Dude that’s not even close to the most insane part. They expect one in every 8 humans on the whole earth to play EVERY DAY.

The government simply doesn’t understand technology. If someone said “I bought a book, but after 6 years the publisher came in and stole my copy and burned it” they can understand that. But a single player game, which is in many ways the same as a book, these old politicians just think “spoiled millennials just want free stuff handed to them. Stop playing games and grow up”. No one would say that about a book.

I want to be able to enjoy my private, legally purchased, leisure activity without the risk that the publisher steals it from me through deceptive practices. Is that really too much to ask for?

NUC for 100$ https://www.amazon.com/Bmax-B1-Pro-Fanless-Computer/dp/B0CJBST7XQ), if you wait for a sale you can often get an even better one. Kodi does basically everything you were asking for with a couple of plugins for free. Your phone works as a remote with a free app (kodi remote). You can “program it” by taking any keyboard in the house and setting it up, shouldn’t need it after.

If you somehow don’t have a keyboard or mouse and/or don’t have the tech literacy skills to install a program and a couple plugins and have no desire to learn then I can understand why you feel like Chrome cast is your only option, because it probably is. Nothing wrong with that I suppose, but stop acting like it’s the best option for the average person, let alone the average person on Lemmy.

You can get an N100 NUC for about 100$ and it’s a full windows 11 or Linux PC that can do everything you listed and everything else a computer can do. No ads unless you allow them.

I think an ideal game starts easy then ramps up the difficultly. At this point you gain abilities that make the game easier and make you feel more powerful. Then the difficulty increases again at the end for the final challenge portion, that way you as a player feel like your have to master your new found abilities.

Like going over a big hill then when you get to the valley on the other side you have to climb a mountain.

Basically Google started monetizing it’s semantic matching engine. It’s what made Google results so great. For example if you searched the word “tall” it would include results for “big”, “height”, etc… with each word being ranked by closeness to what you searched.

Well now they made it so they will match monetisable words preferentially, like brand names for example.

It’s likely the main reason Google results have been getting so shitty lately, the semantic match engine is one of the things that made the results great. Now it’s an ad delivery engine and the results are crap.