an offender are a call for violence, the vast majority are calls for accountability and potentially shame.

Imo we need to start attaching criminal penalties to the people behind businesses that knowingly abuse their power and position like this. Corporate bullying isn’t a financial position, it’s a failing of ethics.

I’m not saying it’s exactly KH, I’m saying it’s in the action-rpg hybrid combat genre like KH. I don’t enjoy either of their combat. As for my experience, I completed the first KH game and I’m like 90% through FFVII remake, but it is a fucking chore every single time combat happens. I think basically all action-rpg crossover combat is shallow. I want them to give me either a fully satisfying action experience or a fully satisfying RPG combat experience, stop dicking around in this dumb compromise space

I just don’t want this half-assed combat. If they wanted to make this an action game, go full action and give us a DMC-like experience. If they want it to be an RPG, either stick to classic turn-based or iterate in some way that isn’t a shitty compromised half-step between two things, don’t give us this shallow Kingdom Hearts-like (but worse) half & half. I guess I’m in the minority on this but I personally find action RPG hybrid combat systems almost always unsatisfying; very few games offer me something that doesn’t feel like a cheapened knock off of some better game style.

100%. I literally keep falling asleep during combat being it’s so mindless and boring.

I hate the remake’s combat so much. So so much. It’s so fucking boring. God why couldn’t they have just kept the core gameplay mechanic the same?

I agree they don’t have to be anti-consumer to be pro-developer, but my point is that that is how they are approaching being pro-developer - by limiting pro-consumer features at the behest of developers. Or perhaps I should be saying more actively publishers, to be fair.

I gave what I see as a significant example in my original comment. Not being able to see comments or reviews from those who have purchased games through the storefront is a problem for me. If a game has a bug or problem, especially if it is one that could potentially be tied to or unique to the EGS version, I would like to know about it. That EGS currently doesn’t provide readily available user feedback when it frankly has been the standard as defined by steam, just doesn’t for me.

So you have to ask yourself why they wouldn’t include such a simple a rudimentary feature - the only result I can come up with is to appease developers who want to prevent being negatively impacted by bad reviews. Thus what we have is prioritizing the wants of developers at the expense of features which benefit consumers.

Some people prefer not to do business with entities whose business practices they don’t support.

Steam doesn’t engage in the same kind of strong-arming and anti-consumer practices, so it’s not exactly comparable, is it?

I say this every time Epic comes up but it remains the same.

Steam is the pro-consumer storefront. Epic is the pro-developer storefront. What Epic seems to fail to understand is that by being so staunchly pro-developer, they effectively become anti-consumer. And as a consumer, I’m just not going to spend money on an anti-consumer marketplace.

When Epic considers adding necessary pro-consumer measures like actual user reviews so I can hear how a game actual performs from real end users, then and only then will I consider Epic a real storefront viable for consumers.

I can’t decide if I’m proud or sad that this answer was buried so deeply into this post

This is embarrassing, bro

We’ve got to stop talking about “if” and “when.”

It’s NOW. This is happening. We are watching the rise of the next Hitler, now, live, today. This isn’t hypothetical anymore - yesterday just gave them carte blanche to go full stormtroopers.

At this point, all of our conversations need to be about how we stay safe in the wake.