This is self explanatory; to all who do not support the idea of ownership, there shall be no more funding, regardless of their game’s quality.
Advice:
buy from GOG, avoid single player games which require internet connection or 3 party launchers.
Repost from reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StopKillingGames/comments/1ugzirg/stoppayinggames/
The dogged insistence that piracy of a corporate product impacts the pay of it’s employees neglects how the wage system works.
The wages only appear if the thing they produce creates profits for the corporation. If they continually produce something that doesn’t sell, they won’t have a job anymore. And I’ll raise you another part of this equation. If you pirated Assassin’s Creed: Shadows because you hate Ubisoft or whatever, that game will take somewhere between 35 and 65 hours for most people to finish, according to How Long to Beat. That’s 35 to 65 hours that you weren’t spending in some other game, perhaps a game that respects your values enough that you’d part with your money to play. Maybe that’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II or The Alters or Knights in Tight Spaces; whatever your preferences are, there’s some other game that also didn’t get your money because you were playing that pirated game instead, and I picked those three examples because they’re recent and run a range of different developer/publisher models while still being DRM-free.
What are you talking about? Game devs are constantly being laid off even after the product they create, creates profits for the corp.
That’s a different story entirely. That’s poor allocation of resources on large projects, when certain disciplines needed at the end of a project don’t necessarily have work to do at the beginning of another. The money that hired those people in the first place still came from selling the company’s previous video games.
Would you take a job that requires years to complete and forego wages until it retails?
Nobody actually works like that.
No, they typically don’t. That’s more what startups do. In the corporate world, the schedules are amortized, but the money has to come from somewhere.
You’re right. It often comes from the previous game but if that game doesn’t do well then the chances of there being another are greatly reduced.
And yet there are free indie games out there that are generally better than the corp funded crap. Creators will create, no matter what happens.
You’ll find far fewer of them creating when they need to spend more of their time at a job that will allow them to feed their families. And I don’t think the games I’ve found for free (actually free, not given away for free once as a promo) have tended to be better than the paid ones.
I’ve put more hours into Infiniminer, Minetest/Luanti, Industry, Dopewars, dnd, dopewars, and various Twine/Frotz games than any corporate games. When I do want an FPS (rare), I look at Doom sourceports and maybe Cube/Sauerbraten.
And there’s the real time-murderer: Nethack.
Having a personal taste and preference that lets you enjoy free indie and/or old DOS games is great for your wallet, saying these games are “generally better” than paid-for games funded by corporations is wild to me.
To each their own, but I’d say none of those compare to Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, and Skullgirls.