Still need market demand. People want these products.

You can't just chase a trend and throw out a game and expect it to print money. Ask Sony how that went for their run at a hero shooter.

Deep dish crust has been surprisingly easy to replicate at home, but for the life of me I can't get the sauce and especially the sausage anywhere near where I want it. I swear Lou Malnati's does some outright witchcraft with their sausage. It's so good.

Plus, it's amazing how hard it is to find whole milk mozzarella in some places.

A lot of those games are still around, just not in legal distribution channels.

The more at-risk stuff is newer games going forward, such as live-service games or games locked down with DRM that requires authentication to play.

Here's a second person, then. It shouldn't be too surprising; anyone that works in games media will tell you that new releases are what drive peak engagement.

RSS can be similar to their Twitter feed, with a curated set of highlighted games once a certain amount of reviews are in. I already get a dozen feeds that have reviews in them anyway, and I often read them even if I'm not already interested in the game. Why not an aggregate? I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.

I doubt anyone knows how much of the playerbase it makes up, but the WoW subscription effectively went up to $20 a month for anyone that's using in-game gold to fund it.

There are certainly people that specifically like that kind of storytelling that puts the onus on the audience to do some digging. It's why Malazan Book of the Fallen is popular, for example.

It didn't do as much for me in Elden Ring, but I enjoyed it in Dark Souls 3 and it's why Demon's Souls has one of my favorite moments in gaming. Wouldn't have worked with more explicit narrative.

I don't think there's ever been more game demos than there are right now, even going back to the PC shareware era. I can't even keep up with all of them on Next Fest these days, much less play any significant number of them.

Also, if your desired game is on GOG, they have a friendly return policy. That hasn't been a thing since the compact disc era started, so it's nice to have again.

We still have options.

This succinctly covers my view on it as well. I think it'll be more of a problem a few years down the road as statist admin culture begins to influence the mods of more instances, but for now I treat it on an instance-by-instance, user-by-user basis. I wouldn't be surprised if majority of community leaders and users in general went to lemmy.ml simply because it was one of the larger instances last year and didn't think much more of it than that.

If I have a choice, though, I'll still try to grow a community on one of the smaller instances simply because it's still one of the largest ones, and that's better for the health of the network.

All I can think about is how this bot is immediately a non-starter because this is the kind of attitude I can expect from the author when asking for support or collaboration. It's not just in this post, either.

Even if the parent comment here was hostile--it's borderline, at worst--I can't possibly understand the mentality of being argumentative in a post trying to encourage the use of a service.

I forgot I had this on my list. I'm neck-deep in Metaphor ReFantazio right now, but I've got to try this soon (along with at least half a dozen Next Fest demos). Emperor Rise of the Middle Kingdom is one of my favorite games.

I also can't see complaining about free content. This isn't an Ark situation.

A welcome change, though I imagine the more savvy grifters have seen the writing on the wall for a while now with virtual credit cards becoming more popular. I put a freeze date on every single purchase I make that has a recurring subscription.