AnyOldName3

A big part of the reason was that Facebook offered game studios a big upfront sum if they made their games work on whatever headset they were selling at the time in standalone mode with no major caveats. The headset only had an anemic mobile GPU, so was only capable of as much as mobile games were doing at the time. A bunch of studios took them up on this offer, and cut back their projects’ scope to be viable under the hardware constraints, so nearly everything that got made was gimmicky mobile-style minigames, and obviously that’s not what makes people want to drop hundreds of dollars on hardware, as they can get their fill by borrowing someone else’s headset for an hour.

Mobile GPUs have improved, so standalone headsets aren’t as terrible now, but we missed the expensive toy for enthusiasts and arcades phase and soured most people’s opinions by making their first VR experience shovelware.

It’s not realistic to demand to own games in the same way as a spoon any time soon. It is, however, pretty reasonable to demand you own games like you’d own a book. You can chop up a book and use it to make a paper maché dog, but you can’t chop up the words within to make a new derivative book (or just copy them as its to get another copy of the same book except for a single backup that you’re not allowed to transfer to someone else unless you also give them the original). The important things you can do with a book but not a game under the current system, even with Gog, are things like selling it on or giving it away when you’re done with it and lending it out like a library.

About a hundred years ago, book publishers tried using licence agreements in books to restrict them in similar ways to how games and other software are restricted today, but courts decided that was completely unreasonable, and put a stop to it. In the US, that’s called the First Sale Doctrine, but it has other names elsewhere or didn’t even need naming. All the arguments that applied to books apply equally well to software, so consumers should demand the same rights.

The vfs of MO2 isn’t the thing that’s hard to port. FUSE would make it fairly straightforward and the main reason USVFS is complicated in the first place is that there’s not a way to make a fast VFS under Windows due to the higher overhead of going back and forth between kernel and user mode, so it has to resort to hooking most of the multitude of functions in the Win32 and NT filesystem APIs instead of just providing about twenty callbacks like you’d do with FUSE.

A mod manager looks much simpler than it is as it looks like you’re just keeping track of lists of files, but mods come in the most insane packaging formats ever devised (e.g. with mad compression schemes and custom scripting languages) and mod managers need to selectively pretend to have all the bugs of every other mod manager as mods get made that rely on a particular bug in the mod manager their author used.

MO2 has a particular extra complexity when thinking about porting it to Linux in that it uses Win32 APIs in lots of places it doesn’t really need to, and also does so in a few places where it’s genuinely much more convenient that it does. It also uses a custom build system generator generator because its CMake and dependencies are too complicated for a human to practically deal with, so it would take loads of work to even build a completely unusable binary on Linux. We have people volunteer to do the work a few times a year and read a warning I write that looks like this comment and claim to have the willpower to do it anyway, but none of them have ever submitted a single commit.

Being mean is willfully making people around you feel worse. Being cringe is negligently making people around you feel worse. Once you’re aware you’re cringe, if you do nothing to mitigate it, you’re being willfully negligent, which is just as bad as doing something intentionally.

Edit: I’ve posted the same joke as a response each time I’ve seen this meme, and this is the first time it hasn’t been well-received. Just in case that’s down to people thinking I’m being mean instead of making a joke, I’ll clarify that I am in favour of letting people enjoy things.