I can't really call anyone who supports companies buying their way into the market, and making shady exclusivity deals, left wing. That's the opposite, in fact, because they are saying companies are free to do whatever they want against the consumers' benefit.
I’m not saying they’re genuine portrayals of coherent left-wing thought.
'Exclusive' has lost its meaning at this point in the EGS situation. And not by accident. Way more wiggle room if you can literally control the language of your discussion.
I guess hypothetically, “co-exclusives” already exist like how we have games that are “console exclusive” to one of the three consoles, but openly on multiple PC launchers.
I'm sure they do on some level. Not the saviour of PC gaming aspects, but the better deal for devs, angry fans, crunch being worth it. those, yeah.
I mean, that's just my opinion, but Tim's communication doesn't read like carefully chosen PR statements. It reads like someone fully invested getting defensive, but inadvertently leaving in ambiguity because they don't know the best way to communicate their strategy - he is the tech and business lead after all, his areas of expertise aren't in marketing.
So Ubisoft games returned to the store after three weeks of being unavailable and....
they are being pulled again!
I'm watching it on Twitch. I'm praying for some multi-store launches for the games announced there.
I honestly believe that such behaviour is caused by the fact that the game industry is relatively young and grew up in a relatively awkward way.
Back before the 200x indie boom, the barrier to entry was very high, and in some cases close to insurmountable.
Gaming was a niche, and by and large gamers were "hardcore" gamers, somehow expressing their (our) appreciation by considering the famous names (Miyamoto, Garriot, etc.) as actual idols, basically rockstars that the outer world had never even hear of.
That (my) generation grew up dreaming of becoming game devs, only few got to, and some of them became entitled.
Suddenly they only knew what was going on behind the scene, and everybody else had to STFU.
These people now are completely convinced they know better, even if their (legitimate) point of view is often more narrow (or biased, or oriented to something else) than ours.
So on one hand they managed to get where most of us couldn't, and therefore they think we don't know shit and we need to just buy whatever crap they tell us.
On the other, they never had any manager handling them. There's a reason why most old-school devs are generally nice persons compared to new ones: it's their social media manager talking.
