Yeah, that's why I specifically mentioned dividends. A lot of executives are also paid bonuses on their salaries based on stock performance, so they can "double dip" in these cases too. This is on top of lobbying for deregulation.

Must be great to not have to worry about money and be able to simply fire other people if it ever becomes a concern; it just further goes to show that these people don't actually add value to even their own companies.

Ah, I see. That's definitely not my experience; snacks take like 10+ minutes and are usually the reason if I'm late to the show.

Billionaires mean that workers are exploited and underpaid somewhere in the chain. Support for billionaires means support for exploitation and resource extraction from actual workers (and the government initiatives and representatives they pay for).

Their money doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from us. It comes from income taxes spent on subsidies, it comes from stock dividends paid for by mass layoffs, it comes from not having to pay a commensurate fine when hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollutants leak into the water we drink and fish in.

"Absolutely supporting billionaires" is a decidedly uninformed position.

Welcome to Debian! Listen to @treadful@lemmy.zip, that's the easy advice.

Has arriving at the specified showtime not worked out for you? Usually that's enough time for me to get there, use the washroom, get snacks, and sit down before the movie actually starts. But I don't go to the theatre often or usually see movies when they first come out.

Personally I already do that by only going to the theatre when I'm really excited for a movie, which only happens maybe once a year, or am invited out by my movie-goer friend (maybe twice or thrice a year).

Last thing I saw in theatres was Late Night with the Devil, and before that was Tenet. It's not hard to wait for a home release.

If you check this list and this list, many games on Steam will actually launch without Steam running. ~~I don't think I can say the same for a lot of other platforms, excluding GOG and itch, of course.~~

I don't disagree with you about why it exists and that it's bad, but the fact remains that it does exist and Remedy and Epic, as companies, need to face that when making these decisions and factor that into sales projections accordingly. They should have known what they were getting into, and forcing people into using Epic isn't really the answer to the lock-in problem anyway.

Edit: Turns out a bunch of other platforms have DRM-free games too, TIL.

I wonder how many Americans are going to go to Thanksgiving dinner with all of their family and lie about who they voted for because they don't want to talk about how they don't see anyone but cisgender men as real human beings.

Respectfully, using Epic means using yet another platform. I have games spread across Steam, GOG, itch, Amazon, Ubisoft, and probably at least one more. If I buy a game on Epic, chances are I'll forget about it, so I don't bother.

This isn't to mention that the one game I do have on Epic, GTA V, has 3 different launchers when used through Epic (when it wants to actually open). It doesn't do anything Steam doesn't and doesn't do many of the things Steam does. I don't even really love Steam either, because it crashes constantly on Debian for me, but I already have 500+ games there and it's got ~20 years on Epic. I'm also a Linux user, so Proton is essentially one of the only ways I can reliably play most of my library.

Platform lock-in should be a consideration for companies, even though it sucks, because it's an objective reflection of the reality of the games industry. Remedy knew that they would have fewer players going Epic-exclusive but seemed to underestimate to what degree that might hurt sales; this past couple of years have been sort of bad for the average person, so maybe they used previous sales data that didn't really account for lower levels of consumer spending.

The game wouldn't have been a massive success even with 30% more money than what they ended up earning. They didn't want to pay the fee so they didn't, that's their choice and they were free to make it; the result isn't Valve's fault, they weren't involved at all. When it's on GOG or Steam, maybe I'll buy it on sale, but at this point there's no reason to lock myself into another janky platform. I did this with Control: the GOG version of Control is great and I don't have to use Epic.

My parents (who are nearly 70-year-old computer users, by the way, and threw away their 2010 Apple laptop in 2015 because it essentially stopped functioning) absolutely don't have the technical knowledge to do something like this. I think you may be vastly overestimating the average user.

Technically, you have a 2nd amendment to form organized community militias (ostensibly for defense if your town is invaded or something), but y'all don't seem to want to remember that part.

You just know that if the UN sends them anyway, they'll be killed by IDF ~~murderers~~ soldiers.