I don’t know how you can convince yourself that the Powers That Be is so powerful that it can just ram age verification through, but weak enough to be stopped in its tracks right afterwards by this lesser implementation by this one state. I guess you must imagine it working like the bear circle in spongebob lol.

Bethesda, Square Enix, and Capcom usually do that, but it’s not a rule.

Cummins is the same way as well. Semitruck engines to support our logistics and transportation sector? Not in this economy, lol! Power generator engines for AI? YES! pumped +50% YoY.

Donations and ads sweeten the pot a lot. Also you don’t really need to buy media if someone else already made it available for download, and you don’t need to store it if you’re uploading to external hosts. So if you’re running a video game repacker site, and you get all your games from scene releases, you upload all your files to various external file hosts, and you run ads on your site + inject pay per click links, you could probably turn a profit from your hobby.

It certainly is a rich tech person’s perspective.