Question is do the Liberals get to take credit for it? If they do, then things get fucky again.

This will be funny when it bankrupts my employer because they can’t pay to import any of the components we need to make anything at a +30% markup.

You’re just supposed to accept that It Is A Video Game and you do Video Game Stuff in it

I kinda think that this a big reason why the “Traditional JRPG” is a more-or-less extinct genre outside of the Persona series, and whatever weird remake, or “narrative experience” experiment SquareEnix is working on right now.

Most JRPG’s never really figured out how to actually get their game-worlds & their gameplay to interact with each other in ways that are actually compelling in any way; and consequently they ended up kind of just stagnating & getting overtaken by more dynamic games.

Like these things were invented to help portray Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian-esque adventures in pen-and-paper game form in the 70s

Yes, but you see Conan is not a fucking nerd, and is the furthest possible kind of subject from a Neoliberal Optimization Gremlin; and so his perspective is not relatable, or salient to anybody watching, or working on contemporary fantasy anime.

As a consequence of this, the modern audiences & creators plunder the systems meant to simulate things he would do or encounter, and then interject their own existing neoliberal value-sets on top of it in order to treat those systems & simulations as the “Actually Real” part; and then write shitty spiritually dead characters designed to thrive within that framework.

It’s possible that they did intend to separate out those things at some point in development, but never actually got around to doing it.

The scale-creep of Elden Ring makes it so that the game is, in a lot of ways, weirdly less “polished” than other Fromsoft “Souls-Borne” titles when you consider the significantly increased development resources available to it.

We’re talking about Elden Ring, not Sekiro here. If Michael Zaki didn’t want you to be able to represent yourself, or what you value in the game, he would’ve just given you John Eldenring to play as, and told you to go fuck yourself if you didn’t like it.

So this is a legitimate question to ask.

I do like the sound of this rule change, and it is funny watching Gaben use his monopoly power as the sole functional digital storefront for PC games to fuck with publishers. This does make me wonder, though, if this wouldn’t lead to a more concerted effort by AAA studios to back a different distributor, cause if there’s anything that Capitalists despise, it’s being told what to do with their Capital.