I don’t know what Judd was smoking when finalising the deal with the new owners, but I thought it was super obvious from reddit and forums by end of season 2 that there’s no point servicing this market segment. LE was being held up against the standards of POE1 and POE2 and the market was demanding releases of a frequency and quality that is just way beyond the budget of EHG’s then size. Theres no way for an underfunded, undersized incumbent to win against unrealistic customer expectations.
EHG would have been remembered as the bad guy and an example of how not to develop an ARPG either way, but at least if EHG had just closed down after season 2 the developers could have went on to infinitely more meaningful jobs by now rather than servicing the absolute worst market segment in the entirety of human history past present and future.
1- Were roman slaves the only slaves that existed? Were there no other slaves that maybe suffered quite a lot?
Then the argument is valid that there were worse periods (past present and future) than being an ARPG programmer in the 21st century.
2- Spoken like someone that was never actually a slave and doesn’t actually have any idea what it’s like to have no freedom.
Just gonna say inform yourself about the size between the 2 biggest slave situations in human history… which was the roman slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.
Then check the overall living conditions of the worker compared to slaves at the time to get a baseline.
Then talk again when comparing it to the comparable base-condition of living level nowadays.
You’ll be surprised, but not in a good way. As the living standard rises overall so does the comparison level shift. Imagine ‘not being free’ but havign to work but without the human rights being removed. Now imagine also that despite that you weren’t - commonly - treated badly in roman culture for example, it wasn’t societal acceptable as it would mean you don’t take good care of your property.
They had friggin better lives in several areas then modern workers.
But don’t worry… that’s not world-wide the case, hence we don’t need to compare it with the total condition there anyway… just percentile-based the good sides versus the bad sides respectively… and it still comes out as better despite no freedom.
Should make you think.
But yeah, the ARPG-dev definitely doesn’t fall into the category, they’re upper middle-class, hence equivalent to a freshly freed roman slave which has just gotten enough to buy their freedom at commonly the age of ~30, just risking to easily fall back lower unlike in roman times… where by the way basically no differentiation was made between a wage worker and a slave, just to mention that as a side-comment as well.
So maybe before virtue-signalling you should get into the nitty-gritty of a topic rather then regurgitating what 99,9% of people have for a shallow understanding coming from the instilled lessons because of the transatlantic slave trade aftermath. Despite extreme upheaval in food security and convenience goods it was the worst time in human history to be alive in… as a free ‘average’ person. Mind you, that’s the british empire to be specific. The historical timeframe in which more death, illness and general atrocity was commited then during any socialistic regime or any human-faced disaster of any kind in history as much as we know.
