Ok, so Zelensky has banned opposition parties, arrested political opponents. And furthermore he cancelled elections that were supposed to happen next month. Will you be condemning Ukrainian conscription then, since the government will neither be democratic or legally elected?
So the 15000 civilian deaths caused by Ukraine bombing its own provinces before Russia intervened, the constant efforts by Russia to resolve the issue diplomatically, the naked refusal of the West to even engage with Russia, the West openly backing a fascist coup in Ukraine, and then arming it with the explicit dictate of provoking Russia, the West pressuring Ukraine to not accept the generous settlement offered by Russia in May after the war started, all that doesn’t count?
It’s not like Russia has never done any of those things individually.
[citation needed]
50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.
The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.
The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.
And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).
For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).
Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.
This is the real disease:
because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.
Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.
But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.
Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.
You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Show me the numbers. Curious how population growth rate in both USSR and China rises unprecendently, after these two came to power.
That’s a pretty vague definition you came up for to dismiss people.
Oh yes, wanting to raise people out of poverty is totally what fascists want.
You don’t know what you are talking about. You are just repeating something someone in authority once told you to believe. Ironic.
Or you can use an ad-blocker. Also youtube is profitable just fine. If it wasn’t Google would have shut it down a long time ago.
Depends who you ask. If you ask a Marxist, they’ll tell you that in an electoral system where elections are largely determined by who has the most money in order to reach the most ears, is not really a democracy.
A democracy would be a system that gives you the right to actually and directly influence specific policy through voting (e.g. through referrenda), and direct control over representatives (e.g. ability to recall them if they are not doing their jobs).
In Norway and Germany (to use your examples) people might enjoy a lot of personal freedoms and a high standard of living, but both domestic and foreign policy is still functionally determined by corporations and the rich elite.
The economic system of capitalism makes it so governments realistically care more about the interests of business, rather than the interests of the citizens. And that’s an oligarchy. It’s just that some countries are better able to pacify their populace because they happen to have the resources to do so. But we still see that in Norway and Germany (and any other traditionally-regarded “good democracy”) the social welfare systems, that make them such appealing examples, are systematically diminished and destroyed. I do not think it’s the citizens who demand that.
All this, without getting into the fact that we spend 1/3 of our lives in a feudal-like or dictatorial system we call “job”, where we hardly have the power to influence how it operates.
As a Greek speaker who also knows Latin and Ancient Greek, both words mean the same thing and come from the same roots in their respective language (demos = publius = people/community/population). I don’t know why political theorists try so hard to separate them. The only real use of separating them is for easily differentiating the Athenian Democracy from the Roman Republic, for historical purposes, but nowadays both democracies and republics are functionally the same thing (and linguistically should be the same too). The only difference is sometimes the functioning leader’s name (president vs prime minister). Every other difference between them are for the sake of local cultural/historical traditions.
In the classical sense, Parliamentary/Representative Republics/Democracies ARE oligarchies. A true democracy would give voting power not just for electing representatives but also for determining specific policies and laws (i.e. Referendums), which very rarely, if at all in many cases, actually happens.
Sure, but then so is Hitler by that standard. They just used leftist iconography on the surface for propaganda purposes, and did not commit their crimes in the name of any sort of left-wing ideology. Pol Pot in particular was supported by the US military and intelligence mechanisms (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States_support_for_the_Khmer_Rouge), and is fair to assume that his movement was used as a psy-op to hurt the communist cause in Cambodia and Vietnam.
Yup, if other corporations follow Threads into the fediverse, history will repeat itself. They’ll do to the fediverse what they did to the rest of the internet.
Not to disagree, but I think that’s really unlikely, unless they do a corporate merge.
Honestly, this is the biggest part that’s bugging me about it the most. Meta is probably doing this to ride on the wave of the Reddit exodus, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that other corporations will follow suit if Threads succeeds. And when that happens it’ll be like the internet all over again. Corporations coming in and setting up ad-infested data-gathering fiefdoms that will squeeze everyone else out.
That’s a lot of assumptions to make an argument.