The acquisition was finalised in late 2021. No, Kim was stupid entirely by his own power.

That entire situation was ridiculous. The major points:

• Yes, that contract was stupidly favorable to Unknown Worlds. It was negotiated by none other than Chang-ham Kim, CEO of Krafton.
• Kim later realized that and wanted to back out of the contract because it would’ve made him look like a pushover. He employed the help of ChatGPT, which told him that it was a stupid fucking idea.
• He went ahead with the plan anyway. He fired Unknown Worlds’ three co-founders for made-up reasons and appointed Steve Papoutsis as the CEO
• He tried to sabotage the game’s development by disrupting communication between Unknown Worlds and other departments, to push the early access launch beyond the window where the 250M could be earned.
• Obviously it went to court. Krafton tried to change the story about the reason the co-founders were fired based on information that they discovered afterwards (they kept backups of documents, which Krafton argued was industrial espionage), but the judge was having none of that chicanery.
• During discovery, the ChatGPT logs and some conversations were revealed that personally implicated Kim.
• The court ruled in Unknown Worlds’ favour. The judge ordered Ted Gill to be reinstated as CEO (the other two co-founders chose not to return) and the bonus window to be extended by several months to account for the time that they didn’t have conrol of the company.
• As a last fuck-you, Papoutsis prematurely announced Subnautica 2’s early access launch. Gill had no idea about the state of development.
• Subnautica 2 then went on to be a massive success, Krafton has joined EA and Activision in the doghouse, and Chang-ham Kim is now known to be both a pushover and a fucking idiot.

Satisfactory is rainbow sprinkles compared to Factorio’s crack cocaine.

Games the size of Destiny just don’t last this long.

Warframe is still going strong. Much of that is the result of competent developers and managers who don’t absolutely suck dog eggs.

There is an enormous difference between the conduct of police officers between the US and Europe. Again, it mostly comes down to the public’s access to firearms, but the quality of training, institutionalized prejudices, and corrective actions (or the absence of those things) are also significant factors.

The US is not a punching bag. It’s receiving fair criticism and experiencing repercussions for decades of failure to improve public safety, and using both legal mechanisms and populist rhetoric to sanctify gun violence and the persecution of vulnerable groups, leading to a deeply divided, damn near tribal society (Us against Them), and the rise of the American Gestapo under the false banner of immigration control. Be patriotic, absolutely. But patriotism without awareness and due criticism is nothing more than zealotry.

You know that shooters have the ability to stay quiet, right? A calm atmosphere doesn’t mean there isn’t someone who is in imminent danger. Back to the thought exercise: you’re a hostage, you call 911, police arrive. Then they wait five minutes and fuck off because nobody’s firing at them or shouting threats. Do you think that’s reasonable? Wouldn’t you want them to breach the house and get you out of the situation?

It’s fucked up that this happened in the first place, but “well, the police should have…” is not how you fix it. Misuse of emergency resources needs to be a federal crime, and doing it to harm another person needs to be investigated and penalized as attempted murder with prison sentence for first time offenders, both as punishment and as a deterrent. But I’ve seen enough court cases to understand that the US justice system has neither the motivation nor the competence to implement or enforce a law like that.

someone called the swat team on her?

some anonymous tip

That’s not what happened. Someone called 911 and described a situation that involved a shooter who has already shot someone. The 911 operator then had to relay that to the responders (in this case, LE). The responding officers might have only received an address, that there was a barricaded active shooter, and that there was at least one shooting victim.

It’s not up to the police to debate the veracity of a report. Imagine being in a hostage situation, you manage to call 911, and they respond with “sounds fake, not coming”.

Since guns are handed out in America like chocolate at a Willy Wonka publicity and outreach campaign, every law enforcement agency has to be kitted out to potentially combat a barricaded suspect who can rain a small militia’s worth of lead on them and their surroundings. That’s why the response team often includes armored vehicles, snipers, and crayon munchers armed to the tits. And because abusing emergency services doesn’t cut into the profit of any big corporations, there are no effective means to seek justice against the offenders.

They were shipped into the US from Hong Kong, so probably manufactured (or at least assembled) in East Asia.

https://www.importgenius.com/importers/valve-corp

I knew the inventory would be sold in minutes, so I prepped. I loaded 150 EUR into my Steam wallet in case the 99 didn’t include taxes, I double checked that my shipping and billing info is automatically filled in, and I made sure to be at my computer one hour before the release time just in case I fucked up the time zone conversion.

Oof. That’s rough. But given how insanely profitable these ~90 minutes must have been for Valve, I’m sure they’ll be back in stock in a few weeks since none of the components seem to have supply issues.

I managed to get one by just spam-clicking the continue button for about two minutes. I know, I’m part of the problem.

Warframe has all three. Late-game players will gladly carry new players through some of the early farms and often foist upon them a crapton of important items that are difficult to get in the early game (we remember and nobody should have to go through the early game alone).

There are some who call the game woke trash and trying to boycot it because the latest female warframe has a larger body type and they can’t goon to it, or because of a relationship between two male characters that is hinted at being romantic, or because there are two nonbinary characters (both of whom are far better executed than most in media)… and some who sent the developers death threats for making a particular farm easier for new players.

You’ll shit bricks when you learn about dinput8.dll.

just the tutorial and the prologue

Cyberpunk did the same, and the released game was a fucking disaster.

That is precisely what Microslop was going to do with the XB1 and they got flayed for it.

The bypass probably allows more extensive dynamic analyses to be run on the running process. Crack development was seriously hindered by Denuvo’s limit of five activations per day.

Steam’s webshop servers are going to fucking explode.

Sony made a fucking Xbox One. Exactly the version that made the internet crucify Microsoft. This is incredible.

I know this doesn’t help you, but someone might find it useful: Steam’s two-hour refund limit only applies to automatic, unconditional refunds. If a refund is justified (e.g. the game is a broken disaster, or the publisher lied about its nature), it may be granted beyond the two-hour window, like it was after Activision lied about AI usage in Black Ops 7.

The survey is always offered only to a random subset of Steam users. The results only ever represent the fractions of users who took the survey, and are not representative of the entire Steam ecosystem as a whole. Unfortunately, this means that the increase/decrease in Linux usage is probably within the margin of error and is not a reliable statistic.

Wildlight is a game development studio made up of former Respawn developers who (allegedly) worked on the Titanfall and Apex Legends games. Highguard was their first game: a pointless, live service, content incomplete multiplayer shooter. It was revealed in late 2025 as the final showcase of The Game Awards, which resulted in a collective sigh of frustration from the audience. The game was released on the 26th of January to a decent peak player count of over 100k (97k players on Steam). It was immediately clear that the game was in a terrible state and it couldn’t retain the players. Two weeks after launch, Wildlight fired most of its staff because Tencent, which had been secretly funding the development, had pulled out. It was later announced that servers would shut down on the 12th of March, 45 days after launch.

Even before launch, it was mockingly compared to Concord, another pointless. live service, content incomplete, competitive multiplayer shooter that only lived for two weeks.

This is the main reason why Concord’s entirely avoidable failure pissed me off so much. Wildlight’s designers and artists spent years creating an entire game’s worth of assets (they lacked style and identity, but they weren’t bad) and now the game is dead, the studio is dead, and nobody will ever see or use those assets for something better.

I wish they’d sell the assets. I know that some animators would love to get their hands on Scarlet’s model.

(edit) Ah fuck, I did the meme. Highguard. I meant Highguard, not Concord.

I don’t understand how having situational voicelines, with transparency and the voice actors’ affirmative consent, would make the game “unfinished”.

There’s one person. He is bald and has a very chokeable trachea.

Denuvo adds an obscene amount of checks to the executable, which manifests as an increased CPU load (compare Assassin’s Creed Origins with and without it) and poorer performance. It also restricts the game’s availability to legitimate paying customers if there’s any issue with the “is this a new installation” detector.

Would-be pirates were never going to pay for it.

If the opinion of the public is as inconsequential as you think, then you have no reason to engage with it at all.

Nobody is beyond reproach, and nobody gets free passes, especially with the flagrant attitude they’ve shown toward concerns and criticism.

My trust in PEGI’s ability to properly review games has decreased significantly after Balatro got a PEGI-18 rating for some real horseshit reasons. This is a good direction, my concern is with the execution.

Original article by PEGI: https://pegi.info/news/pegi-expands-age-rating-criteria-interactive-risk-categories

Purchases of in-game content: games with time-limited or quantity-limited offers will be classified with a PEGI 12, games with NFTs or blockchain-related mechanisms will be PEGI 18.

Paid random items: the default rating will be PEGI 16 if the game contains paid random items (and in some cases they can be a PEGI 18).

Play-by-appointment: mechanisms that reward returning to the game (e.g. daily quests) will get a PEGI 7. If these mechanisms punish players for not returning (e.g. by losing content or reducing progress) they will become PEGI 12.

Safe online gameplay: if games contain entirely unrestricted communication features (e.g. no blocking or reporting), they will be PEGI 18.

That wording sounds really unspecific. I wonder how the first two poins will be interpreted with regard to games where the paying for gambling tokens involves multiple steps of conversion. In particular, Genshin Impact and similar games, where the paid currency first has to be converted (at a 1:1 rate) to a general currency that can be earned by engaging with the completely free progression systems.

It absolutely shouldn’t go away. My problem isn’t that Valve is being targeted, but that only Valve is being targeted. It should extend to all of the big players using gambling and addictive conditioning in video games starting with EA and Microslop/Activision, and then all of the gacha games from the east. Targeting Valve and nobody else is extremely suspicious, especially in the wake of the victory over the Rothchilds.

That game has been alive for at least 238.3 Concords, or 74.1 Highguards. Impressive.

You’re approaching the game from the wrong angle. Progression doesn’t reset because there’s no mechanical progression. The only way to make progress is to uncover more of the story so you know where you should be looking in the next loop, or how to get around an obstacle. It’s a metroidvania of information.

This is where the RTFM mindset is important. If you encounter an issue, there’s multiple decades’ worth of information on the internet that will most likely immediately provide an answer.

The location of installed files is determined by long-standing conventions that were in effect even before Linux was released… but I won’t go into it. You can read about it yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_filesystem

This is my point: do you need to know this? Nine out of ten cases, this is not useful knowledge. I’m a sysadmin and even I don’t need to know where each program’s files are located. You should not be interacting with these files at all. Let a package manager do that.

Not as glamorous if you consider that Liz Truss lasted 3.5 Concords in office, and a rotting head of lettuce exceeded even that.

“Please, guys, we really need the money!”

Destiny is on life support, Hunters Gathering is dead on arrival, Marathon’s future is bleak, Concord is Concord, and the one studio that could’ve printed them easy money is dead because the sorry excuse of a circus that is Sony leadership really wanted a live service God Of War title. Gee, I wonder why sales are low.

I agree completely. There’s only one chance to make a first impression. The final ad slot of TGA needs a worthy game that the audience can be excited about, and putting the most generic, most corporate-looking game there felt like an insult. Kind of like this absolute flop.

Not a lot, just enough to get the feel of the game, but also to realize that I’m not the target audience. In some ways, it’s similar to Counter-Strike 1.6 or Team Fortress 2 back in high school: if I have a group of friends and an hour of free time, then sure, I might hop on. But I won’t be investing the time and long-term effort that an extraction shooter expects of me.

The moment to moment experience is good. Bungie haven’t forgotten how to create a tight FPS experience. But the game needs both longevity and a healthy playerbase, that’s what concerns me. Fans of hardcore extraction shooters already have Tarkov and Hunt, and casual players already have Arc Raiders. It takes something exceptional to move players out of their “home” game.

I don’t see how this would be a grift. Tencent’s funding seems to have been contingent on some kind of metric, and they pulled out because Highguard fell short.

Marathon is probably life or death for Bungie. Sony can’t exactly afford to put out a mid game after spending so much on the studio… and “mid” is exactly what Marathon felt like. Just like so many copycats during the battle royale boom.

I don’t think it will fail (or if it does, not as hard as Highguard), but unless it manages to stand out from the Tarkov/Arc Raiders/Hunt: Showdown oligopoly, it won’t bring in the numbers to please Sony.