It’s not a legitimate competition, that’s the entirely point. The claim is AI models rely on stealing content and changing it slightly or not all. And if a “regular” journalist does this, they would get into trouble. Just because the entity switches to an AI company doesn’t make this business model legitimate.

A few years ago there was a big plagiarism scandal on IGN because one of their “journalists” mostly took reviews of other people, changed a few words, and published it. Obviously that’s not fine.

Started playing yesterday, I can agree. I just need to get used to playing slower. It’s so easy to put it on speed three and then suddenly I am falling behind and can’t deal with the issues anymore.

Games developed by Paradox have been like this for decades and it’s fine. The player base is aware of it and buys the game with the expectation that it will take an additional 2 years and several dlcs for the game to be actually good. Everyone knew Victoria 3 won’t be good on release.

And crucially, the developers of Paradox are also aware of that and delivery a product that is still somewhat enjoyable on release. They know where to cut corners that will be fixed with dlcs and what needs to be focused on for release.

But when Paradox is just the publisher things don’t work out that well. Because the developers might not actually plan their game around that kind of thing. And when they are then forced to release early, their game is still a huge mess.

The transaction with kinguin is safe. They even offer a cheap protection against non-working keys, so you are guaranteed to get a working key.

The big issue is the keys themselves aren’t always obtained legally. And then it can take a while for the key to get deactivated. By that point you are usually out of luck trying to get your money back or a new key.

It’s just easier to advertise a single big game rather than several smaller ones. Even if you are interested in games it’s impossible to keep track of everything that’s being released. More casual players are aware of even fewer games. That’s why AAA games still sell so well because they are the only games a lot of people are even aware of.

If the companies have to split their marketing budget between multiple titles, they would reach a much smaller audience. And even if one of the smaller titles would be a hit, it probably sells fewer copies for a lower price.

I don’t think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that’s the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.

The main argument in favor of downloading is, it’s easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other “clean” sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.