Definitely wouldn’t be surprised - MS have been making noises about reducing the level of access non-core Windows services get after the cloudstrike fiasco, and given MS’s patch stability lately, I would also not be surprised if something leaked out early.

Yeah I don’t understand the faux outrage here, but maybe that’s because I’m not in a parasocial relationship with these influencers.

I always wondered how Honey made any money, so this answers that question and is actually a pretty ingenious (if somewhat underhanded) mechanism.

Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.

Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.

Just because the system’s been gamed (especially in the US) doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.

All it takes is some standardized markup like schema.org

Which is the problem AI is solving here - getting every supermarket chain to agree on this (when it’s actually against their interests to do so, since it increases price transparency) would be an impossible task, but AI can get around this requirement with minimal extra effort.

I’m hardly an AI evangelist, but this is actually one of the rare situations where it’s a good fit.

The amount of people bootlicking a corporation’s decision to cut costs rather than just moderate effectively is pretty astonishing for Lemmy,

Plenty of people got value out of the comment section - if nothing else, they were invaluable in knowing when to skip past the recap/opening theme/filler content in long-running shows like One Piece.

Most of it is pretty inane, but there was some useful stuff in there, and I always found it fun to see what other people thought of particularly crazy episodes.

Too bad, you get a battlepass instead!

This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

Here’s another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.

Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.

With GOG, you could theoretically download the offline installer, give that to someone else and then ask GOG support to remove BG3 from your account, and be fully abiding with the EULA conditions.

Holy shit, it’s actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn’t been able to beat 5000 since November… I know people love throwing the ‘dead game’ meme around prematurely, but if this isn’t dead yet, it’s definitely got one foot in the grave.

But if it gets to the point where Ubisoft goes and every studio starts making their own, I don’t think that will work if they don’t have the game catalogue to support it, that would mean Ubisoft could just start churning out horrible games to build their stupid catalogue.

I feel like we’re starting to see a rerun of the streaming service wars - if this takes off across the industry I can definitely see people going back to piracy. I don’t want game pass, ubisoft+, Blizzard Prime, Nintendo Online Super Premium Expansion Pass or whatever stupid names these companies come up with just to play a few games that I’m interested in, just because they’re spread across different publishers.

Ok but who actually doesn’t know what a magazine is

Kbin devs, apparently.

Bobby Kotick is likely on the way out at least (probably via golden parachute).

Yeah I do understand the reasoning and honestly can’t fault them for it - they are a for-profit company after all.

Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good example of them throwing their weight around (which is admittedly rare).

Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam’s ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.

Devs aren’t going to drop Steam as a store, so they’re stuck.

That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.

I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.

People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

Pretty sure it’s a triple whammy - Steamworks, always online, and denuvo to top it off.

The major point is not so much whether your browser could block ads - your point regarding the browser ultimately having to render each element is true. The problem is that if the web server gets a request from an unattested browser (such as an old version, or one that has an ad blocker installed), it will refuse to serve any content, not just ads.

Regular people will inevitably get frustrated and we end up in scenarios like “<x browser>is bad, it doesn’t work with <y site>” because of this proposal, and more and more people end up switching until you have to use a compliant (Chromium-based) browser to do anything at all on the internet, and Google’s strangehold on web standards solidifies even further.