Normally that only works if you have DRM that locks the games to your platform, so that people don’t get the hardware at a discount then use it to run someone else’s software.

But, in Valve’s case, it really has no competitors in the PC gaming space. That might not last forever, but it almost certainly will last as long as this PC / console is around.

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.

All I did was point out your weird parasocial relationship with a CEO of a game store company. It’s very strange how you reacted to that. You must realize just how weird it is, how empty your life is. Get help dude.

Says the guy who’s passionate and on a first name basis with the CEO of a game store chain.

You’re on a first name basis, even a parasocial relationship with the CEO of Gamestop despite never having met him. Who here is intellectually deficient?

It’s a bad sign that you know the CEO’s name.

I guess whatever you’ve been playing since November, when 25 would normally have come out.

I don’t think anybody would be surprised at that.

Launching 25 this late would have been a disaster anyhow. 25 would have cannibalized sales from 26, but it might not have sold well to begin with because people want to buy FM for the current season, not for the season that just ended.

What would be really good is if they got their act together enough to launch FM 26 early, like pre-launch before the transfer window closes, and launch a patch with the new squads as soon as the transfer window is done. It has always been a bit annoying that they launch in November, when the season has been underway for months.

Like all Church schisms it’s “we’re the only ones who are right about how our god is supposed to be worshiped”, so they don’t feel bad about taking the names of Anglicans or Catholics because they think that those other groups are doing religion wrong, so who cares if it’s confusing.

Anglican really just means a version of the Catholic church splintered off by Anglo-Saxons

The proto-Anglicans stopped being Catholics when King Henry the 8th couldn’t get the pope to annul his marriage, so he split the English church from the Catholic church. So, for 500 years, the Anglicans haven’t been Catholics. And it has nothing to do with “Anglo-Saxons”. Anglo-Saxons are a cultural group from the middle ages. The Church of England and Anglicanism comes from centuries later and applies to the country of England under the king Henry the 8th. The Church of England and/or Anglicanism doesn’t date from the middle ages, it was effectively a political construction due to the king wanting a divorce and not to have to answer to the pope. But, the reasons behind the split don’t really matter as much as the fact that the people following churches related to that split haven’t recognized the authority of the pope for centuries, so they’re not Catholics.

In this case, the name is really misleading because the Anglicans don’t consider them to be Anglican, the Catholics definitely don’t consider them to be Catholics, and you can’t really merge the Anglican and Catholic faiths because they’re so different.

Not according to the Catholic church. They’re not Anglicans according to the Anglican church either.

Australia’s Anglican church is the Anglican Church of Australia, which has 3.1 million members. The Anglican Catholic church is a very confused and tiny church with only 35k members.

The Anglican Catholics split from the American Episcopal church, which itself split from the Anglicans when the US split from England. After all, having the king as the head of your church doesn’t make much sense if you just had a revolution to declare independence from that king.

So, it’s pretty weird, the Anglican Catholics want to be connected to the Anglican church, after their church split from the Anglicans in the American Revolution, and to the Catholics who split from the Protestants in the 1500s. It’s almost as confused as something like Jews for Jesus.

Yeah, the Nazi who’s an Anglican Catholic priest runs a gamer website. Sure, it sounds like Mad Libs, but it’s just 2025.

It’s not the Anglican church.

He’s not Catholic.

I haven’t used Critical Roles new systems but I assume they could get a big switch over if they push it hard

It’s launching sometime in 2025, so we’ll see how hard they push it when it’s ready. So far, they’ve only hinted at it. I don’t know if they’d want to do this, but they could also try to convince other smaller (but still big) streamers to use it too. There are some streamers they’re pretty close with (the Dropout guys for example) and others who they’re on friendly terms with (like Penny Arcade’s guys).

If WotC / Hasbro wanted to mount a charm offensive to get people to keep using D&D, I don’t know how influential they are. Other than Chris Perkins, I can’t think of any well known D&D employees at all.

I think what might be different this time is influencers. If Critical Role abandoned D&D completely, I think they’d probably stay popular and whatever system they switched to would get a lot of attention. I also think that they’d be likely to use a system that isn’t math heavy, and allows for a lot of role playing and acting.

The problem would probably be splintering. But, if a tiny company like Paizo made such a big impact on the D&D ecosystem with virtually no ad money back in the 3.5 days, just imagine what could happen today when so many D&D influencers exist. If they worked together on something, it could be a major change to the D&D ecosystem.

I just wonder if maybe another big stumble from Hasbro will cause the rise of a new system.

Paizo is relatively tiny compared to D&D and especially compared to Hasbro, but Pathfinder gained a pretty sizeable following mostly from word of mouth, and this is basically before social media. One of the biggest “promoters” of D&D now is Critical Role, and before the stream started their home game was a Pathfinder game. But, CR is now also streaming their own game system called Daggerheart in addition to their main D&D campaign. I have a sense that many other D&D streamers have a “plan B” game ready in case Hasbro steps over the line again.

An interesting twist to all this is that you can’t copyright rules or stat blocks. That severely limits the kinds of “moats” that Hasbro can put up to prevent competition.

Anyhow, I think you’re overall right. I know Hasbro is going to push an exclusive VTT, and it’s just a matter of time before they try to push a LLM DM.

I remember the days when BioWare wasn’t EA’s BioWare. Those were better days.