On the one hand, the industry is well known for its poor wages and horrible working conditions. On the other hand, as you said, that's on the companies and we shouldn't be expected to pay their workers for them.
These guys rake in more money than Hollywood, and yet they think we should pay more because they don't want to pay their workers a fair wage? How about we help them unionize instead. That sounds more worthwhile to me.
Not to sound snarky or anything, but since when do prices go down? If people were willing to pay the inflated price, there's no incentive for them not to make that the new standard.
Personally, I grasp things best when measured in units of Runebears.
The thing that gets me is calling it DLC-sized. So... small? Large? Is it horse armor sized or Shadow of the Erdtree sized DLC? DLC is not a unit of measurement.
I'm not talking about conservatives as a whole. I believe there's plenty of conservatives who get that this is satire. And plenty who probably didn't pick up on it, but would get it if you explained it to them. I'm saying that you're mistaking the vocal minority for the silent majority. The majority of people, conservatives and progressives alike, only really care about political stances in media when it's hamfisted in awkwardly. Nobody enjoys that. But you usually won't see people complaining about it because people don't usually care enough to bother. All art is political, but not all art is a stupid hamfisted attempt to appeal to some minority group in a way that even they hate. Art has a piece of the artist's beliefs and convictions behind it, so it is inherently political regardless of whether or not it's attempting to say a specific political message. That's just the way that life is. Steven Spielberg's biggest regret is making Jaws, because it is directly responsible for the mass culling of sharks. It wasn't his intention, but it changed the way people saw sharks and terrified them all across the world. He just wanted to make a horror movie and ended up changing the cultural landscape of the entire world. If you look specifically at what the "no politics in my media!" crowd is crying about, you'll usually find that it's something like "two men kissed on screen and now I have to unpack the fact that I search for femboy porn every night" or "I can't believe that they dared to make Deadpool bisexual even though he's been canonically bi since the character was created" or even "I am upset that the Punisher hates cops despite the fact that he was literally created for the sole purpose of being a bad guy who doesn't hesitate to kill bad cops as well as criminals."
I'm talking about that specific subgroup who visit /pol/ on 4Chan. Who would call themselves Gamers with a capital g. That vocal minority who make up a very specific block of the US Republican party. The people that you're referring to from 2016. The ones who hung effigies of Obama from nooses and carried them through the streets while he was in office. The kinds of people who have no actual values themselves, just supporting whatever hurts the people that they've been told to hate. The people who support DeSantis and the others who pushed forward 200+ anti trans laws in the first six months of last year (it was somewhere around 1.2 new bills every day) because trans people are the new boogeyman after the gay boogeyman failed. Who only take up an ideological stance as long as it supports their argument and will support the exact opposite ideology the next moment when the first one becomes inconvenient to their worldview. The people who supported quotes from Hitler and Mussolini when they were misattributed to Trump, and when told who actually said them responded with stuff like, "If Hitler said it, then no. But I would if Trump had said it."
Like my first boss, and my grandfather before him, who would look at you like you insulted them if you asked them who they were voting for and respond every time with "I'm a Republican. I vote for the nominee." It wouldn't matter to these people if the nominee was Trump, Bush, Obama, or Stalin himself risen from the grave to finally destroy the specter of capitalism once and for all. So long as the letter next to their name was an R, that's who they'd vote for.
These are the kinds of people who don't get that the game is satire and decry media as being too political when it's pointed out to them. They see the Super Earth world government and go "See, this is how a country should be run!" The same people who saw Starship Troopers as an ideal we should strive for. This is a group for whom no bridge is a bridge too far, because it's in the name of "freedom" and "democracy".
That's who this article is about. Not conservatives, but conservatives who see no difference between fascism and conservative ideologies. Conservatives see two women holding hands walking down the street and don't give a shit. These people go home and rant about how gay people make their whole lives revolve around being gay and need to stop shoving it down everybody else's throats on Reddit. These people literally harassed one of the devs on the Steam forums for "being too liberal and pushing an agenda". There are conservatives, Republicans, and then these people, and they're a subset within a subset. Not all conservatives are Republicans, and not all Republicans are these guys, but they sure as hell do exist.
But you should check your own biases, because stuff like this:
The fact alone that you’d flatten them all into one mass with a black and white worldview when “the right” encompasses such a massive swath of political ideologies to dwarf the left in variety should make you re-evaluate how much you actually understand them and how much of this is partisan hatred and dehumanisation.
Is just straight up false. There are as many varieties of left leaning ideologies as there are right. Because no two people believe in exactly the same thing. You did right in that quote exactly what you were accusing me of doing. If we want to get into the weeds of politics, the two party system of the US leaves no room for any nuance on either side, but the political compass of both parties leans more conservative than progressive. The Republicans are a right-wing party while the Democrats are largely a left leaning centrist party. There are many people who vote Democrat not because they support the Democrats, but because they oppose stuff like the current Party of Trump's push towards authoritarianism. There's a whole swath of left leaning ideologies that have no representation in the government, and many of them are so different from each other that they have opposing and conflicting ideals. There is something to be said about the conservatives rallying behind the authoritarians and fascists in the Republican party instead of saying "Maybe we should take the L this time so we can clean out our own party", but there's also something to be said about Democrats funding these extremists in the first place because they think that they'll be easy to beat; but all of that goes far beyond the scope of an article about Helldivers 2.
You're giving these people too much benefit of the doubt on their critical thinking skills. The kinds of people you're talking about aren't the ones who complain about politics in media. It might annoy them when it's as bad as you're talking about, but it bothers everybody else as well when it's that bad. The ones who can't see the satire here are the same ones who scream about the main character being a woman.
To them, any politics is blatant cringeworthy soapboxing, and their definition of politics is anything that disagrees with their black and white worldview. When they say "keep politics out of x", they mean "never give me anything outside of my echo chamber." And they absolutely love the Super Earth world government. They don't think any deeper than whether something affirms their worldview or not. They'll go from supporting the cops and government taking away other people's freedoms to screaming at a cop a second later for giving them a speeding ticket because the cop "violated their first amendment rights" or whatever. As somebody else put it in the comments:
Conservatives think they're the default. They don't have an ideology, a religion, a sexuality, or an ethnicity. They're normal. It's everyone else who's different.
These kinds of people believe that there are two groups of people: an in-group that consists of themselves, and an out-group that is everybody else. And they aren't political, but the out-group is.
They believe that there are two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. Two genders: male and political.
I mean, a white guy going into a village of black people and shooting up the place is just colonialist history. There's some potential racism to unpack there, so it's not surprising that people's first reaction was "what the fuck."
This was people freaking out about a white guy shooting up a bunch of other white guys who were part of a Christian extremist militia in South Dakota or something. This was people being angry that the bad guys were white Christians, a group that could never be in the wrong.
Even when the movie came out, people didn't get that it was satire and thought it was 100% serious.
It's always going to fly over the heads of conservative chuds no matter how obvious you make it. Helldivers 2 is absolutely blatant with its satire, and people still miss the point. I've never played Spec Ops: The Line, but I've heard it praised for its brutal depiction of the horrors of war, and people completely missed the point with that one, too.
Some people are so media illiterate that a dictionary to the face would miss them, and conservatives are wilfully ignorant to these messages because it supports their worldview to take things at face value and never dig any deeper. If they thought about things, they wouldn't be able to stay assured in the righteousness of their hatred or the belief that they're the real victims of any situation.
You nailed it. It's 100% inspired by Starship Troopers and is a criticism of US propaganda in the same vein while also being an incredibly fun co-op game.
The only thing you're missing is just how obtuse some people are. It runs into the same thing as the Warhammer 40k universe, where the humans are obviously just as bad as everybody else, but people praise their fascist military industrial complex society. Either people are so incredibly media illiterate that it makes your head spin, or they're wilfully ignorant because it supports their worldview. Take your pick, but I go for a little of both.
So which story is Jesus on the cross in a jar of piss?
I'm guessing #1, but this sounds like a load of #2, so...
I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.