StingingVelvet: To be fair I don't think it's 100% their fault. Everything withers on the vine eventually, people look for new things or get mad at the old things for being too different or disappointing. Even if the new Star Wars movies and show were amazing I doubt I'd be anywhere near as excited for them as I would have been 20 years ago. I think the current Trek show, Strange New Worlds, is really, really good but I still just am not as excited for it as I would have been when Enterprise ended. It is what it is.

neumi5694: Yep, Star Wars was Merchandise milking from the beginning, one might even claim that Lucas invented it. The character toys became smaller, so they could also sell ships to fit them in. He made making money out of a franchise an artform.
The clone wars series was underway under GL, it was not Disneys invention, also hundreds of books, a significant number of games and comics and audio CDs existed before Disney, not to mention a few spin off movies and older TV shows.

Can I blame Disney for wanting to make money with the 4 billion dollar licence they just bought? Definitly not. I only blame them for their decisions "how" to do it. They tried to replace the known rather than build on it which was a total failure.
Now that they took a step back and got shows like Andor on the way or games like Jedi Fallen Order, they slowly get the fans back, but we are still cautious.

ps: I'm currently watching the HD remake of Star Trek TNG (really, really, really well done), almost finished with season 5. Now I know all about humanity that one ever needs to know :)

Tokyo_Bunny_8990: Based on interviews with the directors themselves, Disney clearly went into Star Wars without a plan for an overarching story, hence why its a disjointed mess with no character development.

Tokyo_Bunny_8990: I dont think Star Wars has recovered, not really.

StingingVelvet: Not picking on you specifically but this is an example of the small stuff IMO. The "microtransactions" in that game were always completely ignorable. GOG didn't change the game at all, they just took away the option. I don't really see that the same as, say, Diablo 3 forcing always online for its dumb cosmetic shop.

SargonAelther: I will take your rant and turn it into my own rant. So Rockstar have delisted legendary games for defective cash grab. So what? It makes no difference! Digital version were already censored, especially Vice City, so nothing lost there. We can still go and buy used physical copies with all of the music and all of the original language. Buying used physical games is perfectly legal and lots of stores sell them. This is why physical media with disc-based DRM was far better than any form of digital distribution, even DRM-Free, like GOG or Zoom.

Delistings were publishers' problem, not consumers'. It didn't matter what happened to the store or the publisher. We used to own our games and we could lend them to friends, resell them, whatever. All legally. It wasn't until some ex-Microsoft schmuck decided to destroy PC game ownership forever with his steaming pile of anti-consumer garbage. Everyone knew it was anti-consumer, but people were not given a choice. Everything went digital and even the physical releases swapped disc-based DRM for stupid online-authentication, turning their own dics into paperweights. Overtime everyone grew to accept their loss of rights and even turned the man who took away their rights into some kind of a saint.

Old GTA Games, No One Lives Forever, Alice 1, etc, we can still buy those games with relative ease thanks to the amount of rights that physical media granted users. All of these rights were stripped from us with digital distribution. As a result I cannot legally acquire delisted Telltale games, because they were released in a post-steamy-dystopia world. Post-Steam games are the real tragedy, not old GTAs.

Consoles have held onto physical media for far longer, but even they are no longer safe. Once right to repair is sorted, hopefully people can turn their attention to digital ownership and game preservation. The way I see it, if a company is unwilling or unable to sell a game for whatever reason, they should be forced by law to turn it into shareware. Digital distribution was supposed to make things easier and yet it doomed thousands of games to death. These games can no longer be legally acquired thanks to digital distribution and outdated copyright laws. No game should be allowed to die.SargonAelther: Diablo 3 doesn't have any cosmetic shop. Diablo 4 does. The always-online requirement is simply DRM for the sake of DRM, as it is more effective than even Denuvo. Console versions of Diablo 3 are all playable offline. Only Diablo 4 is always-online on all platforms.

clarry: I can't tell whether it's your love for games dying or your hatred of big publishers just boiling over? Yeah, screw the big ones. They've always been all about the money.

MysterD: About Diablo 3 and 4 PC being always online - I think it's definitely there for DRM, but it's also there for more reasons too.

StingingVelvet: I'm sure there some legitimate reasons, but probably ones that could have been worked around. However I think the root of it is that any game that can half justify being always online is going to do it for piracy reasons. If you can sell it to people then you're gonna do it, and a strong multiplayer focus makes it an easy sell.

StingingVelvet: I don't know why any company would care, honestly. It has been shown to have no real detrimental effect on their sales. Ignoring questions about it seems to have no real effect either. Same goes for other things like partnering with AMD or (shocker) not releasing on GOG. Even the dreaded "not on Steam" doesn't seem to really effect things like Diablo 4's success. I know Overwatch is heading to Steam but that seems to be more about that game being in the gutter and their desperation for hype.

Anyway... gamers, in my experience, talk a lot of anger on forums and then never back it up at the register. If I ran a company like Activision I'd barely pay social media any mind.

MysterD: They (companies) only care when it's going to have an impact on their bottom line and going to hurt their wallets.

Look at how fast Turtle Rock back-tracked on Back 4 Blood having no progression for solo mode, after so much backlash for going that path. They changed their tune quick...after tons of backlash, it not selling that hot, and everybody instead basically just played it 1st month on Game Pass then abandoned it.