Tens of millions of us voted against it and did our best to convince those around us.

On the whole, we deserve what we’re getting. We asked for it. I just hope the rest of the world doesn’t forget that so many of us tried.

Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.

There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.

Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.

While this doesn’t directly affect me, I really hate that a payment processor I don’t even use can dictate what is and is not acceptable speech.

Evolutionary psychology. I think there’s real research in the field, but it’s drowned out by charlatans who invoke its name to lend credence to their made-up bullshit without the burden of scientific rigour.

I mostly take issue with the paid exclusivity deals from Epic. That kind of thing can stay on consoles. I also don’t trust Tim Sweeney or Tencent, and I feel that they’re kind of openly hostile to consumers.

I don’t care for intrusive DRM, but it’s clearly marked which games have it on Steam and which don’t. I won’t buy anything that requires a second account or has Denuvo. I don’t do online matchmaking games anymore, but if I did, I’d also avoid anything with kernel-level anti-cheat. I don’t really mind Steamworks DRM, though. It’s not intrusive and Steam is useful enough that I normally have it running in the background anyway.

I also like buying on Steam because they’re contributing so much to Linux gaming and FOSS, even if Steam itself isn’t FOSS. It’s because of them that I can have a Windows-free household without any significant compromises.

I’m a little disappointed that it doesn’t appear to be a direct continuation of Jin’s storyline, but I’m still excited.

The cut taken by stores is of little concern to me as a consumer. Greenlight was a mess for a lot of reasons, but they discontinued it years ago, while Epic continues to pay for exclusivity deals. Steam provides lots of services to me that Epic doesn’t, though, as others have listed here. That said, I also like GOG and itch.io.

It’s a little different to have your own games exclusively on your platform than to pay other devs not to release on other platforms, and it’s entirely different if devs just choose not to release elsewhere because no other store is worth the effort for them.

I’ve definitely seen some games that do have an option for this.

And that’s just what they’ve done by accident. There was also that time they installed rootkits on their customers’ PCs, lied about it, belittled their customers when nobody believed them, then put out a fake uninstaller that actually installed additional software and didn’t uninstall the rootkit.

Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.

I had the same issue at first, but once I learned that the game actually expects you to spend some time in the training ring with Bernard to both level up Henry’s fighting and build your own skills, it got a lot better. The game will let you do one round of training and move on, but you should do quite a few to level up, and you should revisit the training ring periodically as you level more to learn new techniques.

I would say a little more repetitive than Horizon. The structure is very similar, but there are really only four or so types of enemies and they’re all human, so you lose a lot of the variety that comes with fighting the machines.

That said, I still enjoyed it. Even though it gets a bit stale in the mid to late game, the gameplay is solid, and the story is good enough that I didn’t mind too much.

Why do I feel like no good can come of this?

I just hope it gets the funding and resources it needs to realize its potential. Hopefully all the recent attention helps.

Lots of games are made for adults, and relatively few mainstream games have sex scenes at all. Many of the games with sex scenes have an option to disable those scenes and nudity. Practically all of them have an M rating with specific content descriptors on the box or store page, making it easy for parents to avoid it altogether. All modern game platforms also have parental controls that can be set up in a couple minutes.

All this is to say that if kids are seeing sex scenes in games, it’s because their parents have ignored all the warnings and options. For a parent to say that these types of games should not be made (as one of the above commenters did) for adults because they’re too lazy and feckless to use any of the options available to control and monitor the types of content their children consume, when it’s been made so easy, is disturbing. It’s especially disheartening to see it in a gaming community, from someone who presumably plays games themselves and therefore has absolutely no excuse to not know about the options available. I’m accustomed to hearing it from places like Fox News, but not here.

And “Revolution” was Nintendo’s codename for the Wii at the time.