Disruption always works this way.

VHS let people watch a movie at home, whenever they wanted, but they had to buy that specific movie and put up with their dinky 20" TV. If you wanted serious sound or scale, you either paid five whole bucks at the local theater, or left your whole wallet at Circuit City. And even the best home experiences were standard-def. Film was not threatened by mere video.

DVDs made buying movies a lot cheaper, largely because they cost a penny to make, so studios could print a million copies just in case and shrug off any losses. If you wanted to see this year’s releases, this year, you went to the big theater at the mall. It still beat your enormous 32" plasma in glorious 720p. Theaters got to be fancy and focus on the popular hits.

Streaming was like-- you want me to buy a subscription to watch an old movie? If I’m gonna use the internet, Kazaa is right there. Okay fine, adapting VGA to component video sucks, and this 40" set finally has more pixels than my monitor. Oh wow, that cartoon’s on here? I haven’t seen this in a decade. And movies wait like three months. I can watch The Office again until that’s available. Driving outside town to pay thirty bucks a head at the megagigadodecaplex is only worthwhile for hot new things, like superhero movies. Theaters better step up their game to beat my couch and a stiff drink.

There was a moment.

There was a moment, where they might’ve turned this around. As Netflix was being cannibalized by assholes splintering off their little fiefdoms, the major competing theater companies could have seen the pattern. Disruption always works this way. Your low end slips away, letting you focus on better quality with higher margins. Then your midrange slips away, and you’re a luxury! Then your whole industry dies. What might’ve saved it was pushing back toward small local theaters. You only have to beat 70" screens and decent stereo. People still don’t bother with surround sound, and even a modest projection screen beats the most obscenely large television.

The global respiratory plague put a hard cutoff on how late that might’ve worked. It was probably screwed, long beforehand. Theaters are over. Move on.

If you want to get weirder, Tengen released the first version of Tetris on NES. It looks better. It plays worse.

Copyright’s explicit purpose is to give the public new works. You can’t “unpublish.” Once it’s out there, it’s ours, and you are entitled to money… or not.

NASCAR has chosen not.

Take everything freely.

Inverting the PVP to be intra-team sounds brilliant. You’re there to be the best on your side, at any cost… and then there’s five other schmucks present. There’d still be a contest between teams, but it wouldn’t really matter. That’s the background noise for trying to steal kills from the other guy in your lane. One player can even be “the albatross,” the worst loser on your side, motivated above-all-else to foist that label onto another player.

The simpler fix is to make rounds so fast and chaotic that people can’t develop narratives about how so-and-so fucked them over. Let people win some rounds and lose some rounds, even if the outcome is a devastating three-and-eight loss. Make their catastrophic fuckups contained. Allow everyone the opportunity to clutch critical moments, by making more moments critical, without creating one continuous hour-long panic attack.

Key to any of this is scoring via bots. The game can snapshot any moment of gameplay, and run it back over and over, with AI substituting any given player. It’s VORP. If you just got your ass handed to you - would any bot have done better? If not, then that failure shouldn’t count against you. If this failure was caused by the game introducing randomness, then your bad karma can be made-up-for with better luck later on. But if you fumbled a fight that 99% of simulations survived, the game is free to laugh at you, and so are the other players.

It’s a zero-sum team project. Half the people playing will lose, and none of them will feel responsible. Even though they need to work together the entire time, to such a degree that any single person can ruin it for everybody… and one player quitting counts as ruining it for everybody. You’re handcuffed to these people for an hour. If this was all silly fun-times then you’d laugh it off, but of course, no, it’s a competitive sweatbox.

This is a formula for a stranger in Nebraska to blow out your headphones screaming obscenities because you clicked NPCs wrong twenty minutes ago.

Compare other hyper-competitive team games like Counter-Strike. One player can clutch a 1v5. Quitting is heavily discouraged, but is roughly balanced through numeric adjustments. And most importantly, games are quick. A round can happen in under a minute. Whole matches can be as long as a MOBA round, but being broken up into multiple phases - each one a separate win or loss - lets people feel that they did okay. Even if they stood no chance. Nobody invents a racial slur, mid-aneurysm, when they lose an aim-duel in silver.

One of the ex-devs for LoL or DotA said people should get kicked just for picking the wrong guy. If you can commit a bannable offense on the character select screen, maybe the game has intrinsic problems.

Beatings won’t improve systemic problems with your genre.

There’s a reason every MOBA is this toxic, and only MOBAs are this toxic. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. You designed this problem.

Unzip tools should always do it in a new folder.

I can deal with home/ZipName/ZipName. I have no patience whatsoever for a program dumping randomly-dated files onto an existing directory.

Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

Making one game a “saga” was pretty messed-up.

People made the same excuse for the Wii. ‘Oh it’s not competing with the PS3 and 360. It plays completely different games.’ The same people inevitably turn around and say those real consoles ‘have no games,’ because they mostly play the same games.

The Switch has both a shitload of first-party exclusives, and a shitload of ports. They’re killing it. Their legal department can burn in hell, but the platform is clearly dominating the industry. It’s so fucking good that everyone else is rushing to compete with them.

The Switch has outsold it by an order of magnitude.

This company should fire their entire legal department.

Yes.

Text to the contrary is bullshit. It can and should be ignored, rejected, and opposed.

Added chance of fire damage!

Here’s the right approach to rightsholders:

Did you get the money?

Great, fuck off.

Literally mind your business.

Sony heard about Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy and said “I am also the first one here, now.”

Specify the country in the damn headline.

Netflix didn’t do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they’d steal Netflix’s business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.

Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.

We broke up movie theaters for that shit.

They announced a battle royale cash-in a few months ago?

And if a single house in the county has DirecTV, it doesn’t count. Right?

AT&T tended to have abundant small competitors, even since the 19th century. They just kept suing them out of existence or buying them.

All of which is really missing the fucking point - absolute monopoly is rare and weird. Most monopolies have competitors. They’re still monopolies. They command overwhelming market share, which lets them single-handedly shape the market. Having that power is what makes them a monopoly - abusing that power would make them a trust.