They’ve been investing way more in gaming lately, but I imagine their long-term plan involves setting up Apple Arcade as a premium brand for high-end titles in a way that might be undermined by promoting their “competition” now. Like if Apple promoted a lot of shows that were available on iTunes shortly before launching Apple TV+. No idea, though, I’m just wildly speculating.

After beating Final Fantasy XVI I resubscribed to FFXIV and played the latest patch’s story updates. It’s interesting to go back to XIV after playing what feels in many ways like it’s successor. XVI has problems, but they’re the a subset problems that XIV has, and it shores up so much. My main thing is the almost complete lack of engaging combat scenarios in XIV’s MSQ. There’s so much fun in the endgame that it’s hard to complain too much, but I hope they fix that in Dawntrail.

It has ads unless you pay to remove the ads, which is a perfectly reasonable model for an app to use.

You know when you see a game that doesn’t interest you in the slightest but you know will make a billion dollars? I’m feeling that.

I really appreciate how you structured these rules. Simple enough to remember, sensible enough to keep the conversation clean. Moderator discretion can be frustrating, but it’s a lot better than finding out that your post got deleted because it didn’t fit some arcane law that was hidden away on a sixth-layer wiki page.

Good implementations of Denuvo have such a minimal impact on the quality of the game experience that I tend towards optimism when I hear this kind of news. That said, bad implementations of Denuvo cripple the game in a way that previous horrible DRM schemes could only dream of. I’m not planning on playing Payday 3 (I never had any fun with 1 or 2), but I hope that this is the former situation for its fans.

That’s exciting. The larger these unions get, the easier it’ll be for other other workers to feel encouraged to unionize themselves. It seems like this is the biggest one yet, at least in terms of cache - I hope this makes waves.

While that’s self-evidently true for some of Infinite, Halo also actively avoided a lot of the dark patterns that would’ve kept people playing. It was, unfortunately, kind of the worst of both worlds. The battle passes stick around forever, events repeat, almost all externally-advertised cosmetics were free. It’s supposed to be a system that works for the players, and it more or less does (in comparison to, say, Fortnite), but it also means that you don’t have a reason to sign back in every single day and grind through something to get enough currency to buy the new skin you like, and most people aren’t financially investing themself much in playing it.