MantidSys

If you assume they’re from countries with weaker economies. Meanwhile, I live in the US, and I survive under the poverty line. Nothing about the US is ‘region-locked’, I’m just treated like shit for being disabled. It’s a lack of income first and foremost.

Maybe. But multiplayer games exist. And people have a very high standard for what population a game must have for it to be worth playing. People will consolidate into singular pre-made titles, compromising on their desires like they do now, in order to have many other humans to play with.

Maybe AI can be convincing NPCs eventually, but people will want to play games with their friends. They’ll find out eventually if another character is an NPC or human, and they will care.

Even singleplayer games will be subject to this, to a degree. People enjoy playing what their friends play - they like having the same experiences, they like having something in common to discuss, they like the shared experience that brings a sense of community to the fans of a single title or series.

Sure, people could make any game they desire, but it will be isolating. You’re underselling the social desires and needs we all have. Maybe we’ll end up with something similar to Garry’s Mod and Roblox: connected gaming hubs where people can load up any number of experiences - but still being able to include their friends somehow. I think that is much more likely than the concept of a person sitting in the corner of a room with their VR headset, wilting away in a world of their own creation, having lost all connections that would otherwise surround them. Humans naturally fight against that. We’ll experience things we’re not familiar with, as long as we’re experiencing them with other people.

Seconding these choices. Of note in the second link, TTV LOL PRO is pretty great. It has worked when every other ad-blocking attempt is (temporarily) quashed. It requires manual updating, but considering you’ll know when to update because ads are getting through, it’s not a hassle.

https://github.com/younesaassila/ttv-lol-pro

Edit: Nevermind, there’s an extension hosted through mozilla now, so it auto-updates. Get that instead.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ttv-lol-pro/

That was a >100gb download that took the moderators time to download and test. And the admins weren’t involved. All the claims of admins backing the torrent or deleting comments has had zero proof, as it was all hysteria drummed up by the psychotic cracker called Empress, who has had a long standing imaginary feud with 1337x.

1337x can have malware in anything, as anyone can upload. The volunteer moderators downloaded and tested it as soon as they could. I’m sorry some people downloaded it faster, but there’s no conspiracy here.

Is it just me, or does the language in this article feel very AI-generated? And this website is only 10 days old, has only one writer, over 10 articles posted every day by that one person, and is being posted here by an account with the same name as the site. This feels strange.

To me, this sounds like legal ass-covering to be used as a defense should Microsoft ever be investigated for attempting a sort of gaming monopoly. “No, we’re not buying out all the big developers so that we control the AAA playing field, we just don’t like exclusivity!”
I mean, if they don’t like exclusives, why go on to complain about how much they’re losing by putting their games on the competing console? Sure sounds like they’d rather not pay those fees at all, maybe… by making their new games exclusives? Hmmm…

Barriers to entry, PC vs Consoles:

• A console will offer higher performance at similar price points
• Building a PC evens out the cost (or pushes it in the consumer’s favor), but requires both knowledge and time to plan and execute a build
• Improper hardware purchasing decisions (which is likely given unfamiliarity with PC setups) can render certain games impossible to play without additional investment
• Maintaining a gaming PC involves managing OS updates, driver updates, chipset and hardware compatibility troubleshooting, navigating increased security risks (uninformed users accessing online services through their web browsers; scams, phishing, viruses)
• Non-standardized hardware configurations means manually tweaking settings of every game, which means again an investment of time and knowledge
• Lack of cross-platform support leading to separation from friends
• Lack of standardized support: going on sparse tech help forums versus contacting Microsoft or Sony’s customer service

I could go on. The point is, there’s a LOT that makes consoles a much more feasible option for someone who does not own a gaming-capable PC and lacks knowledge about PCs. These people are the majority of people, because people who invest time and effort into learning a topic are naturally the minority. Of course PC is the superior choice - IF and only IF you already are ingrained into the PC hobby, or are willing to invest significant time and effort into learning it. To someone who isn’t into tech spheres and just wants to play games, it’s console or nothing.

Now if you want to argue that gaming as a whole would be less toxic and more consumer-friendly without the patronage of console gamers, feel free, but don’t insist that it’s likely (or even possible) that console gamers would simply convert to being PC gamers if consoles went away. They would switch to other hobbies that require similar [minor] levels of investment. They only have so much time and effort to spare, after all.