Well, then prevent that via regulation, too. It fatalistic to say "Well, we just can't possibly regulate companies, because they will surely find loopholes and avoid the regulation!" The answer is to write better, more thorough regulation that prevents loopholes. That shouldn't be such a tall order!
Just write a regulation that every game developer has to make a great game, not charge too much, support it for years, and give it away for free as soon as it's not popular. That way, we'll only have great games and archives of great free games.
Then just regulate the term Great. You can regulate everything. Just send in the troops to force gamedevs to only make Red Alert 2, objectively the government derived best possible game. Any deviation from Red Alert 2 will be severely punished.
Force them to list an effective annual subscription fee more prominently displayed than any “purchase” price. If they can’t guarantee any level of service, the license is assumed to be valid for one day, and their game ‘costs’ thirty thousand dollars.
> Design for the people who are using and who like your product. Make adjustments based on their feedback. Ignore the people who just make noise.
And how do you know the userbase for GP's specific product is all Flatpak users? In fact, based on their comment, it appears as though they are explicitly not, hence their vocal frustration.
Most places other than the USA, when they use these card networks or their local country networks, are normally using debit cards. There's just no reason to overcomplicate a payment card by making it also a loan.
Mid-thirties Brit here. I've never owned a credit card, neither has my partner.
All of our card transactions are with a debit card.
I've never needed instant-access debt so it's not really an attractive proposition. Perhaps the added consumer protection rules could be worth it, but it's not been an issue to date.
Much more common in Europe, which is partly cultural, and partly because there's not the same single/dual message technical distinction between debit and credit cards, so you don't "need" a credit card in the way you would for certain things in the US (e.g. a hotel that wants to preauth it).
That surprises me, I've never met someone that uses Debit cards as their primary method of payment.
You lose a lot of consumer protections and many cashback rewards by using only Debit cards. The only drawback to credit cards is the interest, if you don't pay it off at the end of the month. So long as you're responsible with your spending, it's a direct upgrade.
> That surprises me, I've never met someone that uses Debit cards as their primary method of payment.
That in turn is not surprising – the split is very much correlated with socioeconomic status (to the point where quite a few of the people working on debit card products have never themselves used a debit card to pay, in my experience).
> The only drawback to credit cards is the interest [...]
Which is a significant drawback if your bank account balance regularly oscillates around zero and/or you've seen your peers get in financial trouble from credit card debt.
I buy flights on credit card, and other one-off purchases like house and car insurance, and often my Costco purchases (because the credit card lives in a different wallet where I normally keep my membership card).
My day-to-day wallet just contains a debit card so that gets used for almost everything else.
Internet transactions are usually done using Revolut because then I can use a disposable card number.
do consider that in Italy most credit cards cost around ~30€ per year + a 2€ tax for all months you spend more than ~70€ and most offer no benefits. Debit cards are offered for free by all banks. So credit is only used to rent cars (not really mandatory anymore) and if you really need the credit (but other ways of getting short term credit exist now).
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