Exactly. We spent four years playing into their hands, its going to take us decades to recover from that mistake.

Why make money if you can make MORE money?

Ask Texas how that’s goin.

https://www.statista.com/chart/6780/only-5-countries-have-a-bigger-gdp-than-california/

It’s gdp is more that france

Honestly, so long as people keep buying their phones they really don’t care about this kind of stuff. Sure, it was a way to drive up margins for a while, but they will just move onto their next bag of tricks to make it hard to leave.

This can be handled a few different ways.

• You can boot from a HDD and then just not ever write data back to it. This would be the most trivial solution, and it’s something people do with their Pi’s a lot to avoid SD card failure.
• You could network boot, pull the OS from the network at startup. Fun fact, this is how some rockets fly! No onboard persistent storage needed. Everything boots into and runs from ram the whole 10 ish minutes of operation.
• You COULD do a ROM as you suggested, but that’s a LOT of ROM. Seems odd to do imho.

I feel like lack of ownership of more and more things in our lives is a sign of problems. Sure, this is just a silly game. But this kind of shit is already hitting cars.

Which is why we need meaningful consumer protections around this. Something with teeth to force publishers to back these sorts of things.

Aye, but forcing them to put a clear “We support this until this date” label will make that a mandated part of their marketed.

That or, you know, force companies to release server software when they sunset support for their product. That would also be nice.

Makes me wonder how long before we see translation AI that approximates your voice. Not great for AAA game, but better than nothing.