I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I’m glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.

Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I’m really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn’t, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I’m not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.

Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.

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.

No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.

once we have gotten past the ethical quandaries and doing it the right way. It would be cool to just synthesize voices for npcs and PC from a list of “character types” and maybe add accents for the main PC. So all games can have voiced audio (could be cool if it can also work in a retroactive way, like play a classic CRPG but have fully voiced characters would be pretty neat), which can be a mixed bag in modern day since realistically there is a budget and voice acting can take a ton of money if done right. So it means we as gamer if we can mod in new quests, we can use such system to truly expand thee game. Like I love real VA performances so I can see this as a “stopgap” so you can get the main questline done and many of the “good” side quests done but you can use this AI trained voice for the more smaller tasks that may not get as much love or as I said use it for modding.

He was certainly above that. Hell his story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” also known as “White Ape”. Is literally a book about the “one drop rule” to the point its actually funny because of how absurd it comes off as. Its so insanely racist, it fucking becomes funny based on the character’s reaction. Its not a great short story but basically he find out his great great great great grandmother was a “white ape” (which is not human per say but lets read between the lines since the white apes come from the congo region), his response to this news was pouring gasoline on himself and burning himself alive. Like yes its fiction but the fact he made a fucking short story where the focal point is discovering that you are mixed race and learning that is so mind breaking, death was the only logical option is god damn hilarious.

Focus 2

meshify 2

Pop Air

Enthoo Pro 2

Evolv Shift 2 Air

Eclipse p400

Like these aren’t the “boring cases” you are referring to but they are black boxes with at least decent airflow since those boring HP,Dell, and other big system integrator use are pretty horrid for cpus/gpus gamers actually use. That was just from a cursory look of 2 case manufacturers .

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.

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.

Sure there is a ton of elitism in gaming but are we going to ignore mobile games are the birthplace of the shit monetization we see in modern AAA gaming. There is a reason why sports games and mobile games were the only gaming related things Konami wanted to do for the longest time (now they are just cashing in on lazy ports). Low expenses, high turnout! Like there are a likely a ton of great games on mobile phones but we can’t ignore the market is filled with glorified slot machines. Many mobile gamers have been pushing for this unfortunately.

Hell while I’m not the biggest fan of apple or its products. It was fascinating to see many people complaining about the price of the Resident Evil Iphone ports going to cost a full retail price. While we haven’t seen them released yet and can’t vouch for its performance or looks but the idea of playing a full AAA title on your phone and asking for it to be priced in a normal mobile range (5-10$) is god damn insane.

I mean depends on where they are from. If they are from the US or Europe they would be fucking idiots but if they are Chinese, Russian, etc they are basically untouchable and it will merely be a game of whackamole.

Edit: welp did a Whois on their website and seems its from Arizona. So yeah nevermind my top comment, if this is truly a company stationed in Arizona they really fucked up.

I mean asymmetrical warfare is a messy affair. Hamas gets new recruits who are angered about their family and homes being destroyed. Big nations typically don’t win these kind of engagements in the modern era because at least to modern sensibilities we don’t really want to see pointless slaughter and genocide, this isn’t to advocate for it, quite far from it but historically typically you would have to be ruthless to subjugate people but thankfully modern sensibilities say that is pretty fucked. So really this will either end up another “forever” war or one of the sides will be wiped out entirely.

While I agree with you, we have to keep in mind even though Bethesda games are pretty fucking shallow. Some people just love them the way they are. Console players are the perfect example of this. I know consoles “recently” added modding but its far more limited than their pc counterparts. Those games had legs even without the modding scene. Its just on the PC market mods are probably the main reason why people play it on that platform.

Super has absolutely not ended. The manga is right now playing catch up with the latest movie.

So its a nothing burger for you…

If you have more hours on your steam deck than your mac. Whats the point since you wouldn’t want the refund. So either you accept that you are asking for something completely unrealistic. I want it to be noted that I was very miffed at Valve because they killed CSGO in an easily accessible way (at launch). You are requesting they shouldn’t care about the hours you play your thing on. Having a “mostly” played on mac requirement makes sense. They aren’t going to give you a number of hours/percentage and simply saying I played it for 2 minutes to test if it actually worked on a mac shouldn’t count as a “refundable” thing.

Are you seriously suggesting. I boot up CS Go on some random macbook and get a full refund while I can still play a legacy build of the game that does support mac.

Honestly it just sounds like you are the kind of idiot who would play bioshock and come out with the that it was just a fun game about smacking people who are in diving suits with a wrench and having super powers. Like its clear you are a troll since you are choosing to pick games that have no in game story then shouting “LALALLALALALALALAL” when people tell you that the fucking instruction manual the game comes with has these themes. Funny part is your argument would make sense if you were talking about other kinds of external material like the whole star extended universe or someone talking about the halo books when talking about the complexity of the universe but this is a thing that came with the game. I’m sorry you either didn’t have a childhood where you didn’t read the fucking manual that came with the game but I assume you were illiterate when it came out.

Yeah I think many people sort of ignore many critics see a ton of movies so when you get ones that are all very trope and cliche, it may be a fun rump but a critic probably would have seen many of them prior. At the end of the day movie reviewing is a job and you are probably going to get sick of shit you see on repeat over and over with just a slap of paint on top of it. Typically the reason why comedies and horror films probably get slapped the hardest by critic reviews.

Kicker is the PC VR mode has been done for months now but can’t be released until the PSVR release.

You make a fair point but as I said people keep focusing only on prompts. So when people see the takeaway that “Oh AI art isn’t copyrightable” it means very little since noone in an actual industry is going to give out a raw render (well they shouldn’t). So that is why I pointed out other tools in AI art. Like inpainting and img to img can easily make it or break how much we influence the AI. You are still using all the AI besides scribbling on paint on top of your raw then rerendering it.

Most of these court cases are primarily on prompt only images. So yes, its great we have the line of well duh if an artist does “sufficient” touch ups its back to being but the question becomes what is sufficient. Would it be sufficient if you still used mostly AI tools especially ones that give the users far more control over what they are rendering (Going to focus mostly on SD since it gives far more versatility than most of its competitors) like if you only use image to image. You posted your own art and it does it thing and bing bang boom is it copyrightable? Img to img only, probably is a low bar and may not get over the hump to be copyrightable but inpainting probably has a far more likely chance to be since it can factor in many things that the “curator” is wanting.

We are at a time when people are very hot on this topic. I just feel some artists are going a bit too insane with this, I understand their anxieties but its quite easy to lose sight and make draconian demands about this future especially the ones who are suggesting that you can copyright a style. Such suggestions are asinine and will hurt everyone including themselves.