Bro? They literally signed with Sony.

While I agree with the anti-authority statement, I have to say the rest of the post is approaching incoherence. This reads like you did translation party on some apologetics texts.

Okay, but what about pre-steam DRM? But what about services that have existed for less time and actually done the slippery slope shit you’re cowering in your boots about (Uplay)? You’re so busy listing possible problems and making problems up that you are not comparing and contrasting your available options. It strikes me that you are complaining to complain and don’t have realistic solutions in mind, you’re asking for either a rental system where you put up collateral to play a game or you’re suggesting that the developer only be able to sell a game once. Are you one of those crazy “first sale doctrine” sovcit types?

As for as storefronts go, which is what’s being talked about here, they are competing and winning. With a fraction of the employees other companies employ for storefront work. Origin (Rest Unpeacefully) and Uplay never stood a chance and epic has had plenty of time to market saturate. The company not being publicly traded doesn’t prevent competition, it prevents investor interests like quashing competition.

You can play: Half-Life 1: Source Half-Life 2 Half-Life 2: Episode One Half-Life 2: Episode Two All with steam closed. Original half life expansions aside, your take is senile. I suppose alyx could’ve done without it.

No sarcasm. Is this a question you want an answer to?

True, I’d forgotten about this and I’m glad to be detracted in this way tbh

It might disappoint you to learn that among american english speakers, literacy isn’t a good indication of maturity by age. Barbara Bush made a literacy initiative that’s still around, the One Good Thing® left over from the bush regime. The site has a handy map to show you the 40-60% adult literacy rate counties spread all over the states. It definitely helped me come to terms with the fact that sometimes a kid who is trying is gonna be more eloquent than an adult repeating the same tired take they’ve been rebutted for a thousand times.

It’s easier for me personally to gauge age as it scales up when anonymity is involved - referential humor, recognizance of the ancient runes (Duckroll, Bill Murray’s face with only the jaw moving), and informed chitchat about presidential behavior predating Bush SR are all dead giveaways that a user is older, but with younger users you have a lot of hobby/interest overlap going all the way up to people in their 40s. You can’t look someone in the eyes and see if the light of youth has gone out yet on forums and imageboards.

The browser war has been long and bloody, but here’s a current battle.

https://fosspost.org/google-slowdown-firefox-users-when-watching-youtube

The same thing actually passing a turing test would require. You’ve obviously read the words “Turing test” somewhere and thought you understood what it meant, but no robot we’ve ever produced as a species has passed the turing test. It EXPLICITLY requires that intelligence equal to (or indistinguishable from) HUMAN intelligence is shown. Without a liar reading responses, no AI we’ll produce for decades will pass the turing test.

No large language model has intelligence. They’re just complicated call and response mechanisms that guess what answer we want based on a weighted response system (we tell it directly or tell another machine how to help it “weigh” words in a response). Obviously with anything that requires massive amounts of input or nuance, like language, it’ll only be right about what it was guided on, which is limited to areas it is trained in.

We don’t have any novel interactions with AI. They are regurgitation engines, bringing forward sentences that aren’t theirs piecemeal. Given ten messages, I’m confident no major LLM would pass a Turing test.

While it was the complaint, the game did mention a required PSN account on all storefronts. This was disabled when auth/login was unplayably bad on launch week, then not re-enabled until a while later (with a week long heads up for new players and a month long heads up for existing players). Nobody actually got locked out of the game, and as my PSN account is registered somewhere I do not live, I don’t think anyone would’ve been stopped playing by the change if it had been pushed.

What we “won” and sony “learned” is that they can’t get accurate metrics on playercount since HD2’s statistics aren’t being tracked correctly by the game’s session system and the playerbase is uncooperative. In this era where data is king, this just means we’ll stop seeing Sony funded helldivers ads on youtube while they market their giants that correctly report the data they’re looking for that helps them make a userbase that prints money.

Oh, and we marred the all-time and recent review score from overwhelmingly positive. Guarantee you the successful action was the steam refund count on the game - truly unsolvable problem. As refund requests that don’t meet an automatic metric need a reply, and resolution usually takes ~an hour, the 6 digit refund count was not realistically solvable without rolling the requirement for a legitimate PSN account back. You can track how many total refund requests steam has day by day, as this is a public count in steam’s support page. There were 800k more than the average weekend.

Tl;dr: while the complaint was this, the reality was not. The review bomb hurt arrowhead’s relationship with sony more than it hurt sony. The refund bomb didn’t cause steam to change policies this time but damn if it isn’t justified now.

I believe it. Multiple friends of mine updated to play and see the streets changes when this press cycle hit, a few even shared footage of suspicious noiseless head/eyes deaths while they were in enclosed spaces. If it has been long enough, just the words escape from tarkov will send some fans back, negative experiences suspended.

SPT and the multiplayer conversion (Now Project Fika, formerly MPT) are the best ways to experience the game now for a multitude of reasons. I think learning heatmaps and dead locations applies no matter how you play - and the same can be said for bullet penetration, it’s just part of the game - but there’s a neverending stream of cheaters that feel far worse to lose to than a boss you weren’t prepared for. I can get trashed by tagila eighty times and accept that gear is just forfeit, I chanced it going to factory; when I am killed by a head/eyes with no audio five seconds into a fresh raid multiple times a day there’s substantially less to learn from and improve on.

Worth noting you can get mods for SPT that change how AI behave, categorize them so some are doing a common farming route, some are moving to quest locations. It doesn’t make up for what we lost (the awkward vocal exchanges as you agree to not slay a new player at a starting quest location), but it helps retain some of the spice.

Some of us want to buy tools instead of toys. 4GB was great for the xbox 360 slim. Will it run anything a sane person would get a mac for? Probably not, most mac DAW I’ve used personally are hungry and 4gb is less than the machine I had my last crash filled experience on.

The most popular venues for GPT assisted confidence schemes right now is a tie between discord and twitter. Twitter allows for the utilization of short form response bots in DM and posts, discord has an ongoing AI generated art scam where a robot begs you to comission them so they can make rent. Both have extremely easy to identify playbook/flowchart type responses, and key messages they will always send to push the scam along among their generated chatter. It’s not quite nigerian prince, and it’s only getting more prominent as neither site has a handle on the current con and thus aren’t doing anything to curb it

I see a lot of people saying nintendo will take action against you, but they are young and do not know about Graal Online, which is your actual competitor. Link to the Past style games are fun and interesting, but graal has dominated the space against any similar game for decades now, especially those in the same visual style. Tunic had a good solution (unique visual style) and I hope people don’t have the same initial reaction I did upon seeing it (that this is a graal world)

LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER: youtube reports it annually earns ~14.07 B from ad revenue and over 20B from subscriptions across youtube and youtube music. You are guessing and passing it off as “fact, not opinion”. Ads make youtube almost half as much as the ungodly amount of money they make, and google as a whole could support youtube without ads just fine, they would just make less money (Google’s throughput is extremely negative, most of their money is not put back into the company).

Your perspective sucks and your opinions are based on misinformation and guesswork.

Copying is not theft. When you steal, you leave one less left.

You should write an open letter to hobbyists. It worked for Gates. If your software was “stolen for profit” and that didn’t result in more people trying it and buying, I have bad news: it didn’t seem like it was worth the money to the people who tried it. JRC does many studies on piracy and the data shows that total sales are not displaced by piracy volume, again and again. You can make the argument that this is only true for games and music (typically the subject of these studies) but this hardline attitude of it being the same as stealing sucks.

Copying isn’t theft. You’re about 40 years late to this conversation and you’re starting from the taste of boots? You’re equating an instantly reproducible, finished product with a service; your analogy sucks.