They can. IIRC, Amazon apps would check to make sure the Amazon App Store was still installed. And I’m pretty sure Netflix games stop working when you unsubscribe from Netflix

Because the developers want to check whether you got the app from the Play Store.

If the developers don’t care where you get the app from, then they won’t check.

It sounds like they simply aren’t making an 8900.

Maybe get a 3.5mm to USB dongle and just keep it attached to the headphones?

The vast majority of employees are not at the top of their pay scale. If you told them their salary will never grow faster then inflation, unlike you they would look for another job.

The average growth in corporate income over the past two decades is 4%/year. That’s comparable to what the average employee expects from their long-term salary growth.

I think it’s disingenuous to keep pushing this idea that corporations cannot survive without ever increasing income.

What would happen if your employer said you would never again get a raise? Most people would probably start looking for another job. At a minimum, they expect their long-term income to keep with inflation.

But if employee salaries are expected to grow over time, then so are the company revenues that pay those salaries. A company whose revenues stop growing is like an employee whose salary stops growing. They will not last long at whatever they are doing.

This is the easiest way. After installing the game, Heroic even has a command that will add it to Steam (with artwork IIRC).

Then every streaming service will die except Disney.

My sort of interesting experience:

I tried to buy the LE on launch day, and couldn’t get through the payment page. When it was listed as sold out, I bought a regular deck without much difficulty.

Then I saw the LE was available again, and decided to try to buy it again. I was planning to cancel my original order if I could get the LE.

I tried to check out dozens of times over the next 24 hours, but on the final page I kept getting the “something went wrong” error.

About an hour ago, I decided to cancel my original order (you can do this by requesting a refund on the order page). The refund was issued 15 minutes later.

I went back and tried to order the LE again, 30 minutes after the refund was confirmed. Went through on the very first try.

So from my limited experience, I think Steam might be blocking all LE orders (and maybe even regular deck orders?) if you already have an active order.

puts the burden of action on the individual

If the “problem” is that you are unhappy when a shitty new product appears, then the problem is you. Because you’ve embraced consumerism so deeply that you don’t know what to do with shitty new products.

Here’s an idea: don’t buy them. Not in order to send someone a message, “vote” for a better product, or otherwise take on the burden of product development. Don’t buy them because you don’t need an endless stream of new products, especially shitty new products. You don’t even need to buy great new products to be happy.

Just to take one example, I open Word docs on Office 2010. Not because I have been trying to send a message to Microsoft for over a decade. Maybe their newest version of Office is great. I wouldn’t know. But Word 2010 still works fine, so I don’t need another one. Diablo 3 still works fine too. I don’t want or need to convince a company to build a new improved version. They need to convince me to buy it.