20 mil is peanuts. Selling shit to children for as long as you can is worth way more. FTC has proven that exploiting kids with gambling mechanics is just good business.

Counterpoint: I can identify which part of the UI most of those come from. This level of variety between various UI functions is actually good. I don’t want the interface tabs or the settings tabs to be confused with tabs in the store, even though they are all tabs. I don’t want buttons to all look the same, especially not the huge purchase button. But even accepting that as an outlier I want some buttons to be clearly part of the steam UI and some as part of the site page I am on, so I don’t get confused.

When your movie is on the frontpage of Netflix with a handful of A listers and effectively “free”, a half billion views is actually not that great. You were handed success on a silver platter.

Nah, they can do whatever with the phone otherwise. But we literally have shooter drills and lockdowns on the regular because we can’t figure out guns like literally every other civilized nation on earth.

Not sending them into that scenario with nothing but good graces and the hope that the police don’t just camp outside the building again.

In a universe where my kids are getting kevlar backpacks, you will never see me agree to this.

I will put a new burner phone in their lunch daily if it comes to it.

I have 0 interest until I hear it has mod support and they don’t lock it into their “creation club” only.

You mean RSS?

Everything you listed is true of all the other companies frankly. That’s just how it is. As you said, the frogs have been boiled, and Sony is almost the last to do this now. They need the analytics info all their competitors have, ostensibly. Sadly this is the landscape we are in.

Sony music, in the CD music era.

Not good or acceptable, but also kind of lime blaming Amazon pharmacy for something azon logistics does. Could not be a more different part of the company.

And rockstar games require a rockstar account. Ubisoft requires an Ubisoft account. Microsoft requires an Xbox account … For single player games too, at least one login.

Sony is late to the game but this complaint rings hollow to me when we only target them.

They all want the social side, and to various degrees add social and other features. With varying degrees of success too.

Right, gayness is a symptom of social media, and invented by the online liberals.

Try existing in the rural parts of the country where no one is “like you”, and increasingly they claim all that “Hollywood media” is just propaganda.

Seeing people like yourself, actual real people, has a huge impact in helping kids avoid isolation and in some cases connect with communities and avoid suicide.

Feeling alone in the world is something teens are already prone to and this makes it so much worse for the LGBTQ kids out there. Their existence now being labeled on the same level as sexual content and gore.

Major difference is that TV and your examples aren’t a firehose free for all of content. There is at least a minor barrier to entry. Which helps stem some of the tide at least.

Too many services with too low quality content.

Once Upon a Time Netflix premiered a handful of huge shows and movies a season. Then they got addicted to watch metrics and decided everything should be “second screen content” from a firehose.

Now I don’t watch any Netflix original until it’s concluded or has rave reviews, because it’s likely to get canceled in season 1 or just not be worth watching at all. And in the rare case it is great, gets picked up, and have rave reviews, they can still fuck it up like The Witcher.

Every other network is pretty much guilty of this too. I’m so, so over it. They have made me actually long for the option of a singular cable-like license I could get, because they are so shitty at maintaining their services and their catalogs are so poor now.

I just roll my own now and host a Plex server, because fuck em.

Not worth installing the app for 2 days of content.

A week? Maybe that’s a promotion.

This looks like a low budget Potionomics.

The same applies for Epic as well regarding piracy. Again it’s just a matter of diversifying.

If I had to rebuy 100% of my games, Id never adopt Epic at all. Atleast this way the library has something of value as an alternative without costing me a fortune.

I’m thinking even farther back to their wretched Windows Live and then Games for Windows Live platform (now dead). MS is one of the biggest companies on earth and couldn’t find a cohesive way to migrate that game ownership forward.

I just like to own the things I own. And I’m more worried about someone hijacking my account because they want some bullshit inventory item or something than getting banned for something toxic. Account theft is sadly still pretty common.

Absolutely. But if someone got you in one of those steam inventory scams or stole your access token, it sucks if you lose your entire game library and have all your eggs in one basket.

So having a bunch “backed up” so to speak with Epic gives some peace of mind. VAC bans aren’t common for most users, but they do make mistakes sometimes.