Eggyhead

It’s like they’re so corporate-plagued over there that the extent of their innovation is to buy other companies, rebrand things, and sell subscriptions to stuff. Microsoft HQ is like Dunder Mifflin of the 2020s

Would it apply to politics?

That’s a really important question to ask, because anything can be made into politics.

I never said the left is immune to disinformation, just that a 5 year plan would likely land its fruition under a democratic president, which automatically makes it a bad thing from a republican perspective. Even though the process begins under Trump. It’s a nice setup for another round of anti-left propaganda when the timing is perfect for it, don’t you think?

5 year plan. It’ll happen under a democrat president and the right will be screaming bloody murder that their right to misinform free speech is being encroached, and build a their political platform on it.

I’ve heard that the “smart” feature services actually help subsidize the overall cost of the TV, but if that’s true, I doubt any of those savings are being passed to the consumer.

9 hours in and zero comments kinda speaks volumes.

I imagine it won’t do console numbers, but I’m sure there will be enough fans and early adopters to justify the added expense of a 2026 launch. However, I’d like to think the popularity will grow organically as the system gets older and prices start dropping again.

As a long time PS customer, the Steam Deck has been probably the smartest/luckiest impulse purchase I’ve made. I used to not have a PC backlog, but now I own a PC port of pretty much all my favorite console games PS4 and backwards, among others, and the majority of those purchases have fallen under the “might-as-well-at-that-price” category of expense. I’ve been playing on Deck nearly every day since I got it and have only scratched the surface of library I’ve built since buying it.

I added the three cats from the last panel as stickers on my iPhone.

The bubble must be showing signs of weakening.

This might be good on Steam Deck for multiple games that have carry-over data. Just mirror the save data folder of one proton directory into that of the follow-up game’s directory. I assume you can go back to the first game to unlock more stuff to carry over, and not have to manually copy-paste the save folder each time. Just run a sync.

Interesting take, but if you’ve got a group of boomers in a classroom, and another with 14-17 year olds, which of the two groups do you think are most likely to start pulling out phones before the hour is up?

Literally owning someone’s soul.

I just keep an iPad set up next to me when playing a game. I can look up guides, and use it to do online chat as well.

Okay just ignore the personal anecdote on how a little bit of piracy actually helped create a long-time paying customer of multiple franchises, I guess.

(gollumnotlistening.gif)

But furthermore…

When Denuvo survives for at least 12 weeks, piracy leads to nearly zero total revenue loss on average. The results suggest that Denuvo does protect legitimate sales to an estimated mean of 15 percent of total revenue and median of 20 percent, but there is little justification to employ Denuvo long-term (i.e. for more than three months), especially given that Denuvo can have negative technical side effects and is generally disliked by users.

The study itself, linked in the article, states that Denuvo is effective at protecting sales for only about 12 weeks, then it does more long-term harm than good.

If that’s the case, I wonder how much Denuvo suppresses sales of a game over its lifetime once those 12 weeks are over?

My first Final Fantasy game was a rom a friend all but insisted I play. Before that the idea of random encounters and turned-based combat were a huge turnoff to me, and I had no interest in buying it. Since then I’ve purchased a copy of nearly every game in the series, some more than once for different platforms. Same story for the Trails games and some others.

That’s a lot of money those companies would never had received if it weren’t for just a little bit of piracy to make a fan out of someone.

Typically the people I know who pirate because they want to play without paying are doing so because they don’t have the money. As mentioned countless times before, they would not have bought the game otherwise because they probably couldn’t afford it in the first place. Denuvo may (or may not, I don’t actually know) block pirates, but it doesn’t ensure the publisher is making any more money. It does however ensure that regular paying folks get a worse product. I think people have the right to be upset about that. They could just use a different DRM.

Advertisers love this one trick.

Sony is accused of abusing its dominant market position by forcing digital game and add-on purchases exclusively through the PlayStation Store, keeping prices artificially higher than physical alternatives.

Fair enough. If you buy a game physically from a store, you still have to buy its DLC and expansions directly from the PS Store, and it can’t be priced competitively.

Then they tell publishers and game developers that more players finish their games on Microsoft’s platform than any others!