“Smile more.”

No, no, I think he does.

Given the sheer breadth of folklore that D&D pulled from, it could be nigh impossible to be sure, but man, it’d be cool.

Same, for the most part. Games that rely a lot on reflexes tend to get a pass from me, as I lack the skill level to grind through something to get at that juicy lore/story. Something more thoughtful or tactical, however, I’ll grind my brain against.

While GG loved his traps, it’s also worth pointing out just how much he borrowed from world mythology, and it’s entirely possible that mimics in the classic D&D sense didn’t originate with him. But as far as their presence in RPGs goes, yeah, direct lineage from D&D to Final Fantasy and similar CRPGs of various sorts.

Same mechanism as and better than physical goods like art. People get caught laundering money all the time, and it’s not because “the blockchain is so good,” it’s because there are always people who are bad at doing crime.

You really have no idea how any of this works, do you? They have to be employed. Those people have to have money to give them. Those people aren’t going to employ them if there’s no profit in it. If making consoles and games isn’t profitable, even a little, literally nobody will do it. Until such time as people don’t…

Because the people creating the platform that enables you to enjoy games don’t deserve to be paid for their work. Got it.

So your argument is to make consoles more expensive, so pirates can’t afford them anyway?

You’re talking about “economy of scale,” there. “Sold at a loss” means what it says on the tin. The total cost of bringing the consoles to sale is under the manufacturing costs, shipping, labor, advertising, and support needed to bring them to sale. You have yet to acknowledge that having to order more consoles made…

You make five consoles for $5, costing you $25. You expect at least $1 from two different game sales, for $2 a console. Six consoles are sold at $4 each, meaning you had to make another batch of five, and five of those pirate games instead of buying them. You are down $25. If only the paying console was sold, you…

How could they possibly lose more money by selling fewer consoles? Fewer consoles sold means fewer consoles ordered to be manufactured, meaning less loss of money. More of a negative number is a bigger negative number. They aren’t making all the consoles ahead of time, then hoping they run out.

Consoles are sold at negative money. If people are just buying the consoles, and never buying games, they make less than if people didn’t buy the consoles at all. For them to make any profit at all, you need to buy games, which they have a cut on.

Studios get jobs based on how well their games sell. So sales metrics absolutely do impact programmers, as they could lose their jobs for low sales. But sure, the real difference is “success bad, struggling good.”

If you want to be pedantic, selling hardware and DRM’d software that will brick your system if you try to tamper with it, as well as directly promoting and selling access to illegally obtained copies of various works.

A sale at a loss is losing money. So saying “they sold more consoles” isn’t actually good unless it’s accompanied by selling more games, and modded consoles are much less likely to do that.

Selling consoles isn’t much of a selling point when consoles are frequently sold at a loss with profits from games expected to fill the gap.

It’s interesting how many people here are willing to crucify someone for profiting someone else’s art unless that art is a video game. This isn’t just sharing, this was a for profit operation.

For standard piracy, sure. We’re talking about people selling pirated content here, making a profit from other people paying for it. We’re talking about people actually stealing goods and selling it, not just sharing what they have. I’d have a lot more sympathy for people who just couldn’t get access to the games…

Your “solution” would put millions of small artists, authors, and creators of various types completely out of a job and allow corporations to steal their work without consequences. You need to keep in mind that these laws protect both ways.