She’s rescuing the artifacts so they can be put in the British Museum where they belong. Elgin marbles better make room

Steam does more than launch games, you realize this, right? They want gog to have a launcher on Linux that will manage their library for them, not just launch their game.

You make it sound like drm didn’t exist before steam or like steam isn’t a form of drm itself. Old drm was more basic and far less nefarious, like entering a cd key or codes in your manual. This later escalated to online activated cd keys. At the very least, these forms of drm didn’t run all the time like steam did- I remember steam getting huge pushback (from myself included) because it ran like absolute dogshit. Later forms of drm got worse with checks in the discs that collected data on your pc (securom, anyone?). Steam did a lot of good things but it did not erase drm- it merely created another form of it (I.e. You no longer own your games, you are buying licenses they can revoke at any time)

“Adding some spice” is just ragebaiting, be honest. We have no idea what they’re doing and have zero proof they are doing what’s asserted, but we want to make a narrative that it could happen anyway.

Honestly that was how I felt as well. I remember being hyped the play bl2 and then getting bored doing meaningless quests over and over. Like am I supposed to feel anything for these people asking me to retrieve parts over and over? At least do some sort of quest where they can shoot people. I thought the combat system was better but I wasn’t compelled to play through it

I’d argue James bond as a franchise is basically a hypermasculine fantasy and the gadgets are pretty much a tech fantasy within it. Breaking laws of physics is completely unrealistic, but the point I was making was that you don’t need to do any of these things- you could write a story about how you went to the gym and broke a treadmill (even though you didn’t) and it would be fiction. The bar to fiction is not that high.

What you’re saying is sound and I agree the plot not being real is fiction; the only problem is you said fiction required unrealistic elements and most people see “unrealistic” as basically fantasy

I’m referring to this review from NLM looking at 49 papers to investigate the effects of gaming on women. It is possible to have multiple articles that contradict each other

Me arguing something can be harmful for society doesn’t mean I’m arguing it has to be abolished in its entirety. I’m not sure why you think everything has to be black and white since obviously there’s room for artistic use- remember you are the only one who thought that, or perhaps it just wasn’t obvious for you. And can you explain how unrealistic body standards is not bad for society? It isn’t far fetched seeing young people compare to beauty standards they are bombarded with. It doesn’t only happen in video games but in tons of visual media.

It is possible to have a realistic story in fiction. For example, Mad Men is a tv series that’s pretty grounded in history but the characters and everything that happens to them are the product of the writers and their research. It’s not a documentary, it’s fiction, but quite realistic.

Have you ever read historical fiction? Stories like jane eyre are not real but they’re sensible. A story can be fiction and realistic. You can write a short story based on stuff you’ve researched and seen and it’s still fiction.

Who said that was a requirement? It’s still a fact that it causes harm

I’m not sure why this is being downvoted because setting unrealistic body standards is absolutely terrible for society

Fiction can easily be realistic- You’re thinking of fantasy which is unrealistic. Fiction means it’s not a true story, not that it can’t be realistic

Well said. I don’t think people genuinely understand the technical difficulties this problem posed and how it only produced negatives- it’s like having a serious movie scene and then the main character randomly has chihuahua legs because of perspective warping. When it happens during gameplay it can be confusing, too. There’s no charm at all and it’s not the fun kind of jank like with physics ragdolls.

Probably would not add kpop to the list of chill. That industry is rife with abuse like slave contracts.

That really sucks. Consoles these days are just pcs with expensive libraries. If you can muster playing on pc with your son, the games are cheaper and I highly recommend it. On steam, you can filter by local coop and hook up two controllers to get a similar experience. You can even try emulating older games like on the ps2.

Wow, shift goalposts much? You said “$10 in qbert days” which was the 80s and now it’s not $10 it’s $30. You can just admit you got it wrong and it was never $10 (though I do think prices right now are actually well aligned at $60 because of the far lower costs in distribution and marketing). Also I’m NOT the OP who played thousands of hours on qbert. Great job quoting someone else.

$50-60 based on what? Adjusted for inflation in 1982, it’s more like $33 and distribution costs are way lower than back then. Truth is you just need to find a compelling gameplay loop but companies don’t like taking risks- not every game needs to be a massive endeavor like skyrim. Look at games like slay the spire and see how a cheap game can be compelling without having to be a AAA behemoth. And at that note, is there even anything wrong if a game only takes your attention for a hundred hours? I don’t see the need to extend the player’s attention with poor side quest grinding. These things add unnecessary cost

Thing is they’ll then just miss those games or be accused of abusing its market position to be anticompetitive, but I think in general these publishers are getting that we don’t want stupid launchers/extra logins. It happened with 2k and it’s good it’s happening with Sony. Honestly I check before I buy any game if the store mentions a third party account now because that’s so annoying. Especially origin- they are awful and their business is awful.

Tbh it’s more the getting users to gamble by paying for cases that got the ball rolling. Objectively, the least terrible monetization form is buying a game outright and then earning your items through playing as they used to do before free to play became normalized. That’s why all these shitty games come out with battle passes even though game developers did just fine supporting their game for a few years without the constant money churn. Because it’s the norm, people now think it’s impossible to have a game with updates that is bought outright, yet deep rock galactic does it just fine without $60/yr worth in battle passes.

I’d argue valve spearheading microtransactions was a bad thing, traceable to tf2 items and cases. People don’t give them enough flak for filling games with monetization.

Problem with their logic is that, as stated in the article, goods such as preserved books are already used for recreation. Your idea that a catalogue of old media would prevent consumption of new media is provably false by example. People read old books and it doesn’t stop them from reading new ones. Can you imagine saying this exact same thing about music? People’s tastes change over time and they like new things- old things don’t stop us from consuming the new things. All the copyright lobbyists are doing is preventing the public from enjoying old games that can no longer be played because the hardware is dated or there are no viable copies left.

With a 2 min search I found a cyberpowerpc prebuilt for $700 that included a r7 5700 and rx 6700. And yes, you can absolutely get 60 fps at 1080p on some aaa titles; I don’t know where you get that idea you can’t, especially if you can tweak graphics settings (for the record, most pc gamers don’t even use ultra- high and medium presets are the most reasonable settings). I’m sure a title like Diablo 4 doesn’t require tuning at 1080p at all.

Now if Google could finally open RCS so other android apps have access, that would be great. People have only asked for 10+ years.