At a glance (haven’t enabled yet, will later today), GoG uses the RFC standard TOTP model. This means you can use whatever app you want whether that is the google authenticator that ties it to your cloud account, something related to your password manager (e.g. keepass or bitwarden), or even just a python script you have in a random directory. It gives you control of your 2FA and protects you in the event you lose a device without properly de-authenticating it.

Valve use their own model that, to my knowledge, is only accessible through the Steam mobile app. Which is a huge nightmare if you ever have a device stolen/damaged (and is why you back up the recovery code)

Just enabled. Yup, bog standard TOTP and they even provide the plaintext key so that I don’t have to extract it from a QR code.

There are a few layers to it. I’ll start with the legit reasons and hope the jackasses don’t read too deep in:

1. EGS was built around the idea of providing what people need/want rather than EVERYTHING. Some of that was truly asinine (no shopping cart for like 2 years?) and some was a conscious choice based on everyone saying they don’t want their video game store to be a social media network. Unfortunately… people apparently DO want their video game store to be social media.
2. Every store handles regional pricing and distribution differently and, allegedly, EGS had worse coverage in a few of the countries The Internet actually knows exists.
3. Tim Sweney is a complete and utter dipshit and always has been and it is REALLY hard to not hate everything he touches.
4. EGS rapidly entwined itself with Fortnite because Fortnite makes more than the GDP of some small nations. But we are hardcore gamers so we all hate Fortnite.
5. Sweeney/Epic actually accidentally argued for consumer rights against Apple which, in turn, led to the full force of Apple running smear campaigns against Epic to make sure that we all realized how much we love walled gardens
6. Sweeney/Epic ALSO kind of picked a fight with Steam by pointing out how little developers get from any given sale. Which… because we all love Valve means that Epic are assholes and developers all actively want to strive to get the negotiating power of a Call of Duty or Rockstar.
7. Speaking of. EGS isn’t Valve and any alternative is inherently evil because we all love Valve.

So what was a mediocre store with a lot of free games and a tendency to give developers a giant sack of money for one year of exclusivity became The Devil.

Having the gall to talk about social issues or the state of the industry as a whole rather than just being an “apolitical” hype machine.

It really sucks that Polygon is dead because they wrote some ridiculously fun and even thought provoking articles over the years. But, silver linings, it is an even bigger magnet for people to show their asses than ronnie radke.

Block list getting LOTS of exercise out of this.

Open ended boycotts don’t work. People MIGHT boycott until they see nothing changing and give up and companies are under no incentive to change anything because it won’t make a difference. It is just a storm to be weathered.

Whereas a boycott with an actionable end state gives the company something to change if they don’t want to try to outlast the outrage, as it were.

Its why the traditional protest call and response is “What do we want?” “X!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”. It immediately makes it clear what will make the angry people go away.

For the BDS boycotts? Microsoft is sort of “Break these major contracts in ways that will make every single potential business partner wary going forward”. The Disney boycott, from what I can gather, is basically “tell gal gadot et all to fuck off”. Which… agreed. But you can also just look at the ongoing lawsuits from the last time they fired a chud for why there will be no public statement and the best we can hope for is to silently stop hiring zionists.

Which is my problem. Most of the BDS boycotts are effectively “burn down your entire company and then we’ll give you money again”. Which… yeah. I still try to support them to some degree (most of what I have settled on is “I’ll grab what I want later so that I don’t contribute to the big numbers on launch”) but there is no end and it is just going to fade away as more and more people decide they want their shiny.

And, for what it is worth, I think at least some of the folk behind these boycotts understands that. The MS boycott discussion was particularly good about stuff like “If you can’t stop using Teams of Office, consider changing to this business plan that is cheaper and turns off copilot”. Which speaks to “We know you aren’t going to drastically change your life but you were probably going to do this so you might as well do it and claim it is related to human rights”

I have a lot of issues with the BDS boycotts having no actionable end states but… there are a lot of reasons to not want to give any business to microsoft at all at this point (borderline weekly layoffs at this point) and… their market share sure ain’t what it used to be.

Good riddance I say.

Go fuck yourself, chud. Celebrating people losing their jobs because of whatever self-hatred you have that you project on the world.

Yup.

I want to say we all found out he was a piece of shit in the lead up to Ori 2? Very much led to a lot of outlets doing the “The game is good but up to you if you want to support this kind of worker abuse”. And he just got worse and worse since.

Buying the dip works until it doesn’t.

But a “safe” thing to do? Just continue what you were continuing, if you are able to. The idea is to not say “I can buy some nVidia stock!” and to instead just continue making your contributions and getting your matching from your employer.

Long term… yeah. But if there is a future, that is how you don’t end up up shit creek without a paddle.

Obviously the ultra wealthy can really abuse this.

But if you are in a position where you can put money into a 401k? You will, “benefit” from this because the investment firms using your money are taking advantage of this. Whether you come out better than the massive losses that you have had lighting up your email (because this was the BEST time to turn on all the LLMs to let us know what is happening to our investments and why all these companies are down on a given day…) is questionable but… it is also questionable whether the ultra wealthy are actually benefiting either. Since you tend to not become an 0.1%er without a LOT of investments.

Now, whether there is any form of long term stability is a very different question. Which is kind of “great” for getting across the point that: Either the market will stabilize and your 401k/pension will have value or we are all fucked.

Ethics are very much a personal thing.

That said: it is conceptually no different than any business banning someone. If you were to, for example, masturbate in a Rain Forest Cafe, they would be well within their rights to never allow you back on their properties ever again.

It is obvious Nintendo finally figured out what Ubi et al did… 15 or so years ago and is making EVERYTHING online. That way they effectively brick a console by turning off updates and immediately locking it upon authenticating with the chat server or whatever.

Depends how it is done

Full console brick? You have an argument that will surely end well against the legal team that puts people into indentured servitude.

Disable of all online functionality? Perfectly valid and no different than banning someone from a store.

And the latter effectively provides the former if you can’t download any updates, connect to any online servers, or even download your game from a “game key card” or whatever the hell they are calling those.

They would get no response, would be removed for disrupting others, and their outlet banned and possibly investigated.

No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me

It just… can’t appeal to a lot of people without being perfectly catered to them?

Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway),

Dude… Dark Souls is a frigging Metroidvania. And every youtube essayist looking for some clicks will point out how incredibly tutorialized Dark Souls 1 is up to the Lordvessel. People whinge that Spirit Ashes made Elden Ring too easy all while not realizing that basically every hard boss in Dark 1 and 3 has an NPC summon… and the Dark 2 SOTS update added the ones that were missing.

I love the Souls games. It is fun to pretend they are super hardcore affairs for those of us who want to drive nails into our proverbial winkies (and some. mostly non-From, ones are) but they are ridiculously mainstream games with off the chart vibes.

Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing?

I forget what the budget of Titanfall 1 and 2 were but both are very clearly A/AA games in terms of scope and what the budget “should” be. If they were actually somehow the kind of industry goliath that a GTA is then… EA done fucked up.

To put it in movie terms: You are complaining that a Michael Bay transformers is not as tight and well done as Before Midnight. They are completely different scopes.

Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.

Then don’t pay for it? Again, you (and I) don’t fucking matter when a significant chunk of the planet are perfectly eager to play those giant tentpole games.

You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways

Oh, well. If you are a master of the economy maybe you can fix the games industry so that there aren’t massive layoffs every week?

Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price.

Again. If you actually CAN make the “jack of all trades master of none” (which is actually a complete mischaracterization of the GTAs but…) game… you make it. Because 11.21 million people who are “mostly happy” and buy it on launch (in 2013 numbers) is a hell of a lot more money than 2 million people who are “ridiculously happy” (in 2025 numbers) in the first few weeks. And, for funsies, RDR2’s week two sales were 17 million in 2018

They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks.

Let’s actually break that down.

Clair Obscur is a game that came out of the ubisoft content mines. We all love the idea that Guilaume Broche made it in his shed with scraps but he applied most of the game design lessons and industry connections from his time at Ubisoft (and 12 coworkers from Ubisoft) to found his studio and secure funding.

Ubisoft… is not in good shape. But, 5-10 years ago, they were very reliably in that AA/AAA space and the AssCreed games were used specifically to point out that platform exclusive games weren’t the be all end all anymore and that most people were playing the same games regardless of what console they bought.

CO also is a game that came out of the “infinite money” of COVID in 2020-2022-ish. Contrast that with the modern gaming landscape where money for devs is increasingly tight and studios are getting shuttered left and right. Xalavier Nelson Jr has talked about this at length in the context of Strange Scaffold which… is kind of what everyone says they want in a studio. They make great games with a ridiculous amount of heart on time and on budget with little to no DLC. But that still costs money.

Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?

You wouldn’t because you seem to think everything needs to be perfectly catered to you.

The general public does because they like 80-95% of a game and value having a great 20-30 hours with it.

AGAIN. This is not a model that most studios should follow. It was basically the killing fields back in the early-mid 2010s when studios and publishers were dropping like flies because they tried to make AA/AAA games that sold B/A numbers. Arguably, this is what has been leading to Sony and Microsoft killing SOME of their studios (less so one like Tango who get praised as what studios SHOULD be by the prick that fired them all a week or two before that interview).

Rockstar and especially GTA is not that. They are peak Transformers/MCU where they can, through one means or another, employ a significant percentage of the overall industry and still turn a ridiculous profit. And, as a result, keep those support studios open for other studios/films to use them (less so the MCU these days…).

Which gets back to: I 100% think there is an argument that AA games are a mistake. That puts studios in a very dangerous spot where they need to get amazing sales just to break even. Whereas a B/A game can be something like Clair Obscur or Armored Core 6 which is a very limited scope with the potential to branch out. But for the studios who can do AAA? They have every reason to because it makes ridiculous bank AND buoys the industry as a whole.

I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can.

And they do.

I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (…) At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about

So you want games made specifically for you and cheaper.

Don’t get me wrong. It is genuinely awesome when it feels like a studio spent years making a game specifically for you (see: most of us Armored Core fans with 6). That works until that audience doesn’t show up. This is what led to THQ and the like crashing and burning a decade or two ago where games were successful but “not successful enough”

MAYBE that is going to be GTA6. Signs are, it won’t be. Because, yes, GTA 6 might not be catered directly to you. But the vast majority of people are going to love the overall package. Maybe they skip a feature. For example, I love the Yakuza/LAD games. Unless there is a story beat (involving a character I care about), basically nothing can make me do the crane game for more than two or three minutes (so one purchase…). Similarly, I loved Lost Judgment and have a LOT of Thoughts and Feelings on it. It would be one of my all time favorite games if it weren’t for the fucking after school special minigames.

Doesn’t matter. It might not be a 100% amazing game but it was still a 90% amazing game which… is still really fun.

Because

all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.

Yes. And… Rockstar pulls that off. I don’t know why they would actively choose to sell fewer units just to make sure you never play a sequence you don’t enjoy.

Again, just to be clear: Very few studios can pull this off. We all make fun of RGG for how much they reuse everything but… that drastically lowers costs and lets them get out a solid 30-70 hour game once or twice a year. And studios trying to turn an A game into a AAA game is literally how THQ died.

But Rockstar is… well, a bunch of rockstars. They CAN do that. They do this through a lot of abuse of labor and manipulative marketing but… it works.

And, to be clear. I actively disliked what I played of RDR2. I found GTA 5 to be “fine”. But me thinking the games are worth getting on sale for 20-30 doesn’t matter when you have the population of a small country immediately ready to buy it at launch multiple times.

There is definitely an argument that AA games are a mistake.

But, since 4 or so, GTA kind of has been THE AAA (arguably AAAA) game and those releases literally buoy the industry.

Maybe you aren’t excited for it. Pretty much the entire rest of the (gaming) world is and so are their friends.

Going purely by “vibes”? I could be “okay” with a world where GTA 6 is 80-90, most major studio games are 60-70, small studios are 40-50, and indy games start closer to 30 than 15. Still plenty of room for waiting for a sale but also makes it a lot easier to be successful without selling millions of copies in the first month.

Addressed it below but:

Anyone who has been around the block a few times knows that those rewards are almost never paid out. Government/cops decide that a hint “wasn’t enough” or find a way to give it to the “police department” instead

And folk may or may not remember all the “I am not saying the UHC CEO was a good person but he was a father with a family and this was a tragic murder and is really bad” crowd. Large swathes of those fuckos would be smart enough to realize “face of the raid that caught America’s Rizziest Alleged Murderer” might not end well. Hell, they may even have grown up in a town/city where someone DID get a payout and subsequently had to move because local “gangs” (so the populace) would regularly vandalize their car or throw bricks through their windows.

… That is somehow even stupider

ALL they needed was to say “yo dog, that dude looks like the dude in the security camera footage”. Simple as that. Also, why even include a mcdonald’s employee at that point rather than just leaving an “anonymous tip” on a hotline?

Again, jet fuel, steel beams, what the fuck?

Ah, apologies. Not a paid actor but instead an undercover cop posing as a mcdonald’s employee. That totally explains why absolutely nobody else at that mcdonald’s would have said “Yeah, I have no idea who that person was but they don’t work here” and so forth.

Moving on:

Why didn’t the anonymous person want the reward himself?

Because anyone who has been around the block a few times knows that these rewards rarely ever pay out. Also, good odds the “good samaritan” would have been smart enough to realize they don’t want to be the face that brought America’s Favorite Alleged Murderer “to justice”.

Why did Luigi walk around with the murder weapon for 5 days?

He also, allegedly, had his manifesto on him. And he was more than rich enough to have booked a same day flight to a non extradition treaty country the afternoon of the shooting.

Those are plausible questions we may get answers to during the case, but it does seem a bit weird.

A lot of things are “weird”. Believe it or not but perfectly sane and rational people tend to not allegedly 3d print a firearm to allegedly stake out someone for days to allegedly plug them in the head for being evil sons of bitches.

But “True Crime” podcasts and TV have rotted people’s brains into thinking a single anomaly instantly is the smoking gun. When the reality is… people are weird and so is life. One of my favorite “deprogramming” tools is to just point out the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand that kicked off WW1. If that were a movie it would be a comedy that even Adam Sandler would say was “a bit much”. But that was life.

Because it is nonsense.

The crux of their argument is that it is too implausible that someone would decide Luigi was probably the shooter, be aware of the reward, and still ask a random employee to call it in. ANYONE who has worked a public facing job in food services or even a frigging grocery store has had plenty of “concerned citizens” tell them to be a cop.

But, because that is implausible, it must mean that this was some huge conspiracy theory where a paid actor faked a call because the government used some super illegal search method instead (as opposed to just palantir or whatever).

It is complete nonsense and is just a few notches below “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”.

The military is all about indoctrination which is the polite word for “brainwashing”. Our trans friends in the armed forces are just as unlikely to stop stomping on necks as anyone else.

Nah, this is just general hate toward the Ts (expect the Ls, Bs, Gs, Qs, and +s to follow).