It sometimes depends on the programmer’s situation. Maybe its “lose a ton of credibility or live on the street/lose your H-1B Visa”

Sometimes its either ship something broken or lose your job.

I say this as an autist who used to fucking loathe talking on the phone: Its that the phone takes up too much mental energy and time, yet has a time limit on your own responses. Its hellishly stressful when you are socially incompetent, and now a lot of even non-autistic people are becoming socially incompetent.

Now its funny, I hated phone calls back when everyone liked them. Now I’m pretty OK at them because I worked at a call center for a year and now it seems like everyone now hates phone calls. I kinda recognize that the one nice thing about phone calls is there is no “set up your account before ordering your food” type bullshit. There is a consistency to phone calls.

I want a hug.

This is why you run stuff locally or not at all.

Steam’s DRM is not mandatory to release a game on Steam. Its there in fact to provide a necessary lesser evil than to encourage every developer/publisher to produce their own. They still unfortunately do, which Steam at least warns customers about, but them providing their own minimal DRM is a good thing, given the context.

(That said, I still respect gog)

You point out that the game wouldn’t exist without exclusivity but then immediately point out that it totally could exist if the profit motive did not run our economy.

The existence of exclusives is a form of cultural capture by capitalists (As is copyright). I would argue that it would indeed be better if Alan Wake 2 was never made if it meant that exclusives stopped being made entirely, and Alan Wake 2 looks like a game I absolutely want to play.