Let’s talk more about everything that is wrong with gaming. It’s been a shit week, and it just seems to be getting worse. Plus, the weather is so gross. It’s been in the eighties to ‘feels like’ in the hundreds–which suuuuuuucks. It’s definitely summer, which means sticky slimy. And insects coming out to play. Bah. Let me get back to winter, please. I’m doubly mad that we skipped spring because I hate summer so much.
My brother taught me a really cool trick to help with CPU. I usually have about fifty tabs open–up to a hundred or more. (He has over a hundred). You can group together tabs and then ‘shrink’ the group so all of the tabs are hidden. All you see are the the tab group names. It really celars up space, and then you can click on the group tag to let the tabs come out to play.
I was so excited when my brother taught me this, which made him laugh. It was the coolest thing, and it makes my life so much easier. It brought down my CPU usage by around 30%! I joked with my brother that I would be doing this for the next following hour or two. Onrce you put a bunch of tabs in a group, you can name it and give it a color. It’s seriously the coolest thing I’ve learned in quite some time.
Back to games. We, the consumers, are part of the problem . We are not the cause of the problem, and there isn’t much we can do to stem the problem–but we are definitely part of the problem. Meaning, we’re going to buy the games no matter how expensive they get. There was talk about how expensive Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games) would have to get before people wouldn’t buy it. $80 for the base game hasn’t stopped it from selling pre-orders like crazy. The fifth game sold roughly 230 million copies world wide. It came out in September of 2013, so that’s nearly 13 years ago.
This is mind-boggling, but, honestly, it’s not as many copies as I thought it would be. A content creator I watch sometimes said to guess how many copies the game had sold. I thought it would be over a billion, quite frankly. But a quarter-billion is still an astounding number.
I’m sure this game will match if not exceed the number. Or maybe do slightly less, but it’sll be around the same number. People are not NOT going to buy the game. I think the only glitch is that there is no physical copy being produced (which, just, sigh). I said in my post yesterday why I personally don’t care about physical copies, but I do think it’s a shame that there won’t be any. Why? Because a lot of people may not be able to afford the game at full price, and without any second-hand copies, they will have to do without.
I know that sounds like a silly problem in light of the world being on fire, but it just further exacerbates the class issues we have. If I wanted to, I could buy the game with little problem. I would then have to buy a system on which to play it–which I most emphatically do not want to do. I mean, I have no desire to play the game. At all.
But I could if I wanted. Which just isn’t right. There are people out there who’ll want desperately to play the game, but can’t. I feel so bad for them.
I’m not saying that everyone should be able to buy whatever they want without thought, but it doesn’t really seem fair that I could buy the very hot thing that I don’t want without thinking twice about it when other people who want it so much can’t buy it.
And the fact that there won’t be a physical disc only exacerbates the problem. Itn’s the meanness of it all that really gets to me. Rockstar Games is going to make so much money with this game. It’ll be like they are printing money with how many copies they’ll sell. Do they really need to make it so there are no second-hand copies to be sold, too?
Well, yes, because their overlords, Take-Two Interactive, which is one of the if not the greediest publisher in the business has decreed it so. They (TTI) are really fucking disgusting. I don’t want to talk about them because it’ll just depress me even more.
I’m a cynical jerk, I know, but when people scream about prices, I just sigh. Not because I disagree, but because it’s not going to stop anyone from buying the things they want. I’m including myself in that. I stopped using Amazon for several months, but then I slowly started using them again. Now, I’m using them fairly regularly. Can I get what I need elsewhere? Yes. Will it be as easy as it is with Amazon? Nope.
That’s the problem. It’s so easy to use Amazon. Or to buy that game that I know I shouldn’t. Or to buy sparkling water because I really like the pineapple coconut flavor. The fact that you can get almost anytihng you want online makes it even worse. I can get whatever I want at the snap of my fingers without ever leaving my house. This is great because of convenience, but it’s bad because of convenience.
Meaning, I make terrible impulse buys. These days, at least they’re not superfluous junk–but I certainly don’t need to buy some of the things I do when I do. In addition, since my memory is now terrible, I forget if/when I buy things I actually do need–so then I have three or four extras. At least I can usse those later.
Back to the state of gaming. It’s terrible. Everything sucks. Will it get better? I don’t know. It’s mirroring the shit that is the world right now. As a queer person, I’m not feeling very safe in this country of mine. It had been getting better, slowl,y over the years, but now, the progress is rapidly shrinking.
I’m angry that I had more civil rights when I was twenty than my niblings do now.
Sigh.
More tomorrow.