I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If the market is sufficiently free, you only need a handful of experts to look past the BS and inform the public. In the past, we called those people journalists, and they would hold bad actors to task.

The issue seems to be that government has given in to moneyed interests and allowed them to shut down critics. If we had actual consequences, like jail time or confiscation of personal wealth for illegal behaviour, I think it would self-correct.

When most people refer to capitalism, they mean free market or laissez-faire capitalism. Many (most?) of the issues you mentioned require government to step in to occur. For example:

• trusts - government structure to protect wealth
• oligopoly - failure of government to prevent collusion (price fixing and whatnot are expressly anti-competitive)
• regulatory capture - government must be complicit since regulations are typically a government thing

I think government has a place in protecting the free market, but it needs to be restrained so it doesn’t get manipulated into destroying the free market. For example, a regulation could protect consumers, but it could also raise the barrier to entry and prevent competition from correcting the underlying problem.

A lot of the issues stem from corporate welfare, where wealthy people are able to manipulate corporate structures to build their own wealth and protect themselves from liability. I think it’s largely those liability protections that encourage anti-competitive behavior. End the protections and courts can meaningfully punish corporations when they break the law.

A few dozen people don’t make a product viable, tens or hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people do.

It’s a natural byproduct though. Assuming a free enough market, you should have several people all supplying the same good. Some will compete on price, some on quality, and some on overall service.

The problems happen when competition evaporates, either from regulations raising the barrier to entry, acquisitions, or resource scarcity. Capitalism assumes people are greedy and pits them against each other to provide better services to everyone. A lack of competition isn’t “capitalism functioning as intended,” but instead the opposite, it means something is preventing capitalism from working as intended.

RX6650 XT, everything works fine on my Linux desktop (Tumbleweed), my SO had had some issues on Windows with the 6700XT, but they run games in the background almost 24/7, so it could just be a heat issue in the ITX case.

Hmm, I have a Tesla dealership nearby that seems short on staples…

Best I can do is tree fiddy.

Then maybe I’ll try it sometime. I don’t like base building (feels like crafting), but exploration can be fun. But it’s pretty far down my list.

It’s pretty fun, and I think the studio that made it is located near me.

That’s like 4.5 years of labor for $100k!

Lol, yeah, that could actually get me to play. “Whose a good hydralisk? You are! Yes you are!”

In game time isn’t everyone’s metric for a good game. Some of my favorite games only have a few hours of content, but those few hours are really good.

I’ve watched some let’s plays of Starcraft Valley, and I’m glad I did because I probably wouldn’t like it, and if I had to give it a rating, it would be pretty mediocre.

I think it being so positively rated is that there are a ton of casual gamers that this type of game really appeals to, not that it has a lot to do.

I just really don’t like crafting mechanics in games, and the game seemed very collecting and crafting heavy.

Source?

Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.

I’m not ignorant of it, just uninterested. I’ve watched gameplay footage of the first one, and it didn’t look like my kind of game.

Yeah, I assume the key cards have a bit of margin, but they probably need to keep margins low on 64GB cards or devs won’t bother, and physical media does have value for Nintendo’s target market.

Buying on PC is a lot cheaper than buying on consoles typically, especially after a year or two, and PC sales are mostly (all?) digital now.

And the thing about cartridges not holding the game is limited to specific games, devs still have the option of putting the full game on a cartridge instead of the license option. All that happened here is that devs got another option on how to sell their game, so if you want to gift someone a digital game but want a physical item to give to them, the license on cartridge option is perfect, and AFAIK it preserves the ability to resell the game (may be dependent on the game though).

I highly doubt it costs that much. You can buy 64GB SD cards for ~$10 retail, which includes:

• margin for retailer
• margin for company “making” it
• margin for factory producing it

If each step is something like 50% markup (not unheard of), the cost to actually get these things from a factory is probably about $2. Make it a bit more expensive because the packaging is unique to Nintendo, and their quantities are probably a bit less than regular retail SD cards, so maybe it’s like $5 per card.

That’s a lot more than an optical disk, which are probably under $1, but nothing too crazy.

I have no special insight here, just some general understanding of how retail works.

She even gets it done in Smash.

Achievements.