TwilightVulpine

I see what you are saying, but Google is still not bleeding money and YouTube has become very well established already. In fact, for years YouTube contributes to Google's primary revenue source: Advertising. Of course, this is why they are opposed to ad blockers, that much makes perfect sense.

But I don't see any indication that it's not making ends meet. And I'm not taking an executive's word as proof, much less one from a whole different company. It's expected that they will say whatever make their actions look good, whether or not it's true.

Do you realize that right now there are US states trying to make publicly existing as a transgender person prosecutable as an obscene act? Or that there are states where abortion is illegal? I'm assuming you are american but that also applies to other countries. In Russia any public indication that one is LGBT is liable to get one persecuted by law and by bands of raging homophobes.

At the best of times this attitude "if you have done nothing wrong, you got nothing to hide" is naive. But these days, as the many flaws of the justice system and the raging bigotry of many people are transparent to see and widely commented on, it's downright clueless to say something like this.

I wouldn't apply Twitch's situation to YouTube, IF it's even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.

It doesn't seem to me a given that they'd boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying "Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷". It's easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.

Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn't figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn't they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it's user data. Maybe it's the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn't be hosting it. It wouldn't make sense.

But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It's just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It's not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.

Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I'm pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn't worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.

True, but if corporations don't care to adhere to ethical standards, then the users shouldn't need to either.

For people who got phones with 5 cameras and decide "this doesn't trigger my trypophobia badly enough"

VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content

Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?

But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?

The prospect that companies will just keep closing stores for each generation and letting games disappear makes me earnestly appreciate piracy.

And this is why I hate playing fighting games (and most versus games) online.

Well, that is a sign of the medium maturing. We've figured out most basic technological limitations and many design conventions to make games that are as close to the vision of the creators as we want them to be. Until some new great discovery drastically changes how games are made, now it's just a matter of building up on existing ideas, with new twists.

Indie games are pretty much the only ones I still buy on release.