Not really. Sub numbers have been falling for a while, game pass value has always been borderline for devs and value hasn’t been increasing that well for gamers. Game pass doesn’t give dlc access, it doesn’t give big enough incentives to buy on the Xbox store.

If they started doing exclusives I’d be a little concerned, but I’m sure they know that would just hurt their already bad numbers.

Right now Visa, Mastercard and Steam are the bigger problems right now. And Steam just because their bubble is popping, their lack of guards has started to be exploited, which is going to mean they’re going to be implementing changes that are bad for everyone, but necessary.

Only in the US and “definitely not related to tariffs trust me” 🤔

Some switch 2 games don’t have physical versions, and I thought I heard they were just download codes anyway, can you even trade those secondhand?

The problem is hallucinations are part of the solution to conversations with LLMs, but they’re destructive in a game environment. An NPC tells you something false and the player will assume they just couldn’t find the secret or that the game is bugged rather than an AI that just made some shit up.

No amount of training removes hallucinating because that’s part of the generation process. All it does is take your question and reverse engineer what an answer to that looks like based on what words it knows and it’s data set. It doesn’t have any “knowledge”, not to mention that the training data would have to be different for each npc to represent different knowledge sets, backgrounds, upbringing, ideology, experience and culture. And then there’s the issue of having to provide it broad background knowledge of the setting without it adding new stuff or revealing hidden lore.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see this attempted, but I expect it to go horribly wrong.

Pretty sure that’s the case, or just breaking from needing to swim.

There’s a middle ground. Maybe they shouldn’t be trying to release a new CoD every 6 months, but they also don’t need to take 11 years with it.

The issue we’re seeing isn’t really sure to production budget, it’s due to a broad squash on the middle class globally by governments going conservative and wealth pooling in the rich. And this is amplied specifically the response of companies to less people buying less games of increasing the cost of the games.

The reality is the people driving all the decisions just aren’t in touch with the reasons behind market shifts.

You’re against server based Anti-Cheat too?

Perhaps a little dramatic, but have you heard the phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”

“things have changed” the makers of GDPR admitted it didn’t really accomplish what they wanted

The EU does great things, but this is an area plagued with issues. Like timed licences expiring, meaning even the devs/publishers can’t continue distributing the game, copyright and IP ownership being unclear who owns it after companies dissolve, leadership leaves or collaborations end. Not to mention the law still hasn’t really caught up over what it means to distribute a game. Does hosting a download for the client side of a game count as distribution? What happens if a company is obligated to stop distribution, but obligated to provide the community a way to keep playing? What if a member of leadership keeps providing a way to download the client-side, it might not contain copyright content, but maybe the server side does, which is actually distribution, is either?

We live in a world where 'I want to remaster <game> and I’m willing to buy the licenses and IP" can end with nothing happening because it’s too complicated.

So forgive me if “We want to continue playing games we bought =(” feels like too vague a direction for something this complicated and I can see far more concepts of terrible consequences for bad implementations than just having to click a popup box on every single website I visit and needing a VPN to visit the sites that try to block EU traffic because they don’t want to have to adhere to GDPR.

True, but it only got so popular because they had convinced both groups, hard and soft. I have no idea how they managed to convince people that Northern Ireland wouldn’t be an issue.

But back to the real point. Yeah, I thought GDPR would be good, but in practice it’s not changed the cookie/tracking landscape at all. Most places you’d have to send a letter to to get them to removed your data, and most would probably not be able to comply. Meanwhile we now have options that are subscribe (meaning they have legitimate reason to track and monitor you) or accept their ads and tracking cookies.

I think you have too much faith in them.

I didn’t say it was, but a lot of people are wanting offline access.

Point is it’s not inherently clear with one vision what SKG is. Just like Brexit and any number of dumb things it’s been marketed in a shotgun approach to get as many people on board as possible and coasting on a “well the EU politicians will just figure out what we want”

That’s not specific “the way we bought it” could be argued to require servers to be kept running and no company will take actions to put themselves in a position to get sued.

It’s not deep that Stripe uses whatever card network your card is on. Visa and Mastercard don’t actually do payment processing themselves, they have processors that do it for them. It’s those that they’ve told to put pressure on itch and Steam.

Stripe is just another 3rd party between Visa/mastercard and itch.

Mainstream betting has already gone too far even within the betting laws. There is no way to do it responsibly

That’s just how Steam bundles work. It decreases the cost by the undiscounted price of the parts you own to some minimum (I think it’s £1). Most likely they only thought as far as bundling the Rebuild edition and SnowRunner and giving it a cost of £60 and didn’t consider this.

Or maybe they did it deliberately given the name. Who knows

Now they’re having issues because sequels are the same game, better engine, but less content, but the old version is still fine.

Console updates and game updates are a thing. It will work, true, it just might be downloading and installing updates for a day before it does.

If Helldivers is anything to go by all they need to do is say sorry and that they’ll do something on twitter and everyone will forgive and forget even if they don’t do anything.

Until players start learning their lesson and not trusting these companies in the first place nothing will change. They admitted this was over sales of the upcoming black ops and it’s multiplayer.