Right. It can and has been done before while still turning a profit. People can, did, and still do use self-hosting as a way to play things for free. It has never been the reason for why a game failed financially, though. Most people just don’t have the knowledge or the interest to go through the extra steps required to play for free. A lot of them buy things because they genuinely wanted to support the developers.

The abuse is the point. The people in charge spend every day figuring out more ways to take power away from people and give it to the corporation. It’s an art and a science at this point.

Money and control. There is no technical reason, and in fact it would be easier to just let people host their own servers.

Allowing self-hosting used to be the norm for online games. Businesses realized a long time ago that gamers stopped having standards and would accept any abuse to not be left out of the hype.

Games aren’t the same, but gaming is still alive and well for those in the know.

I just avoid hype and modern consumerist nonsense and found the good games never left us; we just left them.

Agreed. The writing is top-notch in the older GTAs and we really don’t see much that’s comparable in the modern age.

I’m not too excited for GTA6 and 5 isn’t as good as what came before.

The games that put it on the map, though, are timeless. Try playing one and see for yourself, we just don’t get games like that anymore.

No, bitcoin is shit for people who aren’t paying attention.

Should be charging Monero.

It’s always the same story. Once something starts making too much money, it inevitably goes to shit because of scumbags, scammers, and suckers.

🥛

Everybody is a sellout piece of shit.

They’re the kinds of people that need to be on corporate platforms or else alarm bells start going off in their heads.

They don’t think, they just act.

Everyone who ditches twitter for bluesky is a fucking idiot.

Good. We need to see more people who are angry at the system taking actions like these.

I don’t think you missed much.

It’s clearly just consumerist shit for kids that don’t know any better and the pedophiles preying on them.

Just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.