Then the question is “just why”.

I didn’t even know that some games have proton blocked on purpose.

The upfront cost of entering the market getting higher and higher as an industry matures is one of the major reasons why we have incomplete competition and monopolies. If as a scrappy underdog you “just” need to build a network of serverfarms and hire the people to design, manage and run all that so you can just even start to dream about competing with the goliaths that basically have all that built and more then in practice you are not entering that market. That upfront cost is the issue, not the cost of running it in the long run.

It’s not even some malicious plot, it’s just the cost of doing business in a maturing market gets higher as technology advances. All these cloud providers know this upfront cost issue. White it’s easier to start with AWS they will try to keep everybody locked in so they can milk every cent out of their techofeudal peasants living in their fiefdom if they ever make it. If anybody wants to get out they need to cough up the cash to build all that infrastructure while still paying for Amazon to keep them going.

Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?

Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.