When people may get into a competitive game, data shows that they commit to it as their primary game.

It becomes a part of their identity. You see things like Leage of Legends going strong despite a slow down in new players - people just commit to it for better or for worse, likely because most of the skills they’ve gained in it and friends they’ve made will not transfer to other games. Even other FPS games have different nuances that are non trivial once a player becomes serious about winning.

Take Wild Rift vs Mobile Legends Bang Bang. MLBB is objectively a worse rip off of League of Legends and the Chinese game Glory of Kings, but it was first to market on mobile. Now that League has released their mobile version with immense polish and quality, many mobile moba gamers just aren’t interested - they’re already totally invested in their main game, despite it being proved in court that it’s a cheap copy. (Not cheap as in $$$ though)

When you’re a kid, spending time on any competitive game will be fun (if you can handle the baseline toxicity) since you will start bad at most of them. When you get older there is a real cost to switching, you will not have as much fun until you build up the years of muscle memory that would be needed to even approach your skill at the previous game.

Because of the lock in, if a competitive game finds a sizeable enough player base and lasts a good handful of years, the devs essentially get free rein to milk their cow as they see fit.

Jesus fucking Christ

Consider installing NextCloud on a private virtual Ubuntu/debian server. You can deploy it via docker or other various ways to make this easy.

This can essentially grant you full control over your data as long as you trust wherever you host the server. You can install other open source apps on top of it - like only office which can give you live shared file editing like google drive or one drive.

Nextcloud has phone app access. NextCloud supports markdown. NextCloud is fully open source, and actively developed due to enterprise support contracts, kind of like Fedora. You could secure access over the internet through a VPN, https and every other hardening scheme.

If you don’t trust any infrastructure then host it on a laptop, so many reliable used devices can be picked up for cheap. Expand to other devices for redundancy as you become comfortable.

Feel free to create accounts for family and people you trust, freeing your community from monopoly.

Ask ChatGPT for the steps in between. This is my personal set up, feel free to ask me any questions ChatGPT can’t help with, though I may be slow to answer.

Siralim Ultimate. It’s like Pokémon but your party is essentially a machine built from passive effect interactions and the gameplay is like Diablo.

Absolute hidden gem.