Games

I feel like you're attacking the wrong thing.

The subscription hike is something, but U.S./U.K. inflation from 2008 to 2022 is about 40%, and that's not accounting for any changes in corporate taxes. Its... well, it's kinda mad that WoW hasn't increased the subscription price that whole time, if that's true, but that's partially because they sell expansions, right? And those probably creep up with inflation.

The problem is the choices they've made with that money, aka shoving more aggressive monetization into the game instead of keeping it simple, which was so central to its appeal long ago. Of taking short term profits instead of investing in R&D, new game development, and deeper development for Runescape. This is the real corporate greed. Making money is fine, but just taking it as pure profit at the expense of long-term health is destructive, greedy, unfair to the employees and wrong.

Also, I played Runescape ages ago, and well... I just got tired of the game. I feel like thats why many people left, and I also think it's kinda mad expecting most players to play the same game forever.

Meanwhile in osrs team they have open communication with the community, new content is released only if accepted by vast majority of players, no mtx or other major enshittification of games, the developers clearly very much care of the game and want to keep it running.

You can't say that for vast majority of the game developers

I quit when they announced the membership increase a few months ago.

I've been logging on for the new updates since my membership lasts until next month but they have all been pretty much terrible since.

It really saddens me to see the game go down this path.

Jagex profit has risen by 280% since 2008

That's... the opposite of killing the game

I quit probably 11 years ago. IIRC they did some dumb stuff to cap trades, and I played out most of everything that was very cool & interesting, and they kept adding new stupid skills that I had absolutely no interest in doing. Like the hunting/trapping skill. But then they'd release sick new quests, with good rewards/perks, but to do them you'd have to extensively train up that yucky, boring, dumb "skill" that you would never use otherwise. If not for that quest.

They turned my play into work, and took the fun out of it, and eventually I was like why am I paying these people so I can grind away hours on dumb stuff that I don't even like?? So I quit.

You do realize you're the probelm right? The only vote that matters is the one you make with your wallet, and you voted the subscription hikes are ok.

I think your need to do some inflation adjustment, their costs increase a lot as well. And raw "record profits" aren't meaningful when not inflation adjusted.

Everything is getting more expensive, thats mostly not corporate greed (some of it is tbh) its just the general world economics being in a very big crisis from multiple world effecting events, covid, Russia attacking Ukraine, the fucking Suez channel ship thing (yes that shit actually effected world economics), the comeback of terrorism, the right wing people playing Russian spys for their own gains in all of the western world (super left as well, but they don't have much power gladly) Chinas entire economy is going down the drain for many internal reasons. The World economy has long covid, untreated epilepsy and very bad hemorrhoids all at once basically.