Violating an NDA is a civil issue, not criminal. This guy got arrested for stealing.

The processor listed in the specs, Rockchip 3128 SOC, is a smart tv chip.

Present evidence that fake gambling causes real gambling. Not evidence that it actives dopamine receptors. Actual gambling.

Fantasy and fiction don’t cause maladaptive behavior. One day society will accept that this is still true for audiovisual media, just as it had to be slowly accepted for music, just as it had to be slowly accepted for books.

A review bomb is a collective effort to lower the score of something, abusing systems meant to reflect an average opinion by gathering people who would not normally leave a review, often people who haven’t even played the game. It is intentionally creating sampling bias. “Review bomb” is a meaningful term being applied correctly here. I don’t like modern blizz, but Overwatch 2 is not the worst game on steam as its review average would indicate.

The game’s original hype stemmed from it being a technical showcase for the PS5. Not exactly a selling point for the already more-powerful PC world. They also didn’t bother porting the previous game to PC before porting the sequel.

Left 4 Dead is like Animal Crossing. The sort of game that tricks devs into thinking “oh yeah that’s so simple, i can do that easy,” without understanding all the effort put into the little details that made the original shine.

Would former l4d devs understand that better? Maybe. But I’ve thus far been unimpressed with game offerings from “the team behind [bigger game]” projects.

An early win is a well-documented technique known among gambling researchers and clinicians as a catalyst for addictive play, because it creates an early dopamine hit that gamblers are then eager to recreate, even as their subsequent losses mount.

You meant to say “Because it tricks someone into believing the continuing experience has more value than it does.”

I agree with the premise of the article, but the overuse of “dopamine” to explain predatory commercial behavior is exhausting. Your brain does stuff when you experience stuff. Dopamine isn’t some evil drug that you GeT a hIT oF. 90% of the time I see the dopamine used to describe some phenomenon, it is literally just a worse, more pretentious and sciency-sounding way to explain it. Like trying to describe how microsoft excel works to someone by describing semiconductors.

I remember more than a decade ago when (because popular things are evil) online articles were preaching the dangers of World of Warcraft vanilla, a game with a fixed subscription cost and no way to monetize big spenders. “When you level up there’s a big gold explosion, that’s to help with the DOPAMINE release and keep you HOOKED on your MMO DRUG.” Jesus christ people, it’s just strong visual design that made people feel accomplished.

These games are different, of course. They are predatory. But you don’t get closer to understanding why these tactics are effective by pretending you’re a neuroscientist talking about some highly objective medical phenomenon.

And before I get accused of being uneducated or disrespecting science, I’m a published researcher in cognition and cognitive neuroscience. I don’t have a phd because I left the field sick of a lot of the same fakeness I’m complaining about now.

Jez Corden correctly leaked the Death Knight class in hearthstone prior to announcement. He seems to have sources at blizzard.

Game companies will literally invent superhuman artificial intelligence to filter rude remarks sooner than they will admit their ranking-treadmill game design breeds toxicity.

The lead is actually buried by this headline. Denuvo is unironically claiming their DRM has no performance impact and that gamers are spreading a myth. And to prove it they will provide a test example, entirely controlled by them, to game journalists in the future.

Age of Empires 2 skirmish maps are procedurally generated, in contrast to other competitive RTS games of that style. It’s done quite well and makes scouting meaningful for reasons other than rock-paper-scissoring your opponent.

And who knows among that percentage how many actually are versus just said so on the poll. If you take into account people who were never going to buy the game anyway, the actual number could very well be 0.