There’s nothing else that makes sense

Do not attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

I’m not saying these aren’t malicious people, but the explination that makes the most sense is that they are, in fact, that stupid.

WINE works surprisingly well too. I’ve seen people talk about gaming on Linux using Lutris or launching it through Steam as a “Non-Stean game” but I just put my files in my WINE directory and have better success.

I got a dual boot going so I could try Linux and have a windows fallback. Mint went so smoothly for me I never used my windows boot.

There’s no way this should be a profitable course of action. If I was paying for no Ads and started getting Ads I would immediately cancel my subscription and go somewhere else.

Unfortunately too many people are good little consumers who just don’t care and it doesn’t even occur to them to stop paying and demand better.

It’s not just a matter of avoiding it, I have been signed up for prime on days I didn’t eve use Amazon. The system will sign you up on its own.

Also you have automatically been signed up and charged for Prime.

You wouldn’t steal a casino!

Diablo 3 had a rainbow in it somewhere, clearly woke garbage.

Tetris is Russian propaganda that teaches children doing good work is pointless as it will just be taken away and you’ll be forced to do it again until you do it half assed.

Super Mario Bros promotes the consumption of psychedelics.

See: every RPG ever.

Satisfactory promotes a good work ethic, no problem here.

You forgot about laws.

No I didn’t

You literally just break up grocery store companies and stop them from merging in the future.

Oh, so you mean LAWS?

“only the market can fix this”

Gestures broadly at the market

Multiple competitors just results in them all agreeing to raise prices when taxes are lowered.

Out of curiosity, how do you propose increasing the number of competitors? Or is this a situation of “gee, that would be nice. Oh well, I guess nothing can be done.”?

literally the only mechanism

You forgot about laws.

It doesn’t matter how much competition there is of they’re all going to do it anyway.

Obviously that steam guy was probably coming from a place of bad faith

The Steam forums actively encourage this kind of bad faith behavior:

1. when a post gets a new reply it’s moved to the top of the forums. So as long as people are engaging with a post, even if it’s just to make fun of a bigot, it keeps getting pushed back to the top.

2. Users can “award” posts for various things (helpfull, cool, funny, etc) and users have taken to giving ‘Clown’ awards as a way of making fun of posts. Whenever one of your posts gets an award, you are given Steampoints you can use in the Steam cosmetics store.

This results in every game having bad faith posts “complaining” about wokeness so that people will make fun of them with Clown awards as a way to farm Steampoints. The developer bringing attention to it just helps them get more.

Companies will charge what the market will bear. If Netflix increases prices and lowers quality and people keep paying the higher price for lower quality, then Netflix will keep doing it. It’s up to consumers to not pay for enshittification in order to stop it.

So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets

And for quite a lot of human history the best system we had come up with was Feudalism, until we started doing something better.

Just because Capitalism is the best we’ve come up with so far doesn’t mean we should just accept it, or that 1000 years from now people won’t look at the Capitalism with the same disdain we look at Feudalism.