What about people that use Office 365? Especially if your company uses the OneDrive and Sharepoint integration. While I agree that Windows is becoming ridiculous, Excel just keeps getting better and better. I am at the point where I have actually moved some of my (minor) analytics back into Excel away from Jupyter Notebooks since it is easier to communicate with some stakeholders that way.

Bloomberg Terminal also doesn’t have a Linux (or Mac for that matter) install. Hard to do my job without that.

Make no mistake, I ran Linux for a long time as “daily driver”. Even bought a full Windows 10 license for use in a VM on QEMU. Then I realised all I was doing was booting up my machine and spending my entire day in the Windows VM.

So I guess what I am saying is that Microsoft can get away with murder because of Office 365 (which they now confusingly call Microsoft 365)

Ok. So if I understand your argument correctly you are saying that the financial success of Genshin et al would prompt other publishers to force the studios they own to implement these monetisation strategies.

And this leads to players like you and me leaving the hobby. (Not that I know what else I would do… but anyways) But who knows… maybe people growing up with this sort of thing is fine with it… which might not then crash the industry but just leaves us with shitty games.

Maybe we are in the minority. Maybe millions won’t leave it and it is just you and me taking up stamp collecting or something.

Other than CDPR… I wouldn’t be very upset if a crash in the industry causes some AAA studios to cease to be. The scenario you sketched with more indie studios rising sounds kinda nice actually.

Nature dislikes a vacuum. If the industry crashes because of overzealous monetisation practices I am sure studios with somewhat more competent executives (like say Larian) would jump on the chance to produce content players want.

Then again… it is not like the rise of reality tv lead to the sudden generation of lots of great tv shows from indie studios. So I guess you have a point.

So that argument I can support. However, while I do share your dismay with things as things stand, I am somewhat more optimistic. For instance, it is my belief that recent successes from BG3 and Eldenring for instance has shown companies that a significant market still exists for … let’s call it … traditional games where the model is simply you pay money for a complete game that is great.

Now this obviously works for single player games but even there we see the encroachment you refer to. For instance there was some controversy on Dragons Dogma 2 for instance. (Fortunately turns out most of those items can be acquired in game but the micro transactions presence still irritates me).

Personally I think a bigger threat to the industry is exemplified by Bethesda. Starfield was a pathetic game in my opinion. Lazy writing. Bad tech. Overpriced junk. And I believe that the advancement in AI is going to make it 10 times worse - bland AI written plots and NPCs… AI generated textures and models.

Maybe I shouldn’t say threat to the industry. More a threat to the part of the industry I care most about, which is single player RPGs.

So I guess my question would now be… why do you believe that the crappy monetisation practices of these mobile gaming pay to win companies would bring the industry as a whole down?

Would people not just move to the next game? And is this not something we already see with the success of say Eldenring/BG3?

My issue isn’t really with your argument, though I personally find pre-ordering to be as bad as this pay to win crap. (But I don’t feel passionately enough about that point to debate it - I concede that an activist buyer could leverage that)

However, I do have issue with you calling people who spend money on micro transactions evil. Or immoral. I find that sentiment to be ridiculous and trivialising actual evil behaviour.

I know about the story where some idiot executive suggested paying a dollar to reload or something stupid like that. If you called the companies evil, or the executives… you know what… I might support that allegation. But the players? The customers?

I think I get why you are saying this - you believe the players enable/allow the companies to do this, thereby supporting their evil ways. I just don’t agree that buying a product (especially an entertainment product) from such a company is necessarily (and to use your word: literally) evil.

Say I agree that these players are evil. Should I now stop being friends with people once I learn they play Genshin? Should I shun them? Tell my sister I can no longer visit them because she allows her kids to play Genshin and Fortnite?

What about people paying subscriptions to streaming services that produce crap content? Or people that followed reality tv to the extent that it allowed the Kardashians to exist?

So apologies for this long reply, I guess my only real point is that while I agree with you that the behaviour of these (mobile game) companies is deplorable (to me), if people willingly spend their money on it, that is none of my business. I can vote with my wallet by buying games from studios I like.

Just like I dislike gambling and casinos, I would never call people that frequent those establishments immoral or evil.

What about people that pre order games? Or people that buy each version of Madden or Fifa? Or people that buy games regardless of rootkits like Denuvo? Are you going to call them all evil for supporting companies with dubious practices? For daring to buy games they like? You don’t get to tell people what they should do with their money or time to be “moral”. In fact, I could just as well argue that to spend any money whatsoever on computer games is evil while there are people starving out there.