That was awesome. I imagine if I worked for Activision Blizzard, that knowledge of Bobby Kotick leaving plus that welcome video would give me some feels.
Until recently, my buddy had been enjoying Netflix for going on 10 years, for free. No cost. Turns out he's just been using the service while I pay for it. So your situation is not weird, per se.
You pay for the service to watch the videos. Or you watch the ads that advertisers pay Youtube to show to you. This concern about data harvesting is a side concern that isn't unique to Youtube. If you sign up for a free membership, mailing list, etc. from any place you shop (say, the grocery store to get their members' price discounts), you're allowing yourself to have your data mined and monetized.
Unless they sign a business agreement with you that puts them in legal jeopardy of collecting/sharing/selling your information. This is a standard agreement between companies that use tech products and the companies that provide them.
Is it enshittification, or how the Internet should work for commercial services? Youtube isn't publicly funded. You either pay for the product or become it in exchange for use.
I believe it is MY prerogative, and no one else’s, to decide what I am or am not allowed to see. I curate my own feed by blocking or subscribing to instances I don’t or do want to see, respectively.
What about abusive users that post in communities outside of their home instance? I think that's what we're talking about here. I can block instances, but there are communities in Lemmy.world that I enjoy and I appreciate the admins effort to keep abusive users out.
I'm grateful for activists, particularly those with a focus on archiving gaming. That's another area where I think supporting Live Service Games might be shortsighted on the part of the consumer. By accepting it as a practice, ownership is ceded toward the publisher or creator. We're less owners and more renters when it comes to gaming property.
I remember when I bought Street Fighter 2 for the SNES and realized, I no longer have to go to the arcade to play this game. I no longer have to submit an endless amount of quarters to play what I can play endlessly at home for a one-time fee. It was an amazing feeling. And with LSG it's like we're coming back around.
Multiplayer games are great. I think the upsetting part is that from the word Go, whether it warrants being a Live Service Game or not, it implies an expiration date and an online-only requirement. When I bought Overwatch, I never heard them describe it as a LSG. Maybe they did and it just didn't register. What I know though is that having bought 2 copies, one for PC and the other for PS4, I cannot play those games now and in their place is a reportedly substandard product (one I didn't pay for or ask for).
So now I have this game which I loved and still played occasionally is gone because the publisher made a decision to expire it arbitrarily (read: to get people to pay them more money).
Overwatch could've run on player driven servers. Much of this stuff can. That might only serve a few thousand or few hundred people 10 years after launch, but that's the right thing to do.
This is great. I seem to be less into social media since Twitter died and Reddit became whatever the heck it is now. I do occasionally go back there but it feels weird. I feel disconnected from it. I can see people still using it, but there's a pall over everything, a frost. Lemmy on the other hand may not be as active, but its smaller community feels more personal.
If this is why, great. Microsoft needs to get out in front of this though, otherwise a bad look when they don’t need one.