So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?
It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.
You should at least want the option because it keeps them honest. If it’s digital only, there’s all kinds of shenanigans they can get up to. “Sorry your console is EOL now so we’re disabling it, but don’t worry, just buy our newest XBone720 and you can re-buy all your favorite classic games and play them on a shitty emulator!”
At least with physical option they know people would go back to buying physical media (which they make less money from) if they tried such a thing.
Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?
Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.
A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.
There’s an extremely long list of creative works made to be satire that idiots don’t understand. The Colbert Report, Starship Troopers, hell there are people that think Homelander is the good guy in The Boys. I think it’s a little too restrictive if someone can’t make a point that certain jokes are lame out of fear of how a few idiots might misinterpret it (many times deliberately). There are people right now arguing that the Barbie movie is actually “anti-woke”.
Also consider how many people actually did get the message. They heard how lame the jokes sounded and realized how stupid fat jokes are. From what I recall, the game really makes an effort to deconstruct these jokes. There is no audience within the game laughing at the jokes, and the evil AI explicitly states that it’s making the jokes solely to to negatively affect the protagonists psychological well being to prevent her from achieving anything. And the jokes are directed at the player, so someone that might have made these jokes themselves hears someone else directing these jokes at them and can hear how lame they are. The evil AI comes across as lame, petty, and desperate. Someone who made fat jokes before playing that game might have had the realization “is that how I sound?”
I feel like the people that didn’t get the context likely made fat jokes before playing the game, and would be making fat jokes even if they never played the game. So I don’t think there was any negative impact. Someone that committed to being an idiot isn’t going change in either direction from any kind of media.
These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework
They were fixed in the past. Trust-busting, Keynesian Economic Policy, taxing the wealthy.
It’s just we’ve been stuck in the Reagan’s supply side economics bullshit for decades now. The problems we’re seeing now are because of proven economic solutions being abandoned because the wealthy have confused the voting public to think that we shouldn’t go back to policies that worked for over six decades.
Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
Automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution. You see a robot doing a job a person used to do and get excited and think it’s going to be the end of the need for labour.
But look at an a excavator. People used to have to dig everything with shovels. But an excavator can do the job of hundreds of people with shovels. Excavators have been around a long time, but didn’t lead the elimination of all work everywhere.
Yes, “the majority of jobs we have today” will be made obsolete just like how having a big crew of strong people to dig a canal (or whatever) was made obsolete. But then there were new jobs to replace those ones.
They could certainly be replaced by the LLMs they’ve dumped billions into. A large chunk of middle management too.