It's amusing and revealing that at no point here have you actually directly addressed anything that I've actually said. Instead, you've just used what I've said as a jumping off point for a ludicrously exaggerated, barely relevant and deliberately insulting strawman.
Here's a challenge for you - instead of leaping from strawman to strawman in this vain effort to somehow prove that I'm a horrible person and therefore wrong, go all the way back to the beginning here and frame a positive argument for your position. Tell me exactly why and on what basis (as appears to be your position) publishers should be prohibited from charging extra for early access, and what nominal public good that would serve.
As a bonus, you might also try to explain how the position that publishers should be allowed to charge extra for early access is in any way "a very anti-covid-vaccine argument." I'm especially curious about that one.
I would say that there's almost nothing that demonstrates more contempt for one's fellow man than decreeing that they shouldn't even be allowed to make their own choices.
It’s that population that actively makes games worse for all of us
That's exactly why I don't cut them any slack. Their dumb choices don't just harm themselves - they harm me and all other gamers, insofar as they've made it so that publishers can get away with putting out unfinished, buggy, unbalanced crap.
Sure - the gamers might spend a while ineffectually bitching on forums and handing out 1 star reviews, but that's just meaningless noise. The ONLY thing that matters to the publishers is whether or not people buy the game, and those dunderheads not only buy the game - they line right up to buy the next one too.
Or, now, line right up to pay extra for early access to the next one.
It'd be different if games were a necessity - then the idea of "predatory" behavior would be relevant, since we'd be talking about someone taking advantage of the fact that the consumer has to buy the thing in question.
But games aren't a necessity - not even close - so any consumer is at any time entirely free to say no to any transaction without suffering any meaningful ill effects.
And any consumers who, in such a situation, do not say no to a bad deal have nobody to blame but themselves.
I'm often reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago, with a stereotypical Einsteinish physicist standing in front of a chalkboard, looking at this enormously complex formula with a big blank space in the middle of it. Then he gets a "eureka" expression and starts writing in the blank space. Then he steps back, and you can see that he's filled the blank space with "and then something happens".
In a weird way, this story is so loathsome that it goes beyond ideology.
Yes - the ideologies are obviously exactly what one would expect, and that's a relevant bit of information.
But really, the story boils down to "Decent human being defends child against foul monster's attacks." It's almost as if ideology is a secondary thing - this Gomez doesn't even qualify as a human being.
Learning about Vance over the last few days has been intriguing (I didn't even know he existed until a couple of weeks ago).
The overall impression I get...
Imagine that for every situation an individual is in, there's a number of different lines of dialogue they can choose (like a romance game).
Then imagine that each response is labeled - there's the kind response or the strong response or the selfish response or the funny response or whatever.
It's as if in essentially every single situation, regardless of any other factors, J.D Vance chooses the asshole response.
I didn't expect that, but i'm entirely unsurprised.
I'm sure Trump feels especially at ease being "interviewed" by a fellow abuser, liar and Putin fellator, so Jr. was instructed to bring him along as a first step toward getting him back on the air.
They're just trying to shift back to keeping their desire for a plutocratic/christofascist autocracy on the down-low.
The problem is that their goals are explicitly anti-American, but their supporters tend to pride themselves on being, if anything, ultra-American.
And as more of the details of Project 2025 are revealed, an increasing number of those lunkheads are starting to go, "Derrr... hey, wait a minnit! This don't sound very American to me!"
So the fascists have shifted to that age-old "What, that? I don't know anything about that - someone else must've left it here. Just ignore it."
I'm often reminded of a bit on Top Gear years ago, when they were talking about "turbo" as a marketing tool in the 80s, when you could buy "turbo" sunglasses or "turbo" watches or "turbo" after-shave.
I take "cannot be compared" to be a sort of shorthand claim - they aren't actually asserting that the two things literally cannot be compared at all, but that they cannot be compared meaningfully or relevantly.
I think he should have stepped down weeks ago. Framed correctly (something along the lines of "I still want to believe I'm the best possible candidate, but I can't deny that there's significant doubt about that, and this is a point in history that's far too important to allow for doubt), AND accompanied by the DNC (acting entirely out of character and) simply throwing open the nomination and going with whoever proved to be the most popular candidate, I think that would've generated enthusiasm that Biden never has, and would've led to Trump getting his flabby ass handed to him.
But I worry that it's too late for that now - that at this point there's been too much fiddling around, too much dissension and too much astroturf to allow for the sort of spontaneous rally 'round a candidate that would've worked so well. And I worry that if he does drop out still, it's not going to be so that the voters can get a candiadte they'll rally around, but so that the DNC can just saddle us with some other drab establishment hack who'll likely end up being even less popular than Biden.
So no - at this point, I think the best strategy is to stop bitching about it and focus on beating the fucking wannabe dictator in clown makeup and his christofascist coattail-riders. It really doesn't matter who wins, so long as it's not that foul piece of shit Trump.
It's amusing and revealing that at no point here have you actually directly addressed anything that I've actually said. Instead, you've just used what I've said as a jumping off point for a ludicrously exaggerated, barely relevant and deliberately insulting strawman.
Here's a challenge for you - instead of leaping from strawman to strawman in this vain effort to somehow prove that I'm a horrible person and therefore wrong, go all the way back to the beginning here and frame a positive argument for your position. Tell me exactly why and on what basis (as appears to be your position) publishers should be prohibited from charging extra for early access, and what nominal public good that would serve.
As a bonus, you might also try to explain how the position that publishers should be allowed to charge extra for early access is in any way "a very anti-covid-vaccine argument." I'm especially curious about that one.
Feel free to take your time