JK Rowling has openly said that she also sees piracy as an endorsement of her fascist views. She looks at the download numbers and thinks to herself "trans women have finally lost"

Even if she doesn't get a direct payment per copy sold, which I'm not sure I believe considering you know her negotiating power, there are still benefits for her. Increasing the brand increases future payments. Increases her bargaining power later on. And I'm sure allows her more creative control which means that any trans inclusion would probably be nullified in future projects.

Maybe it's a good game, but at a certain point you got to nut up or shut up. Are you going to take a stand and boycott something or not? Yeah you miss out on things with your boycott, that's the point. If you're not willing to sacrifice at all, and we're talking a very minimal sacrifice here aren't we, then what are you even doing?

Though why we are even talking about paying for it I don't quite understand. There's always other ways.

It's an insanely boring game with no depth. To each their own, but calling it a "really good game" is as much of a stretch as calling it "shit". To me it felt like a Hogwarts walking simulator with a bunch of basic unrelated minigames stuck onto it, marketed as an open world action rpg. The combat was insulting.

really good game

Yeah no

I have to disagree, it wasn't a particularly good game. Everything felt off. I was days into the game and it felt like I was still doing tutorial missions. Basic mechanics weren't unlocked until 3 quarters through the game. And I can't imagine it has much replayability at all beyond trying to hunt down every trinket. 

It never granted you the feeling of being a wizard or whatever made Harry Potter special, it made Wizards feel ridiculous. 90% of the game is spamming a generic unnamed "attack" spell 

I don't agree. It's not a good game. The only reason people may think it's good is because it's Harry Potter stuff. It's yet another boring open world game about wasting your time.

It was alright at the beginning in Hogwarts, but the open world segments, which are most of the game, suck. I think the biggest most glaring thing that shows they're just copying other formulas to waste your time is the lockpicking. They have a spell to open locks, but for some reason it has a lockpicking mini game you have to complete? Not only that, but the person who teaches the spell is the groundskeeper?

There's bones of an interesting game there, but they decided to make it yet another bland open world game that's mostly empty. The entire point of 90% of the game is to just extend how long you're playing it, which is bad design. They should create content you want to play, not boring crap they need to try to trick you into playing by making the game worse until you do it.

It's probably a fine game for console players who only ever play boring AAA slop like Ubisoft games. They've accepted this garbage as normal. For me though, I resented my time with it. I'm a fairly big Harry Potter fan (as much as I hate to admit) but I hated my time wasted on the game.

Isn't the game about putting down a Jewish slave rebellion?

Plus Bully did it so much better with social interactions with staff and students, having a schedule and generally feeling like a school. HL came nowhere even close to that to the point where I wondered if the devs even tried to make it like Bully and we all just assumed they did because what other game makes school life the focus and does it even half as well? I don't even think there is an indie game that tries it.

if you’re gonna play it, just remember that your teacher dies at the end and can’t be saved, and that rockwood is the one that cursed anne

She absolutely is profiting from it.

When a game is "free" the publisher isn't just donating it for funzies. Either Epic pays them (Epic is spending money to get people to its platform) or the publisher is using the game to advertise other games, which has value to them.

Steam also provides a lot more than just a store front for devs at that price, including customer support, multiplayer servers, anticheat, and forums and other social features.

Epic also launched their store without a shopping cart (you had to buy everything as individual transactions) and put new, unreleased games up for sale at up to 50% off without permission from the devs during their first sales event, amongst other things. Like buying multiplatform games to ensure that they only launched on the Epic store. Nobody liked it when Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard, or Rockstar tried that exclusivity crap with their own launchers/storefronts, and they don't like that Epic does it either.

Dude is a twat and his opinions unfortunately drive Epic's policies. People hated Steam when it first launched as well, but Valve as a company has consistently worked to put customer value and rights as a selling point of their products, and people appreciate them for that. Beyond Steam as a sales platform, they've been a driving force in other parts of the industry such as VR and Linux gaming.