Enshittification is the process of squeezing money out of both sides of the transaction after you have built a sufficient customer and supplier base with initially attractive offerings that were possibly made at a loss.

First the service is great for consumers (and likely bleeding money). People flock to it.

Then they use that consumer base to lure more suppliers to the platform. Phase two. The service is great for suppliers because it means easy access to a big customer base.

When both a lot of customers and a lot of suppliers are using the platform they start making changes that redirect revenue from both sides to the platform itself. Prices increase, fees for suppliers increase or their cut decreases, maybe they have to sign that they won’t sell under a certain price elsewhere, customers can’t use all things on the platform anymore without paying extra, they introduce ads, maybe exclusives, that stuff. Customers won’t leave because they are used to the platform, there are network effects (all my friends use it), sunk cost fallacies (I have paid them x dollars over the years and if I leave I keep nothing for it) in the case of gamepass they have maybe stopped buying games elsewhere and wouldn’t have a library at all if they lost access. Suppliers won’t leave because the customer base is huge and they have no other simple way to reach those customers. Both are the literal frog in slowly boiling water. “What’s a few more bucks a month, what’s a little additional ad before my game loads, what’s a few more % to MS when the alternative is losing all those customers”. That’s the enshittification part.

Oh, Daeran must be one of my all time favorite RPG characters, even though I hated him initially. Regill and Ember are great too.

Owlcat can pull this off, at least from the storytelling side. The shooter gameplay is something I haven’t seen from them, so let’s hope that’ll work out.

I’m hyped.

If you want to blow the whistle on somebody and wonder if the Guardian is trustworthy I suggest you ask Julian Assange.

Garbage out is what he aims for.

You first.

What definitely did happen to me is I booted into windows, shut down, on the next startup there was no more grub menu, just instant boot into windows. (Separate physical drives).

Ok, but which? Can you sue them if Galaxy, a free tool that they provide for convenience and that isn’t required for the actual service, doesn’t work, or if it breaks a game? Name one thing.

I have lots of free games from GOG. You don’t have to be a paying customer to use Galaxy.

Which rights do you have?

Galaxy is free and not required. If it doesn’t work you can download games from the website (which I consider an important feature). I’m pretty sure you don’t have any rights whatsoever.

Buuut it also reinforces my point. The free open source solution works better than their in-house one.

I genuinely don’t get the “don’t pre order just buy the day it releases” thing.

Nobody ever said the second part.

Don’t pre order, wait for reviews a couple weeks after release, buy if reviews are good and no major bullshit is discovered.

What do you think you’re winning?

Avoiding the major bullshit.

Also, even if you did just buy day one: If developers have a lot of pre orders they know they’ll sell anyway they have less of an incentive to deliver the highest possible quality day one. That’s why people are telling you to not pre order. I could not care less if a stranger struggles with day one bugs, but they are helping to lower the bar for everyone else.

So does Galaxy?

Let’s say I have not yet had to do a full reinstall of Heroic and multiple associated games because something got unfixably (for my level of understanding) borked during an update.

I hear it every time: But Muh Windows is better, because you dont have to install Drivers!!!11!11elf

I come from a time when you (in Windows) had to hand pick the correct driver for the individual device from a very long list of options to make anything work, not just graphics. Not just “the nvidia driver”. Think “driver for the Sapphire RTX 12345.6.7-8 pro super max whatchamacallit RGB edition with anime waifu on the backplate, manufactured between May 21st and august 15th, quality controlled by Jeff and packaged by Tony”. If your card was packaged by Bertha instead it wouldn’t work. (Mine was always packaged by Bertha. Fuck Bertha.)

I feel so fucking old when I read complaints like this (yeah, I know, it’s because I am). Is clicking the highest version number behind the word “nvidia” considered complicated nowadays?

Even fewer people game on Mac than on Linux (judging by the Steam survey). I bet it’s not that they can’t they just don’t care.

Heroic works better than Galaxy does in Windows. They should just pay the Heroic devs for their work and make that their official launcher.

Doesn’t look like wood to me.

Why would the sword shatter but not the shield?

Some people will always find an excuse to change nothing.

It doesn’t matter how many similar EULA’s people have already accepted. The best moment to not eat it anymore would have been the first time it happened, the second best time is right now.

Also, retroactively amending an EULA is a different quality, since people have already paid for the game and would be locked out after the fact if they didn’t accept.

I’ll make a note to get back to you about this in a few years when they start blocking people from correcting AI authored articles.

Yup. And MS had to bribe the city of Munich with moving their German HQ there to make them switch back.