Things you enjoyed until they got greedy - How corporate greed killed every hobby

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Judge Dredd

Judge Dredd

Senior Layout Artist
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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Aug 23, 2018
A complete rip off of the "Creative works you enjoyed until politics happened" thread, but more broad and based on corpo fuckery. This can be anything from a single piece of media, to entire hobbies and industries.

Here's a couple to kick off the thread,

Cars.
Not the pixar movies, but motor vehicles in general. Since around 2012, cars have sucked. Their designs are just copy pasted SUVs with no difference between them, filled with "infotainment" computer systems that are prone to breaking down, and at a starting price that used to get a luxury car back in the day. There's a lot of things to point the finger at. Boomers pricing young people out of the market. Screen addicted Karens who only care about looking good on the school run. Or dealerships selling knowingly bad product as part of planned obsolescence. Even brands that used to be known for reliability are facing issues with break downs.


Warhammer.
These plastic soldiers were always expensive but at least it was made up for with a fun game, knowledgeable staff, and lively community. These days gaming isn't allowed in the shops themselves, and they act as little more than a place to pick up online orders. Prices spiral out of control as shareholders demand increased profits. The company panders to a competitive scene who will spend a fortune on plastic they hate in order to win tournaments. But arguably the worst is the constant rules churn that basically amounts to a subscription service. It's got so bad that the highly consoomer community widely considers books to be a waste of money, as they're out of date before they hit the shelves.

Even third parties aren't immune. Companies I once considered peak in terms of value are increasing prices while reducing the amount of figures in the box. I used to sing the praises of Wargames Atlantic. They used to sell 30 figures for £25. Their recent Trench Crusade set is £40 for 7 figures, and their Operators set is £32 for 20. They are still far cheaper than Games Workshop, and I assume the kits are still good, plus inflation and costs going up means that prices are bound to rise, but it's disappointing to see.
 
Geocaching, but it's bad for longer than it existed as good, I've stopped enjoying it around 2010. In the late 00's, it had shown me many interesting and lesser known places in nature, smaller and overlooked objects of heritage and facts, and I gotta say that even many now archived listings about industrial heritage and mining are better sources of information, than wikipedia or anything else.
Then, more and more new caches were pointless, like ''What we were doing in today's IT lectures at college'', ''Our wedding anniversary cache'', ''My neighbour's cousin's dog's birthday cache'', ''My elementary school'' and ''My plattenbau of birth'' and as if it wasn't enough, the cache list and map got cluttered by power trails (cache every 161m), so it got harder to wade through all the crap while exploring new lands. That's not inherently corporate, I know, but the organization employs people who allowed all this to get published, even supported it by creating challenges and souvenirs, and did not focus on quality.
And the website gets worse and worse, functions once normal are premium only, I think that's because it was sponsored by Garmin and such brands, but nowadays every smartphone has a GPS. But I noticed many people got bored with it and not many new people are drawn in - my own quite remote caches I maintain for 16 years, have much less logs per month than they used to have back then.
 
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Books. Anyone who reads in any serious capacity will tell you that in order to find consistently good reading material, you need to go back decades.
 
Indie game releases.
The vast majority of indie games these days release as an Alpha or Beta build, and then just coast for the next 1-2 years before releasing the 1.0 build.

It wouldn't be as bad if the Alpha or Beta was just an already completed/mostly completed version of the game looking for feedback for potential changes or bug reports.
The problem is that's rarely the case these days and a lot of Indie games are released as literally half a game, with the rest of the game being released over the next year or so until they release the 1.0 build.

Idk about everyone else but I don't like the idea that I buy a game, enjoy playing it, and then 10 hours in I can no longer progress because the creators are still making the second half of the game.

Then you'll see games on Steam that say "newly released" and they'll have 1k+ reviews, then you find out, "Oh, this game came out 2 years ago, they're just re-releasing it essentially to bring in more money"
 
Dating apps like Tinder.

You are now required to pony up some cash to make your profile visible for longer than a couple of days. Not even mentioning the caps for likes, visibility boosts, etc.
Also, literal whores who just want either your money or your subscription to their social media.

Even a sped like me could get lucky back in the day. Now it is just a projection of how it is in real life.
 
I've talked about this in other posts, but holy crap, McDonald's.

Even in the late 2000s and very early 2010s, you had a company with tons of unique restaurant buildings and a large menu. Sure, they had dropped some of the regional items by that time but they had a ton of options to please everyone, including oatmeal, salads, premium hamburgers, chocolate-dipped cones, and a rotating selection of items, some of which were heavily promoted and disappeared as quickly as they came, but nowadays it has even worse buildings that the "eyebrow" design that swept the chain in the early 2010s, the LCD menus, the horrible app, an extremely limited menu, and a price point that reaches $10 if you want fries and a drink.

It's not just McDonald's, the other fast food places all have some flavor of this shittiness.
 
Judge Dredd said:
Cars.
Not the pixar movies, but motor vehicles in general. Since around 2012, cars have sucked. Their designs are just copy pasted SUVs with no difference between them, filled with "infotainment" computer systems that are prone to breaking down, and at a starting price that used to get a luxury car back in the day. There's a lot of things to point the finger at. Boomers pricing young people out of the market. Screen addicted Karens who only care about looking good on the school run. Or dealerships selling knowingly bad product as part of planned obsolescence. Even brands that used to be known for reliability are facing issues with break downs.
Click to expand...

Chinese cars are also becoming a plague that's spreading to other countries, except for ones that tariff them to oblivion. And they do all of the negative things that today's cars have, only with even worse quality. And yet, people still suck up to them as if their lives depended on it as if the CCP is holding them at literal gunpoint.

As for me, The Sims series has gone from a game that came about as one man's way of overcoming tragedy (Will Wright got inspiration to make the game after losing his home in the 1991 Oakland Firestorm), into a rainbow cashcow that EA sucks the titties out of in the hardest way and pushes InClUsIvE and DiVeRsItY shit as hard as possible. Some people even think that revenue from The Sims is siphoned off to EA's other studios to try to keep those afloat, which would explain why EA continues to milk The Sims 4 for over a DECADE now. The severe lack of talent at The Sims Studio also means that we will never get a real Sims 5 game, even as The Sims 4 continues to get more and more buggier while EA futilely tries to "fix" the mess to no avail.
 
Judge Dredd said:
Warhammer.
These plastic soldiers were always expensive but at least it was made up for with a fun game, knowledgeable staff, and lively community. These days gaming isn't allowed in the shops themselves, and they act as little more than a place to pick up online orders. Prices spiral out of control as shareholders demand increased profits. The company panders to a competitive scene who will spend a fortune on plastic they hate in order to win tournaments. But arguably the worst is the constant rules churn that basically amounts to a subscription service. It's got so bad that the highly consoomer community widely considers books to be a waste of money, as they're out of date before they hit the shelves.

Even third parties aren't immune. Companies I once considered peak in terms of value are increasing prices while reducing the amount of figures in the box. I used to sing the praises of Wargames Atlantic. They used to sell 30 figures for £25. Their recent Trench Crusade set is £40 for 7 figures, and their Operators set is £32 for 20. They are still far cheaper than Games Workshop, and I assume the kits are still good, plus inflation and costs going up means that prices are bound to rise, but it's disappointing to see.
Click to expand...
The modern warhammer scene is actually so bleak. Most warhammer store's nowadays don't even host events, they exist only to bait new players in and to sell more plasticslop. Most third party store communities are the sweatiest, most toxic shitholes ever now that the metaslop crowd have reached critical mass. Now that warhammer is becoming more mainstream, the prices are just going up and tourists are flooding in, the troons have found a new franchise to infect and the consooomers are out in full force. Warhammer is on a direct path to ending up like d&d or MTG at this rate, and jeworkshops is more than happy for this to continue. Btw TC is notorious for having shit quality minis as of late and horrible .
 
There are plenty of purists in gaming, it's just that they mostly keep to themselves when having their gay retarded internet slapfights over what constitutes a roguelike vs a roguelite or whether or not it should be called a "soulslike" or "soulsborne".
 
Cars the pixar movie, the first one is cool because the cars went vroom vroom and that was cool when I was 5.
Then in the second one Mater becomes a secret agent and has to stop carjews from doping sportscars to death or something and it was retarded, and in the third one they replace Lightning McQueen with a carwoman.
The bottom of the barrel was the planes movie which was astoundingly lazy and fucking retarded, the worst part is that the main plane guy fucks a jeet plane woman. The only good thing about that movie is that the plane race starts at John F. Kennedy International Airport, which confirms that the JFK assassination is canon in the Cars universe .
 
Thiletonomics said:
revenue from The Sims is siphoned off to EA's other studios to try to keep those afloat,
Click to expand...
why would they need to do that when they make all the yearly niggerball games, that has to bring them hundreds of millions of pisseasy money. also ea is an evil company. really ea in general screwed up a looot of stuff.
COME ON OUT YOU RAPIST said:
Books. Anyone who reads in any serious capacity will tell you that in order to find consistently good reading material, you need to go back decades.
Click to expand...
see the image with all the words

to add to the op request, bethesda and their damn horse armor. and microsoft. microsoft pissed away total dominance of the pc gaming market to chase the console market, paving the way for gabe newell to have his own personal fleet of yachts. ensemble studios, which made some of the best RTS games ever made, microsoft killed it IN THE MIDDLE OF MAKING A VERY WELL RECIEVED game just for kicks. and then there are the dozens of xbox and xbox 360 games that have never been ported to pc, despite microsoft owning the number one most popular operating system for decades.
 

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Neodanthril said:
why would they need to do that when they make all the yearly niggerball games, that has to bring them hundreds of millions of pisseasy money. also ea is an evil company. really ea in general screwed up a looot of stuff.
Click to expand...

EA's Sports Game income took some hits recently, mainly after they lost the FIFA license because they didn't want to pay to renew the license for it.
 
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