I want to play this but a confluence of factors has made it unviable - ludicrous price tag (even for the "basic" version), not being available on Steam or GoG or other sane platforms, and always-online bullshit.
It's like game developers nowadays actively don't want you to buy their game. It's like running a fucking obstacle course, and your reward is a letdown.
It's often said of capitalism that it kinda works in the sense that it does produce stuff we want, most of the time, and produce it well. And that's true to an extent, but there seems to be a level of development of capitalist institutions where they no longer really work on the profit principle, but start to compete for market share, and/or promote their hobby-horses. Which is natural, really, but should be carefully monitored by a democratically-elected State.
There seems to be a point where capitalist product actually gets more clunky and shoddy instead of more streamlined and shiny. That's been the case a lot with computers in some areas (e.g. the proliferation of office make-work, when we were promised a "paperless office").
In a way, this is both a libertarian argument that they (big capitalists) are not behaving in a properly capitalist manner (they're not maximizing profit, but a kind of dominance hierarchy status that's outside the domain of economic behaviour proper)
and a Left-wing argument against corporate greed.
Do we really hate the small businessman, the entrepreneur, the shopkeeper? No, in fact the way capitalism develops in the real world, it seems to shut such people out - i.e. the middle class gets squeezed out, and you have the super-rich and the plebs, with a merely managerial (not entrepreneurial) class inbeetween. As Burns said, "there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip" and something goes wrong with the capitalist process at some scales and in some conditions. The best thing for capitalism is actually a strong state that rules with a light hand, a state
capable of severely punishing capitalist malfeasance, and
very willing to do so if necessary, but that leaves capitalist acts between consenting adults free, so long as they're not harmful.
Oh God, am I becoming a libertarian again?
