ThunderingJerboa

I’m sorry to pop your bubble but while Denuvo sucks for consumers, it actually works at least on the PC front. Many cracks you would see require emulators since the pc ports are pretty solidly protected. Like Total war warhammer 3 is still uncracked after 2 years.

Not early access games but more AAA “Early access games”, which means you preorder advanced edition you get to play like a week early. The biggest examples being Starfield and that new Star wars game by ubisoft (with the insane price of 130 for its super special edition). So this is just a logical loophole getting closed. We can have disagreements with the 2 hour refund window on steam but I don’t think it was ever intentional for you to play 48 hours of a game then being able to refund the thing since its not official out.

And those are fundamental problems with the 2 hour refund system but the loophole they closed just makes sense. You shouldn’t be able to play a game for 48 hours while its in AAA “early access” Ie you preorder the game’s special edition (Starfield and that new ubisoft star wars game are doing this) and you can play the game a few days before launch but since the game isn’t released you can get a no questions refund. To be honest, I assume those kind of games already followed the 2 hour restriction but I guess it was very uncommon until very recently but now this is a new way for Publishers to screw consumers because it means consumers can start playing before embargoes for game reviews come out.

Footage of a police shooting that occurred during November has came out. A cop detained a suspect who they believed to have a supressed gun, they cuff and search him finding no gun and put him in back of a police car. So the deputy was walking past the car when an acorn struck the car. He shouts “shots fired” and basically unloads on the car with the unarmed suspect while screaming he is hit. The other cops on the call also start unloading on the car and thankfully the person in the car was not hurt. So from the onset its a humorous story about a cop overreacting to a stimuli and we are only laughing because noone was killed in it (well I guess some people would still be laughing if it was deadly but probably less). The cop apparently was a vet, so this seems to be a case of PTSD and its not great that an officer was able to make it that far along while such a mundane stimuli was able to set them off possibly getting someone killed. Hopefully the officer in question gets the help they need but its clear they shouldn’t be in that position at all if that is how they will react.

I think you aren’t thinking out this problem. While its not great that the IRS “targets” the poor. Its just simply they are the least likely to fight back against and will pay their debt in full. The rich, they fucking drag that shit out with lawyers, they have to try to hide it so you need well trained financial forensics to notice it and document it all and at the fucking end of it all, you are only getting a fraction of what you are literally owed. We want the government to be “efficient” yet we are complaining about the IRS doing their assigned task in an efficient manner because newsflash the lower income audits typically are far more automated, so they are simpler to do when your budget is limited.

Edit: Also I would like it to be remembered that the IRS are merely enforcers of the tax code. They aren’t exactly the ones who set it in place, they are just doing what they can with what they were given. Hell I’m fucking happy they allocated time and money for the free filling system. Its a step in the right direction because fuck the tax refund companies who lobby our government to make the taxes as painful/annoying as they currently are, when the tax man sort of already knows most of the information they are requesting like many other countries in the first world.

Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand “new” copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many “new” copies around. Also I can’t fault publishers from just “deleting” a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven’t sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren’t even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.

I mean couldn’t they just still make their own “class base” shooter in S&box without the TF2 IP involved? So you get the enjoyment of those tropes while not “stepping on the toes” of Valve and out compete the game.

Edit: hell it would even let them try new and different things with the formula. Change up the look of the game maybe even bring it closer to the classic TF look.

With that said though, while Hasbro is fucking evil it would be weird for them to deny they were using AI at first until now. I wonder if one of their partners sort of fucked them over and actually used AI without telling them. Its possible they were 100% for the AI art since the start but think due to how large wizard of the coast is and with the likely usage of sub contractors it may not be on them fully with that said though, they probably should have double checked the images for any of those signs.

It is funny or sad depending on how you look at it that the fan modding community has done more for VR in these last few years than most of the big names. Then again it does make sense since there isn’t much big money to be earned in the VR space right now. Hell while not a big fan of what Meta is doing with titles, they appear to be the only ones paying out a premium to have games developed for them resulting in a closed garden but for some indie devs, it actually pays the bills.

Can’t wait to see what 2024 has for VR since with the release of the Unreal engine universal VR wrapper, we will likely see a boom in VR mods at least for the Unreal scene. Great job to all the mod developer out there putting so much effort into the medium.

I mean games that finally make use of SSD speeds sure but most people have games before SSDs were standardized. Hell most people’s libraries are filled with those. Hell you don’t even need NVME drives since most games never make use of them. Until games start actually using direct storage the difference between sata and NVME are very minor for games at least.

I have a 6TB one and yes mostly for single player games since loading screens typically aren’t that big of a deal. OS always goes on your best drive and you know you can have multiple drives in a singular pc since you are sort of implying you can only have 1 drive.

Isn’t that the sad part about gaming media/journalism. They are all for banking on the drama about “no appreciation for the devs from the vgas” but chances are their front pages are filled to the brim with things announced during the VGAs. While they do nothing to really highlight the actual meaningful award shows for game developers.

But we already have award shows that are like that, we have DICE awards, BAFTA Games Awards, GDC awards. This event is clearly just a commercial for many publishers. Noone is forcing devs to appear here. Hell I think it would be fucking great some devs just don’t appear just to snub this award show. If the audience actually cared about recognizing developers they would watch the other 3 awards, this event is just about the hype machine and game trailers.

I mean it isn’t but sort of is at the same time. It firstly depends on what kind of kickstarter it is. There are many ways where its just a system for a publisher to gauge interest in the project. Those are typically just preorders however many others are just throwing money into a well and hoping something comes of it. I get people’s hatred of crowdfunding and it can easily be a trap. Where a ton of people are just there to get the money and leg it or who are simply too incompetent to use the funds properly. Hell even experienced developer can be too incompetent, double fine studios/Tim Schafer is a poster child for this. While I love their work, they had a horrid run with crowdfunding and I guess it should have been expected since they are always late and overspend on their budget when they were working with publishers.

Now with all the negatives said, I think crowdfunding in all its forms can lead to wonderful project that simply couldn’t have existed due to a lack of interest by publishers. Hell I doubt we would had Baldur’s Gate 3 without crowdfunding and this isn’t talking exclusively about BG 3 since the Divinity Original sin games really got the ball rolling for Larian Studios. Crowdfunding can lead to the rebirth of genres once thought dead.

Also even the last time there were travel bans, we just got it from Europe, it was too late to contain it in china.

True but you are still at the end of the day giving the host your IP still, it just can’t be seen by the other players by normal means.

You are good mate, this stuff just always happens where it gets a bit annoying. We see this in the drama cycle where news comes how X person is an awful person or did something wrong. We know about Y events that happened in the past so people try to draw Y events around this new bit of news but we don’t really live in a fictional world where all these plotlines/events all culminate into something satisfying. Life is a rather complex thing and it makes it feel so small when it all culminates into every event we the public know about a public figure have to fit into each other like a complete puzzle when huge portions of a public figure’s life is typically shrouded in mystery.

Okay Completionist started 2011 or 2012, he has a costar named Greg and it seems they met at college and were friend. Greg played the comic relief of the show at the time. Fast Forward to 2015, he leaves unexpectedly. Then fast forward another 2 years when in 2017, Greg I believe with lawyers told Jirard the completionist to unlist all the episodes Greg has appeared with. That is basically the story of Greg. It seems there were issues with extended work periods that didn’t gel well with his schedule and priorities and good for Greg understanding that since choosing loved ones over work is rather important. It seems Greg got shafted because Him and Jirard had a falling out and there was no formalized contract between them since he expected friends to look out for each other. It sucks but I consider money to be a part of the equation with the removal of those old episodes since he didn’t like the company using his image to earn a profit.

Also take this with a grain of salt but apparently he also made a post about it on reddit in the past with these lines

“It is extremely difficult to move on from a project that I helped create for so many years. Not only were we building the show as a creative outlet but, also as a source of monetary stability for the both of us. Both of these are no longer true for me. While we may have not put in precisely equal hours on the show, I believe that had Jirard and I’s mind not morphed into one for four years, TOVG would not be what you see and enjoy today.”

This could be a random poster and not be Greg, seeing as this is their one only post. I just don’t think its a huge leap that money and friends typically don’t mix well. Money breaks bonds in so many different ways and its a prime reason why I don’t like dealing with loans with friends or family. It really rarely ends well.

I think this is a bit revisionist. You even say the real answer, Greg likely wasn’t getting a cut he thought was sufficient, he had a falling out with Jirard probably due to said cut not being enough. So he requests Jirard pulls down content that has him included because he doesn’t want the man profiting off his work. Its a mixed bag and I can see both points of view but lets not include “new bad thing happens, this is the ‘true reason’ ________ left” moment. Its no secret that mixing friends and money can easily lead to a falling out, I just find it silly whenever there is drama we have to add our own conspiratorial twists when we already have a very logical reason why X happened. Unless Greg chooses to confirm this is the reason why he left its pointless to assume its this way, hell even if he does confirm it we have to keep in mind, people are willing to lie to get seen far more favorably and jumping onto a dogpile is pretty easy. Greg hasn’t really kept an online presence, so I may actually believe him far more than if it was another content maker doing this because there is far less to gain from this.

While yes that is the level headed answer but gamers aren’t level headed. People associate people with their game choices with the decisions of the developers/publishers all the time. We see this with people who do Gacha, COD, Etc. Where people’s hatred is for these people for supporting said things. The “true gamers” see most mobile gamers as gamblers and children because of the industry/monetization around it.