Click on link to watch the video and read comments there is alot so for those making content i guess there off to get a old bot-leg copy or another program. Oh i looked up ways around this there seem to be patching them quick so you just got post's of people getting censored.
You must be registered to see links
EDIT: i do not know why but the forum thinks it s a media link look below that giant white box for the link it keeps going back to a media link.
Adobe is pure cancer. People need to learn to use clip studio paint. You can buy a permanent license, no subscription horseshit. The subscription plans don't have the classic adobe "cancellation fee". Fuck adobe.
I'm so fucking fatigued from this kidification of the world. "Muh, bu..but there's kids online, we can't do this" natural selection. If a kid was born with parents that don't give a fuck, companies and governments shouldn't step up to "protect" them from said dangers. If the kid ends up traumatized or somethings, let it be, it shouldn't be everybody else's problem that the parents are fuck ups, you can't protect everyone, specially in a situation like this where paying costumers can't do what they want with their tools because little Timmy might get access to it and generate 'le bad stuff', and that is ignoring the fact that if the parents aren't paying attention, if he is interested, little Timmy WILL find what he's looking for, so in the end no one is getting protected anyway, they are just nagging their costumers for no tangible gains.
Yep this is why I still have my old copy cracked and never updated, that and you no longer own your copy. Serious a really shit company that's held ground for so long simply by GIMPs shitting the bed and removing it's photoshop like features over a decade ago. Which hay, maybe Photoshop had a part to play in, wouldn't shock me. Laws are being past just because of how hard it is to cancel a subscription to their services even.
You can blame the anti-AI retards and the hack journalists for this one. Look at X, they released a pretty uncensored image editing model that allowed you to do what you wanted right within the app, not that different than what you can achieve with a local install of ComfyUI. And to this day they're still dealing with the backlash fueled by idiots who are happy to jump on any opportunity to peddle their bullshit. Any other big company is going to look at that and try to steer away from a similar controversy.
Want things to change? Make fun of the luddites whenever you can.
It's ridiculous that you cannot use paid software for your legal own projects. I haven't used Adobe in a long time. I've been using Qwen-Image-Edit and had found that to be great for what I needed. It did a good enough job at replacing text, integrating different environments, etc. I've even found many of the generations to look superior to what I could do with Adobe. This is yet again another awful change they've introduced. It's unfortunate. Hopefully they revert course....
While i'd say I was surprised, I would be lying. Thankfully I stopped using Photocrap long ago. Hopefully Clip studio doesn't get it into their heads to try to do similar again, especially after the backlash which made them cancel AI plans in the past.
t is a sad trend that has been happening: the banking system wanting to determine what an establishment can sell, even when the product is legal. Now paid tools dictate what is appropriate, when this should massively be the function of the state.
And it is not just censorship, but also the increase in privacy invasion—and most people don’t even care.
There are always groups wanting to wave their flag, always disguised as protecting women, children, the elderly… but in the end they only use the flag.
I'm so fucking fatigued from this kidification of the world. "Muh, bu..but there's kids online, we can't do this" natural selection. If a kid was born with parents that don't give a fuck, companies and governments shouldn't step up to "protect" them from said dangers. If the kid ends up traumatized or somethings, let it be, it shouldn't be everybody else's problem that the parents are fuck ups, you can't protect everyone, specially in a situation like this where paying costumers can't do what they want with their tools because little Timmy might get access to it and generate 'le bad stuff', and that is ignoring the fact that if the parents aren't paying attention, if he is interested, little Timmy WILL find what he's looking for, so in the end no one is getting protected anyway, they are just nagging their costumers for no tangible gains.
Back in my day we had those catalogs for Christmas the underwear section showed more skin than today's tv shows and underwear photographers are affected by this adobe censorship.
Yep this is why I still have my old copy cracked and never updated, that and you no longer own your copy. Serious a really shit company that's held ground for so long simply by GIMPs shitting the bed and removing it's photoshop like features over a decade ago. Which hay, maybe Photoshop had a part to play in, wouldn't shock me. Laws are being past just because of how hard it is to cancel a subscription to their services even.
You can blame the anti-AI retards and the hack journalists for this one. Look at X, they released a pretty uncensored image editing model that allowed you to do what you wanted right within the app, not that different than what you can achieve with a local install of ComfyUI. And to this day they're still dealing with the backlash fueled by idiots who are happy to jump on any opportunity to peddle their bullshit. Any other big company is going to look at that and try to steer away from a similar controversy.
Want things to change? Make fun of the luddites whenever you can.
t is a sad trend that has been happening: the banking system wanting to determine what an establishment can sell, even when the product is legal. Now paid tools dictate what is appropriate, when this should massively be the function of the state.
And it is not just censorship, but also the increase in privacy invasion—and most people don’t even care.
There are always groups wanting to wave their flag, always disguised as protecting women, children, the elderly… but in the end they only use the flag.
Yeah, fuck Adobe. They've also rolled out a special kind of "Adobe protected pdf" that ONLY opens in Adobe acrobat/reader. I have to use them for my work, and I HATE IT.
Also, fuck Playstation for phasing out physical game discs.
At least swfs aren't fully dead yet. Flashpoint, Clean Flash, and other alternative players still exist, and some of the old flash artists are still around making stuff.
In my opinion, there are seven main factors behind the recent rise of corporate censorship:
1. Cyclical reversion to old norms. Western culture tends to go through cycles of more or less sexual permissiveness. (You can see this pretty clearly by looking at gradual changes in fashion, from the sheer-cut boob-a-licious dresses of the Elizabethian age down to high-collar Victorian stuffiness. The same applies to the age of consent, which has gradually fluctuated older and older as societies have become less agrarian and labor consequently less valuable, making kids an economic burden rather than an asset. Other examples are more sudden, like the difference between pre-code and post-code films in early Hollywood.) What was acceptable in one era would have scandalized the next. And in the US, porn was illegal for a long, long time under obscenity laws, until Hustler v Falwell successfully challenged the restrictions in court. Porn isn't a freedom we should take for granted. Could be we're entering another period of sexual restrictiveness. That certainly seems to be the fucking spirit of the times.
2. Consolidation. A handful of mega-corporations control the government, man. Like, super PACs and lobbyists representing special interest groups hold the purse strings of state. And in the US, Citizens United has made the distinction between the corporate and government sectors even less meaningful. And now there's even more direct corruption and undisguised attempts to influence elections, like a certain musky individual's multi-million lottery offer.
3. Privatization. Across the world, many governments have handed over functions to private industry, and massively cut back regulations. You can debate whether this is good or bad (spoiler: it's mostly bad*), but it certainly has the effect of enabling corporate censorship. Without any government interference, big tech gets to decide what is morally acceptable without ever consulting the public.
*Clear examples where privatization has lead to inefficiency include: the Boeing manufacturing crisis, the increasing reliance of militaries on private contractors that massively over-bill, adminsitrative bloat at colleges, the insurance claims process in the American healthcare industry, and mouldering public transit systems across the western world. More insidiously, academic publishing has also suffered from some of the effects of privatization: a handful of huge private corporations control access to journals, making scientific research prohibitively expensive for most people outside of either the university system or corporate labs.
4. The corporate cult of professionalism. If you want to understand why the modern western world is the way it is, read Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas and Listen, Liberal. The gist of the first book is that the culture war is political theater where wedge issues (e.g. hot-button shit like abortion, prayer in schools, guns, pronouns, minority rights, sexual mores, political correctness etc.) are used to distract from economic issues, and fiscal conservatism has quietly become the norm. The second book argues that the liberal middle class, with its support of technology, corporate culture, and obsession with consensus, has become complacent, seduced by elitism, and abandoned the working class. The New York Times and The Economist are pretty clear mouthpieces for the corporate technocracy, as are the various broadcast news outlets (e.g. ABC, NSNBC, FOX, CBS, BBC) on ALL sides of the culture war.
Under the culture of professionalism, discussion of social issues is politically acceptable to an extent, but discussion of economic inequality is framed as radical or sophmoric. The great history of populism in the US, from the Pullman Strike to the New Deal, has likewise been practically erased from high school history textbooks.
The politicization of global warming is a good example. Rather than going after big oil, liberal media has heavily promoted the idea that "climate impact" is a personal responsibility, dependent on an individual consumer's "carbon footprint". This shifts the onus away from the big corporations, and onto the individual consumer. And it allows corporations to charge more for "eco-friendly" products, and to profit off the backlash too by creating other brands that cater to climate skeptics. Liberal media shills "green" products and hippie shit, conservative media shills "big trucks n rollin' coal". It's all about framing, man.
The same goes for how the vegan/meat-eating debate is framed as "environmentalism" versus traditionalism. Green-washing, red-washing, blue-washing, companies will use every trick in the book to sell shit, and it turns out that branded identities sell really, really well. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a moral identity and set of experiences. And ultra-wealthy consumers, who have money to blow on experiences, are now a bigger market than the rest of consumers combined.
When it comes to porn, consensus means censorship. And the debate over what is "morally acceptable" in porn becomes just another theater in the culture war.
5. Pearl-clutching ultra-conservative "think of the children" reactionaries. A recent example would be Collective Shout, the main group behind the push to censor lewd and LGBT games on Steam and Itch, as well as the anti-porn laws in Texas and the Sunbelt. Older examples would be the Westboro Baptist Church, the John Birch Society, the McCarthyists, and Father Coughlin. At the academic level, the recent ban on American federal funding for research that uses certain keywords (for example, "gender") is another clear example of reactionary-lead censorship. One could also point to the worlwide rise of pseudo-libertarian, vaguely populist, neo-fascist movements like the AfD as conservative practioneers of censorship.
6. Loony ultra-liberal poke-bowl-eatin', latte guzzlin' coastal elites, subalterns, and snowflakes. These get a lot of media attention and blame already, some of it deserved, some of it exagerated or just made up to smear minorities and alt folks. The label has also changed a lot over the years (the current labels seem to be "DEI" and "woke", nebulously defined, or the good old reliable boogymen of "socialists" and "Marxists"). There aren't as many truely "woke" liberals as conservative media would have you believe, but they do exist. Some I support or sympathesize with, but others are just awful. If you've worked in academia, you'll definitely have met the worst sorts. They're the loudest, dumbest voices in the debates over subtle issues of gender, colonialism, and environmentalism, and sometimes the biggest hypocrites: for example, advocating for minority rights while in practice supporting gentrification. Together with the ultra-conservatives on the other side of the culture war, these are the main flag-bearers of witch-hunts and moral panics. Both claim to support free speech, but practice their own forms of extreme censorship (political correctness in the case of the ultra-libs, and traditional censorship in the case of the ultra-conservatives).
7. Neo-liberalism. Go read about it. Specifically, read about the effect of neo-liberalism on "post-truth" politics. The gist of it is that neo-liberal ideology (basically, the idea that free markets should be allowed to determine policy with government interference or communal input) treats identies and ideas as something that consumers can choose for themselves on an individual basis, and "improve" by buying the "right" products and subscribing to the "right" views. (Look at all the podcasts, corporate slop, and self-help books shilling variants of this idea.) Treating ideas like a marketplace has the unintended second-order effect of making facts a poltical commodity, where the truth is an exclusive product available only to expert "fact-checkers" or "in-the-know" talk-show hosts. The popularity of New Age-y shit in the 1970-1980s, conspiracy theories in the 1990s onward, and alternative facts in the 2020s, are all related to the rise of neo-liberalism as the dominant ideology in the western world.
You can blame the anti-AI retards and the hack journalists for this one. Look at X, they released a pretty uncensored image editing model that allowed you to do what you wanted right within the app, not that different than what you can achieve with a local install of ComfyUI. And to this day they're still dealing with the backlash fueled by idiots who are happy to jump on any opportunity to peddle their bullshit. Any other big company is going to look at that and try to steer away from a similar controversy.
Want things to change? Make fun of the luddites whenever you can.
It's worth pointing out that AI is being used FOR censorship too. When Photoshop runs its algorithm to detect if your image is "inappropriate", it's using AI. And when Facebook was spying on its employees, it used AI to analyze their online activity.
Me, I'm a pragmitist. I'll play games that use AI art if it's high-effort and done well.
But I also find it annoying as hell when corporations and political actors push AI tools so hard and blatantly exagerate its potential. The concept of "artificial intelligence" is an inaccurate description of machine-learning, and the hype reminds me of a lot of the dot com bubble. Also, Google search has gotten noticeably worse, and porn sites are getting swamped with low-effort AI-generated images. Makes it harder to find what you're looking for, and buries the AI stuff that is actually well made.
And AI data centers are awful, man. The media has a tendency to overstate the potential effects of AI (both good and bad), but in this case the threat posed to water security is a cause for real concern. It's not even subtle. The town I live in is under Stage 2 water restrictions right now, after a data center was built upriver.
As a side note: the historical Luddites are misunderstood. The original Luddities in the 1810s, and later the Swing Rioters in the 1830s, fought to improve the lives of mill-workers, croppers, and threshers. While both movements failed to stop industrialization, over the long term their protests were successful in making working conditions more tolerable and galvanizing later, more nuanced movements for social reform that resulted in the first industrial regulations (which prevented, for example, more girls in textile mills having their fingers torn off by the automated looms). This came at great personal cost, of course: many of the Swingites ended up transported to the penal colonies of south Australia, and some of the Luddites were executed or shot during the crackdowns.
Also, as jkj pointed out, corporate-controlled models like "Grok" are hardly bastions of free speech. Grok in particular is well known for repeating Musk's personal biases (it is obsessed with an imaginary genocide in South Africa). Twitter/X (both before and after Musk's takeover) likewise has a long history of political censorship, and is well known to block keywords relating to its competitors (for example, "Substack"), or criticism of its parent company. There are better options for making AI porn than using Musk's tool.
That's just a small part of the creation side of things. The post production editing and formating can be done with free shit too. Also, all of the proprietary shit thats giving you folks issues, was built over the top of free stuff.
There are always options. Don ye Tinfoil, O penquins of the CyberSeas. I can't, I'm dumb as hell, but you guys might pull it off. Besides, the generation that started the whole Ren'Py thing was a bunch of pervy Linux weebs.
Bargain laptop + any stable linux (not Mint!), and you can get a lot done without subscriptions, spyware and constantly being held for ransom MicroDobeTosh.
They learn nothing, governments bail them out. Fascism/Communism is in your face already just with a new coat of paint. By the time the normies catch up its the fucking bread lines and too late to do shit.
Yeah, fuck Adobe. They've also rolled out a special kind of "Adobe protected pdf" that ONLY opens in Adobe acrobat/reader. I have to use them for my work, and I HATE IT.
Also, fuck Playstation for phasing out physical game discs.
At least swfs aren't fully dead yet. Flashpoint, Clean Flash, and other alternative players still exist, and some of the old flash artists are still around making stuff.
In my opinion, there are seven main factors behind the recent rise of corporate censorship:
1. Cyclical reversion to old norms. Western culture tends to go through cycles of more or less sexual permissiveness. (You can see this pretty clearly by looking at gradual changes in fashion, from the sheer-cut boob-a-licious dresses of the Elizabethian age down to high-collar Victorian stuffiness. The same applies to the age of consent, which has gradually fluctuated older and older as societies have become less agrarian and labor consequently less valuable, making kids an economic burden rather than an asset. Other examples are more sudden, like the difference between pre-code and post-code films in early Hollywood.) What was acceptable in one era would have scandalized the next. And in the US, porn was illegal for a long, long time under obscenity laws, until Hustler v Falwell successfully challenged the restrictions in court. Porn isn't a freedom we should take for granted. Could be we're entering another period of sexual restrictiveness. That certainly seems to be the fucking spirit of the times.
2. Consolidation. A handful of mega-corporations control the government, man. Like, super PACs and lobbyists representing special interest groups hold the purse strings of state. And in the US, Citizens United has made the distinction between the corporate and government sectors even less meaningful. And now there's even more direct corruption and undisguised attempts to influence elections, like a certain musky individual's multi-million lottery offer.
3. Privatization. Across the world, many governments have handed over functions to private industry, and massively cut back regulations. You can debate whether this is good or bad (spoiler: it's mostly bad*), but it certainly has the effect of enabling corporate censorship. Without any government interference, big tech gets to decide what is morally acceptable without ever consulting the public.
*Clear examples where privatization has lead to inefficiency include: the Boeing manufacturing crisis, the increasing reliance of militaries on private contractors that massively over-bill, adminsitrative bloat at colleges, the insurance claims process in the American healthcare industry, and mouldering public transit systems across the western world. More insidiously, academic publishing has also suffered from some of the effects of privatization: a handful of huge private corporations control access to journals, making scientific research prohibitively expensive for most people outside of either the university system or corporate labs.
4. The corporate cult of professionalism. If you want to understand why the modern western world is the way it is, read Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas and Listen, Liberal. The gist of the first book is that the culture war is political theater where wedge issues (e.g. hot-button shit like abortion, prayer in schools, guns, pronouns, minority rights, sexual mores, political correctness etc.) are used to distract from economic issues, and fiscal conservatism has quietly become the norm. The second book argues that the liberal middle class, with its support of technology, corporate culture, and obsession with consensus, has become complacent, seduced by elitism, and abandoned the working class. The New York Times and The Economist are pretty clear mouthpieces for the corporate technocracy, as are the various broadcast news outlets (e.g. ABC, NSNBC, FOX, CBS, BBC) on ALL sides of the culture war.
Under the culture of professionalism, discussion of social issues is politically acceptable to an extent, but discussion of economic inequality is framed as radical or sophmoric. The great history of populism in the US, from the Pullman Strike to the New Deal, has likewise been practically erased from high school history textbooks.
The politicization of global warming is a good example. Rather than going after big oil, liberal media has heavily promoted the idea that "climate impact" is a personal responsibility, dependent on an individual consumer's "carbon footprint". This shifts the onus away from the big corporations, and onto the individual consumer. And it allows corporations to charge more for "eco-friendly" products, and to profit off the backlash too by creating other brands that cater to climate skeptics. Liberal media shills "green" products and hippie shit, conservative media shills "big trucks n rollin' coal". It's all about framing, man.
The same goes for how the vegan/meat-eating debate is framed as "environmentalism" versus traditionalism. Green-washing, red-washing, blue-washing, companies will use every trick in the book to sell shit, and it turns out that branded identities sell really, really well. They're not just selling a product, they're selling a moral identity and set of experiences. And ultra-wealthy consumers, who have money to blow on experiences, are now a bigger market than the rest of consumers combined.
When it comes to porn, consensus means censorship. And the debate over what is "morally acceptable" in porn becomes just another theater in the culture war.
5. Pearl-clutching ultra-conservative "think of the children" reactionaries. A recent example would be Collective Shout, the main group behind the push to censor lewd and LGBT games on Steam and Itch, as well as the anti-porn laws in Texas and the Sunbelt. Older examples would be the Westboro Baptist Church, the John Birch Society, the McCarthyists, and Father Coughlin. At the academic level, the recent ban on American federal funding for research that uses certain keywords (for example, "gender") is another clear example of reactionary-lead censorship. One could also point to the worlwide rise of pseudo-libertarian, vaguely populist, neo-fascist movements like the AfD as conservative practioneers of censorship.
6. Loony ultra-liberal poke-bowl-eatin', latte guzzlin' coastal elites, subalterns, and snowflakes. These get a lot of media attention and blame already, some of it deserved, some of it exagerated or just made up to smear minorities and alt folks. The label has also changed a lot over the years (the current labels seem to be "DEI" and "woke", nebulously defined, or the good old reliable boogymen of "socialists" and "Marxists"). There aren't as many truely "woke" liberals as conservative media would have you believe, but they do exist. Some I support or sympathesize with, but others are just awful. If you've worked in academia, you'll definitely have met the worst sorts. They're the loudest, dumbest voices in the debates over subtle issues of gender, colonialism, and environmentalism, and sometimes the biggest hypocrites: for example, advocating for minority rights while in practice supporting gentrification. Together with the ultra-conservatives on the other side of the culture war, these are the main flag-bearers of witch-hunts and moral panics. Both claim to support free speech, but practice their own forms of extreme censorship (political correctness in the case of the ultra-libs, and traditional censorship in the case of the ultra-conservatives).
7. Neo-liberalism. Go read about it. Specifically, read about the effect of neo-liberalism on "post-truth" politics. The gist of it is that neo-liberal ideology (basically, the idea that free markets should be allowed to determine policy with government interference or communal input) treats identies and ideas as something that consumers can choose for themselves on an individual basis, and "improve" by buying the "right" products and subscribing to the "right" views. (Look at all the podcasts, corporate slop, and self-help books shilling variants of this idea.) Treating ideas like a marketplace has the unintended second-order effect of making facts a poltical commodity, where the truth is an exclusive product available only to expert "fact-checkers" or "in-the-know" talk-show hosts. The popularity of New Age-y shit in the 1970-1980s, conspiracy theories in the 1990s onward, and alternative facts in the 2020s, are all related to the rise of neo-liberalism as the dominant ideology in the western world.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
It's worth pointing out that AI is being used FOR censorship too. When Photoshop runs its algorithm to detect if your image is "inappropriate", it's using AI. And when Facebook was spying on its employees, it used AI to analyze their online activity.
Me, I'm a pragmitist. I'll play games that use AI art if it's high-effort and done well.
But I also find it annoying as hell when corporations and political actors push AI tools so hard and blatantly exagerate its potential. The concept of "artificial intelligence" is an inaccurate description of machine-learning, and the hype reminds me of a lot of the dot com bubble. Also, Google search has gotten noticeably worse, and porn sites are getting swamped with low-effort AI-generated images. Makes it harder to find what you're looking for, and buries the AI stuff that is actually well made.
And AI data centers are awful, man. The media has a tendency to overstate the potential effects of AI (both good and bad), but in this case the threat posed to water security is a cause for real concern. It's not even subtle. The town I live in is under Stage 2 water restrictions right now, after a data center was built upriver.
As a side note: the historical Luddites are misunderstood. The original Luddities in the 1810s, and later the Swing Rioters in the 1830s, fought to improve the lives of mill-workers, croppers, and threshers. While both movements failed to stop industrialization, over the long term their protests were successful in making working conditions more tolerable and galvanizing later, more nuanced movements for social reform that resulted in the first industrial regulations (which prevented, for example, more girls in textile mills having their fingers torn off by the automated looms). This came at great personal cost, of course: many of the Swingites ended up transported to the penal colonies of south Australia, and some of the Luddites were executed or shot during the crackdowns.
Also, as jkj pointed out, corporate-controlled models like "Grok" are hardly bastions of free speech. Grok in particular is well known for repeating Musk's personal biases (it is obsessed with an imaginary genocide in South Africa). Twitter/X (both before and after Musk's takeover) likewise has a long history of political censorship, and is well known to block keywords relating to its competitors (for example, "Substack"), or criticism of its parent company. There are better options for making AI porn than using Musk's tool.
100% agree and the death of physical disc is covering up the fact they still have 1 store per console.
I fucking hate people when they talk about cost of keeping up a store on a older device when said store is on the same servers as the current store and said company makes billions a month. They can make a console that has a emulator for older consoles and have 1 store across all devices like pc has.
As far as blurays being to small they were made 21 years ago there successor is from GE via holographic discs they were cancelled though but further development they could have been a way to install the game via disc as they could hold up to 500gb first gen but they were trying to make 1tb discs.
Adobe is just trash throughout, literally the only reason i see they are still going is that they have the big name recognition behind them that makes a bunch of people buy from them before they know there are better and cheaper/free options out there.
Adobe is just trash throughout, literally the only reason i see they are still going is that they have the big name recognition behind them that makes a bunch of people buy from them before they know there are better and cheaper/free options out there.
Actually as someone that works on pc's in the office environment they get there money because of compatibility like posted above how there getting .pdf to only work on there software and companies using them like MS office trash fucking software but used over open office due to file compatibility/training.
So sadly they will continue to be trash while making cash.
100% agree and the death of physical disc is covering up the fact they still have 1 store per console.
I fucking hate people when they talk about cost of keeping up a store on a older device when said store is on the same servers as the current store and said company makes billions a month. They can make a console that has a emulator for older consoles and have 1 store across all devices like pc has.
As far as blurays being to small they were made 21 years ago there successor is from GE via holographic discs they were cancelled though but further development they could have been a way to install the game via disc as they could hold up to 500gb first gen but they were trying to make 1tb discs.
The end of physical media isn’t really about cost it’s about control. That excuse about discs being “too small” for modern games doesn’t hold up either. Back in the PS1 era, games came on two discs. Same with PS2, and even the Xbox 360. Those consoles ran games directly off the disc, but now we’re forced to install everything anyway, so having multiple discs wouldn’t be a valid excuse.
As for production costs, I can’t speak for companies I don’t know, but I once got a quote from a small printing company: 1,000 Blu-rays ready for sale came out to about $1.66 per unit. Adding a second disc was just $0.41 more. Sure, that quote is outdated, but I don’t see why the price would have changed drastically. And for a company producing at scale, the cost per unit would be even lower.
Operational costs for maintaining a store at that level are almost insignificant. People often assume costs are the same for a small business which has to rent space and hire staff just for that purpose and for a giant corporation that already has servers, employees, and billions in profit. It’s not comparable.
So when they shut down a store, it’s not because of costs. It’s about restricting public access. The data itself is still considered valuable, and they’ll keep it running internally, which means it continues to generate costs anyway.
The end of physical media isn’t really about cost it’s about control. That excuse about discs being “too small” for modern games doesn’t hold up either. Back in the PS1 era, games came on two discs. Same with PS2, and even the Xbox 360. Those consoles ran games directly off the disc, but now we’re forced to install everything anyway, so having multiple discs wouldn’t be a valid excuse.
As for production costs, I can’t speak for companies I don’t know, but I once got a quote from a small printing company: 1,000 Blu-rays ready for sale came out to about $1.66 per unit. Adding a second disc was just $0.41 more. Sure, that quote is outdated, but I don’t see why the price would have changed drastically. And for a company producing at scale, the cost per unit would be even lower.
Operational costs for maintaining a store at that level are almost insignificant. People often assume costs are the same for a small business which has to rent space and hire staff just for that purpose and for a giant corporation that already has servers, employees, and billions in profit. It’s not comparable.
So when they shut down a store, it’s not because of costs. It’s about restricting public access. The data itself is still considered valuable, and they’ll keep it running internally, which means it continues to generate costs anyway.
Yep. This is a good analysis. It's about control and ensuring continued monopoly over access to products on a given platform. What you've described is sometimes called "platform monopolization".
Aside from artificially raising prices for consumers due to lack of competition, maintaining a platform monopoly provides companies with opportunities to engage in other kinds of unethical practices. For example, "digital only" distribution makes it easy for publishers to quietly de-list old games so consumers will buy newer versions. There have even been instances where companies abruptly pulled support from or disabled features in older games shortly before releasing a newer, more expensive version with shinier graphics. (Ross's Gaming Dungeon has some insightful video essays on the subject.) Planned obsolescence is a more widespread strategy than many realize.
Outside of gaming, another clear example of the effects of "platform monopoly" would be "Big AG" machinery companies like John Deer, which now require farmers to purchase expensive firmware updates in order to keep their tractors repaired and working. Another well-known example, currently being litigated in EU courts, is the question of whether Alphabet/Google's effective monopoly over web-search violates anti-trust and fair competition laws.
Certain social markets have also been affected by digital monopolies. In terms of online dating, for example, Match Group has achieved an almost total monopoly over dating apps. (Other forms of social media are less affected by platform monopoly: although corporations like Meta, Twitter/X, and Reddit have achieved market dominance, alternative platforms still exist.)
A subtler example would be the academic publishing industry. The big firms that publish academic journals, like Brill-DeGruyter and Springer-Link, have an effective monopoly for many fields of research, and control their own web distribution platforms for digital articles. As a result, prices have been jacked up tremendously (like, $100 to view a digital article, or $600 for monographs). If you've been to college and had to buy (or better, pirate) "new editions" of textbooks, you'll probably have run into the junior version of this. Universities and research companies pay for access for their employees, while those outside the system are faced with either the prohibitive cost of buying access or the time cost of waiting for inter-library loans or scans. Likewise, repository services like HathiTrust, which were built on scanning projects that used public funding with the promise of eventual free access (under the auspices of Google books), now use copyright law to restrict access behind paywalls.
A controlled market also makes it easier for corporations to defend their IP. Protecting copyright is a priority for many big companies, because copyrighted material is (alongside consumer data) the lifeblood of the information age: it's mainly for this reason that Bethesda doesn't allow paid mods for Skyrim, and why Nintendo stomps down so hard on cracks and fan mods. When a company controls not only the close source code, games, and consoles, but also the market for buying games, vertical integration both reduces costs and makes it easier to control content on the platform, or to introduce anti-piracy measures like "game launchers" designed to prevent IP "theft".
It's harder to "steal" what you never physically own in the first place.
On a related note, it's wild how much bigger games have gotten since the early 2000s. A cynic might argue that memory bloat isn't just because of higher resolution graphics, but also because demand for more memory forces users to buy new devices every few years if they want to play the latest games. The graphics barrier also helps reduce competition from the indie market. You can't run GTA6 on an old machine, and you can't produce something of the same scope as GTA as an indie dev. That's just economics, sadly.
Mandatory Windows updates have also ballooned exponentially in size in recent years:
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The increasing demand for memory probably has some legitimate explanations, but it does have the side-effect of encouraging users to buy more storage (either on the cloud, or physically). So Microsoft (and other corporations, like Adobe) has a perverse incentive to make updates larger and larger, or at least not to care very much about keeping them small and streamlined. Big and bloated means more profit.
I'd wadger most mega-corporations aren't intentionally unethical. Many companies, either for moral reasons or out of fear of lawsuits, do their best to avoid outright malicious behavior (with some exceptions: Uber, Kalshi, and Hobby Lobby have all been convicted of not only unethical, but illegal practices, and are pretty clealry bad actors in their respective sectors). But in the absence of regulations, unchecked profit-seeking behavior often leads to bad outcomes for consumers.
A bit of inefficency from regulation isn't always a bad thing.
so no doubt they had a hand in that. 
