It’s a distraction. He’s stepped in the shit by fucking with the economy and he’s using cruelty and culture war BS to fill up the news cycle.
But, we already have quake.
The real trick is to have a the cycle continue done further with models of their model of your model of their model ad infinitem.
Then go “sorry what” because you were to busy doing that to actually process what they were saying.
Ok, well, I suspect most people aren’t going to be willing to pay that, or at the very least will buy significantly less games over all.
I suppose from a business sense the question is; will a reduced number of games sold at a higher margin be more profitable over all than more games sold at a lower margin?
They’ll probably just loose disproportionate market share to games vendors and platforms that aren’t selling at such a high price point, even if most of the major consoles fallow suite, i think that will just hurt the market share of consoles as a whole, phones have gotten shockingly good and might devour the low end of the market more than they already have if there are some shake ups in how app stores work, and there are a lot of plenty capable mid range gaming PC handheld that are competitive with consoles.
They’re desperately trying to distract from the fact they just wiped out a 1/5th of the value of the stock market, and so they’re throwing red meat to the culture war crowd by backing over the people they’ve already run over
Look Starbucks often trades on the reputation of small local roaster by imitating their patterns and colors, much like how insects will imitate wasps to avoid getting eaten by predators. but they’ve been leaning on high sugar content and colorful food dyes for decades to make up for the fact that they sell generic mediocre, supply chain and consistency optimized coffee, and are slowly transitioning in to a fast food chain.
Like is it bad coffee? No, it’s fine, it has caffeine and will taste what ever, maybe even good with enough sugar and cream. But it’s nothing compared to the stuff being whipped out by the tired eyed enby who looks like they’ll cut you if you ask for a frapachino but simultaneously will eagerly info dump about the origin, drying and roasting process of what they have available that day.
Look, I’m not an accountant, I don’t need a numpad.
“Huh? The people I’m not directly targeting don’t approve of my actions targeting a group? It must secretly be the targeted group making them not like me! I don’t experience empathy, ergo it is impossible for anyone else to experience it.”
I mean, ICP’s cultural impact metastasizing is certainly part of it.
But also clown is a strong aesthetic, and we’re detached enough from unironic clowns being a fairly common thing that it can be repurposed for new ideas. Not many people hiring party clowns and most remaining circuses have moved on from clowns as a central element.
Yah, but we forgot about it for over 10,000 years. We were all winners for quite some time.
Ahhh, Neil, gotta be one of my favorite niche internet micro celebrities.
Step one: target a marginal group, push the public in to cruelty so as to make them complicit.
Step two: target a less marginal group and use the public’s complicity in the last to prevent them from pushing back.
Because they’re based on delirious vibes, not any meaningful policy goals. Keep the base happy while they steal everything that isn’t nailed down.
It would be easier to list the things she didn’t do.
Long and short, screwed over a lot of minorities, oversaw a lot of violent conflicts, and reshaped the UK economy and government to benefit the financial sector and ultra wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
I use librewolf just because it’s privacy focused.
But, there is also waterfox, floorp, and mercury, just off the top of my head.
I had a smart watch for a bit, and stuff like this is kind of why I dropped it.
Like, it was something else I had to charge and remember to grab in the morning, and all it did for me was make it slightly faster to see notifications and gather more info on me that i didn’t really need. Like, ok, theoretically I could answer texts on it without pulling my phone out, but only by using janky ass STT that got half of what I said wrong, so I’d have to re-record 4 times and by that point it would have just been faster to pull my phone out and type out the response, and if I have to pull my phone out anyways what is the benefit of having the notifications on my wrist.
Once knew a guy who would wear a gold Apple Watch on one wrist and a Rolex on the other. I asked him why and he said “oh this one is to check my blood pressure and heart rate, and this one is because you have to have a Rolex if you want people to take you seriously in my line of work.”