USA slowly changing into country like Russia, Izrael or China.

It was easy to predict that giving all the power to small group of oligarchs will end up like that. What's next, complete removal of independent media or no more elections.

USA is not a democracy, two party system and oligarchs did it, techno feudalism it's the future.

Concord... rofl

Though as you say, it's not a genre problem but a capitalist piece of shit problem.

Games USED to be able to be hosted locally. You USED to be able to spin up a server and play with your friends without paying the capitalist tax. Not so more.

The entire ~~industry~~ world is rotting in wait for these fucking morons to realize profit above all else is cancer.

I may be wrong as I don't really play the genre, but I think Marvel Rivals is kinda the king of the hero shooter genre right now.

But that said I generally do agree that "another live service game that doesn't clear a very high bar" is the issue. The recent success of ARC Raiders despite social media telling me people "don't want extraction shooters and to give it up" really drives home the point of "if it's good enough... It'll probably do well."

(And I realize those two are third person games, so not "first person shooters", but I'd still consider them competition for them.)

And with the economy the way it is, yeah, money matters a lot more. People are more likely to dedicate their time to one big game, and sometimes a couple of smaller ones. It makes things an "all or nothing" proposition. And most games don't look like "all".

Unless you're Skyrim you can't just reskin a thing and release it. I think the problem is there's either poor marketing, or nothing new here.

In order to oust a competitor, and take their audience you need to be a more than a little better than the previous game. You need to be A LOT better for people to leave behind the familiarity, the time invested, and the community.

liveservice games completely lost any goodwill

And yet gacha liveservice shit reskins some fantasy into SF or the other way around every few weeks and makes good money.

Since almost 100k people tried it on Steam at launch and the next day it's a ghost town, I'd say it's very much whether the game is good or not. And 3 vs 3 on huge maps, with prefight busywork that feels like it could be skipped with no loss, on UE5 (which might be a good engine, but from high-end graphics games I learned to expect smeary upscaled shit with lumen painting everything grainy and blurry, input lag badly disguised with motion blur, etc.). Also, they lost a sizeable chunk of players to their TPM+secure boot requirements, even people who don't know computers realized it means ad-serving fucking corpos can trust your secure computer, not you yourself.

Its over saturated because each of these games gate unlockables either under microtransactions or enough time that it effectively becomes the only game you play.

Boomer shooters welcome other boomer shooters, they only have a finite time worth of content before you're replaying them for the sake of replaying them.

Aside from specific dependencies that may want some installed packages even if you don't use them, yes, it's fine.

I have used Debian for 15 years, with Gnome 2 then MATE, and now I'm using Cinnamon, while mixing with any GTK apps I can find.

Unless the programs in question rely on conflicting core dependencies that actually have to have hooks into the system, like KWallet and other credential managers, and other similarly "system" level tools, you'll be totally fine. Worst case while avoiding those, you might have to install some hefty frameworks (eg: KDE's dependencies are >1gb), but that's about it.

If they need to integrate with specific core utilities, it can get weird. Though as long as you check for conflicting stuff before actually installing, you'll be fine.

Certainly. I've had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE's xfce4-terminal, MATE's Caja file browser, and GNOME's Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won't get in the way either.

Display manager won't matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you're interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

sure, but in doing so you have to follow the rules:

1. be mindful of what you install
2. dont be afraid to remove stuff
3. have fun :3