Online gaming used be the wild west, free from the shackles of reality, one could immerse themselves in all manner of hijinks and trollery. Anyone remember how toxic the old Modern Warfare lobbies were? That shit was the best. Absolute madness, a magical place of racial slurs where every squeakers dad works for Microsoft, and you will learn about how much of a whore your mom is. Not anymore. Hurt someone's feefees these days and BANNED. And you can't even make new accounts hardly because damn near everything has an IP blacklist and has to verify your identity with a phone number, email, and rectal examination. Everything, even M-rated content, has become watered down bland family-safe yuck. Just because it has blood and gore doesn't make it any less childish, and cries about a "bad community" frequently ruin what otherwise could be fun. On that note, why is everything a "community" these days, anyway?
This applies in a broader sense to the internet as a whole. Everything must safe to protect the children (and to appease the Chinese communists). Look at YouTube and what that's turned into. Comments are disabled on half the videos, and you have to sign in (read: be tracked) to watch the other half. YouTube kids? What a fucking joke. Why are 1st season SpongeBob clips even flagged as for kids? The only people watching those are people who grew up with it, and are now firmly in their 20's. Or Looney Toons from over 50 years ago, yeah, I'm sure all those views are from children, and totally not nostalgic adults. Give me a fucking break.
I find it so ironic that literal porn webites have no more age verification than 'click here to confirm you're 18' but YouTube, which doesn't allow porn anyway*, has to censor everything to protect the children from seeing naughty words.
It's such a fucking joke to me that on the internet, this platform where you can find literal beheading videos with a little simple Google search, sites try to market themselves as safe or family friendly. Here's an idea: Parents, get off your lazy asses and entertain your little shits instead of just giving them a smartphone. Stop expecting ANYONE to look out for your little bags of saltwater, and do it yourself. And KEEP YOUR FUCKING KIDS OFF THE INTERNET IF YOU CARE ABOUT THEM. The whole thing should be 18+, with maybe a few genuine educational sites as a small exception. Rated M or R means kids GTFO.
I am aware that these sound like the ramblings of a lunatic who is just mad he can't cyberbully people anymore, but I think the bar for what people consider cyberbullying has dropped way too fucking low. I think it's reasonable to want to be able to brutal trash talk, and get some back, in an M-rated game.
But I guess it doesn't matter anymore because hardly anyone actually plays a good old deathmatch/team deathmatch. PvP is all about battle royale now. Any game that actually tries to do a unique PvP mode (like DOOM Eternal's Battlemode) simply doesn't pick up the traction that PvE gets.
Not to mention just how bloated games have gotten. And I don't mean the raw file size, storage is cheap and I understand 8K textures take up a lot of space. I mean bloated as in the sheeer amount of crap. Lootboxes, microtransactions, invasive DRM and anticheat, online accounts and independant launchers. Steam, Epic, 2K, Origin, FUCK... Steam is arleady a launcher. I think people have forgotton that. There is absolutely no circumstance in which a launcher should open a launcher. Thank God Bethesda was smart enough to finally ditch theirs, I commend them for doing so.
I would say I don't understand why companies think this is a good idea, but I do. The more crap they force you to install the more data they can harvest from you. It really is that simple. Same reason why every company selling literally any product or service has to have some garbage bloated app, instead of just a functional mobile version of their site. The data they siphon from that app running in the background is far more lucrative than whatever you were actually going to pay them. What's even grosser is that the bulk of these "apps" are just stripped-down front ends for Chrome, with some extra spyware stacked on top. If all your app does is point to a URL, is it really an app?
Spoiler: It isn't. And you should be ashamed for forcing it on your users.
*Although they do "allow nudity when the primary purpose is educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic", strange given that art is subjective.