… you mean that thing we were talking about?

Apparently they’re up to three years now. Woo.

Good luck finding new ones in the US.

They’re basically online loyalty accounts like you’d have at retail stores.

That’s a pretty popular opinion, actually.

Cause if it’s not on the entertainment system… they’re just going to use their phone? And being afraid of technology because of a small subset of people you assume are misusing it is a little fanatical.

Some people can do two things.

I’m sure they can churn out a bunch more half-finished board game and game show adaptations.

PS: I don’t use condoms for my phones, if they need that for daily use, it’s an obvious design flaw!!!

You don’t use a condom because you know you’ll get a girl pregnant, you do it on the slim possibility. There’s always going to be outliers, and refusing to prepare for the possibility because it’s remote is playing with fire. It’s asking for a worst case scenario when the preventative measures are so very easy out of pure arrogant principle.

More importantly, the system we all accept (willingly or not) requires that people be employed to survive.

It’s not a matter of wanting to be employed, as needing to be employed.

Maybe they have one of the shitty adblockers for some reason.

It is like No Man’s Sky in that most people who weren’t fanatical about saying it had a huge turn around stopped caring about it after a year or so.

That was my first thought, too.

What would a “Steam Deck 2” be in peoples minds? Less incremental changes? The repairability and modability of the Steam Deck kind of means it doesn’t have a direct comparability to console “alternatives”. Not to mention the less closed software architecture it provides.

There is definitely a lot of corporate bullshit in regards to triple-A gaming… but there’s also a significantly larger indie community as well.

Depending on what you choose to look at you can decide any one time frame is better or worse. Accessibility is leagues better now than it was then… but there’s definitely problems with monetization you see now that wasn’t as prevalent back then.

It’s not black and white, you’re not going to have an objective “best” or “worst” time.

Probably hard to organize when you’re so emotionally broken from overwork.

In your mind, of course. Seems you have a monopoly on opinion.

They’re not, actually. Just because you only see Epic (which still has market share despite every effort they’ve made to drive people away) doesn’t mean there aren’t other storefronts.

They’re definitely part of an oligopoly, though.

As opposed to negative money?

“I prefer a quality storefront that at least presents the pretense of caring about providing a quality product to one that just wants to separate me from my money”

“What are you, some kind of fanboy?”

Taking the most positive likely option, developer salaries. Possibly repaying past investment that they used to pay salaries before they published as well.

Obviously corruption is a possibility, but it’s not the only possible answer.

Apparently they didn’t make enough money when self-publishing. At least from what I gleaned from reading the article.

So… a Robot Chicken sketch?

Shitty mobile game companies make a shit ton of money.

I mean, you’re the one trying to imagine it.

There’s quite a few (of the nearly/over a thousand current pokemon) that are humanoid in appearance.

But yeah, there’s those too.

Only if you’re a rich white landowner who has financial interests at stake.

Its capital is Notlob

It really helps to have good spawns for technology. If you don’t have decent ones on a first run through it can feel like you’re stuck in a rut pretty fast.

Once you know what you’re looking for, though, it makes life a lot easier.

… I thought Activision was bought by Microsoft, not Ubisoft.

That assumes they’ll actually fix the game breaking bugs and system compatibility issues.

Expansions used to come in disk form, you know. They’re not exclusively downloadable. And mods aren’t always expansions. Each word contributes something different, even if they have quite a bit of overlap and are often considered synonymous these days.

Why, in objective terms, is it lazy and dumb? Or do you just not like it?

Plenty of useful and appropriate words are used by people in dumb ways, that does not make the words themselves dumb.

It’s got about as much gameplay as most hack n’ slash action games or FPSes where you spend the entire game spamming the same buttons over and over again.

And a hell of a lot more story.

So… mindless stuff for more than one mind! Genius!

I mean… it started as a resource farming simulator.

Now it’s a resource farming simulator with mechs and submarines and bases.

Still the same basic game with the same basic core mechanic… just with more mindless stuff to keep you busy.

Pretty much all successful companies are like that. Because that’s the system they want, and they’ve tricked the general populace into believe that’s a good thing.

You really live in a truly binary world, don’t you? Either it’s all one thing or it’s all another.

No, it’s not likely that mega-corporations are suddenly going to magically decide to be okay guys. Yes, it’s mostly likely going to take a great deal of communication and organization of workers and/or government intervention to make things better.

That does not preclude that the people running those mega-corporations made that choice. It is not a forgone conclusion that they are going to be shitheels. They are specifically making that choice. Believing otherwise removes that onus from them, and whatever blame can be laid at their feet.

If you want to live in a black and white world, and just assume that everything as a good or bad trait, that everything has a yes or no answer, feel free. But just know that you are not living in reality, but some fantasy you have created to try and explain the world away.

Just because you don’t recognize them doesn’t mean no one else would be able to. I couldn’t name an athlete I hadn’t read about in the last five minutes if I tried. That doesn’t mean they don’t have name recognition.

Interesting that you only chose one of the three names as something you didn’t recognize.

There’s tons of recognition in game development as well. Notch? ConcernedApe? Peter Molyneux?

There’s tons of no-name actors and athletes to go with the big names as well.

“It’s exclusively the workers fault that their employers are shitheels”

You can acknowledge that workers need to do more to better their own working conditions without placing all the blame on them. The publishers have as much free will as the developers, they choose to be awful as much as developers choose to work for them. And they have a lot more power to influence change.