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This article should be Exhibit A in any class on “correlation does not imply causation.”
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Gambling was made more accessible in the US because of a SCOTUS case in 2018. Starting later that year, Delaware became the 2nd state to allow sports betting (after Nevada). The list of states allowing access to online sports betting keeps growing, with Missouri the latest to join less than 3 months ago. 39 states now have gambling in some form, with 7 more considering legislation in the next year or two.
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Gaming revenue took off in 2020-2021 because more people were spending all day at home. It has since flattened, or slightly declined as a) pandemic-era games that were written and designed in those tough circumstances turned out poorly. b) gaming company execs thought the gravy train would never end, so set projections too high. c) acquisitions and mergers due to a combination of a) and b) meant massive layoffs and low-effort slop. d) VCs bought up the shells of former successes and accelerated c). Oh look:
A new report by Epyllion, a gaming industry advisory company headed by venture capitalist and market guru
These two things have nothing to do with one another, besides coincidentally happening at roughly the same time.
- Already answered.
- Are you using a good quality new displayport cable, or the same old HDMI from your old monitor? 4k HDR needs a lot more data, and some cheap cables can’t handle it.
- 🤷 Change to colors to what feels right. Unless you’re a graphic professional, it’s more about preference than some perfect standard.
- Yeah. There’s a lot more pixels in a little more space. Each of them is smaller, and you may need to zoom on text-heavy apps that aren’t optimized for 4k.
- Lots of new monitors default to a power saving mode where brightness is capped. You’ll have to disable that to get the full brightness they advertise.
I’m not sure if steamdb can search the entire catalog, but at https://steamdb.info/sales/ you can put a filter on the maximum number of reviews.
Not exactly the same thing, but may be a decent proxy.
Payment processors, if left on their own, would take any money from any person for any reason. This is more to do with a patchwork of laws that are trying to snuff out anything “adult” and will absolutely sweep up every party even remotely involved in the transaction.
They’re covering their own ass. It’s cowardice, not righteousness.
Might be too late. They changed the policy a few years ago when they introduced mod packs. They didn’t want entire packs to fail if one person pulled their mod, so total deletion was disabled.
Folks can still hide their mods and make new individual downloads impossible, but it’s still there in the background.
(All this is from memory. I hope I’m wrong)
I’ve always maintained that the first was a fine game that was tanked by the price. It was priced to drive gamepass subs, not sell the game. At $35-40, it would have been received much better, imo. Years later, now that it’s more appropriately priced, it seems to be more well-reviewed.
Unfortunately the second is going down the same path. It may take 5+ years for the game to be appreciated to its fullest (assuming no glaring issues), through no fault of the devs.
Yeah, I don’t remember all the details myself, so you’re probably right. I was basically trying to support your thesis that Bethesda getting nasty over mods would be something entirely new and out of character. The only example someone could even try to point to had a bunch of other (better) explanations than “mod bad, Bethesda mad.”
For all their faults, Bethesda may be the most mod-friendly AAA studio out there right now.
I can vaguely recall a single instance where they shut someone down, and that was over re-used audio assets from an older game. That was almost certainly about contractual licensing obligations to voice actors.
The copyright industry has pushed the “making available” narrative for so long, that’s sort of become the dominant talking point. IANAL, but as an internet user, I have opinions*:
a. That seems entirely backwards from what the law intends. “Making a copy” is done by the downloader, which is explicitly what the law is about.
b. The industry only went the other way because it was more convenient from a litigation perspective. It’s far easier to sue one person for seeding to 100 peers than to go after the 100 individuals who downloaded from that seeder. They got a few courts to go along with the more loose interpretation to get precedent for the next and the next suit.
* always be aware of your local copyright laws before listening to some rando online.
Legally, it’s still a license, it’s just effectively impossible to revoke.
Edit to expand on this: A truly offline forever-purchase of physical goods can be re-sold. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine (this is the US-specific version, other jurisdictions may have similar doctrines).
American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property.
A digital “purchase” is usually non-transferable, even from GOG. It can’t be removed from your own HDD once you download the installer, but there are still restrictions attached on what you can do with it, even if those are limited and hard to enforce.
Out of all the boardroom discussions, raising the price was actually the most consumer-friendly suggestion from Sony. Others included:
- Deleting the original version from users’ libraries.
- Re-printing the original on disc, but including a rootkit.
- Compiling a list of original version owners and leaving their personal details in plaintext on the web until they upgrade.
- Downgrading the original to 480p, telling users the original graphics were just a bug, and selling the higher-res upgrade.
They do point out that they will be monitoring how it’s used, and could adjust things later.
Sounds like corporate-speak for “if people abuse this, we’ll lock it down harder.”
Even if people are using it to share with actual family around the country, they may get caught up in future updates that remove that feature. Also note that any publisher can opt out of the sharing. If EA or Ubi or some other big company doesn’t like the lack of limits, they may be able to force Valve’s hand in changing the policy.
The idea is wonderful, but there are a ton sof ways this could end up worse than the old system.
They had some cool software like 20 years ago. Then they doubled down on the subscription model, and I haven’t thought about them much since then.
Hopefully they don’t lean into live service games or DLC traps.