If they’re going to be successful turning this brand into a cross media property, hopefully they’re sticking to the dark humor and satire.

Maybe before an Activision acquisition and the implosion of the console business model.

Eh, this is a case of them offering a better deal than actually ever made sense, because they expected the volume of subscribers to make up for it, but that never manifested.

I’m not sure if you live in NYC, but there will typically be a courtyard next to big apartment buildings, often home for a trash area for the entire complex, among other things.

It’s also suspected that Yuzu was not “clean room” reversed engineered and built on code that they shouldn’t have had access to, which will allow Nintendo to pull down any fork of Yuzu but not Ryujinx.

I suspect Australia is responsible for Streets of Rogue changing “cocaine” into “sugar” as well, but I know Japan doesn’t allow things like beheadings in their games, which I thought was part of that DLC.

Most of this nostalgia was already functionally dead and got a second lease on life, really. There was no chance another Alone in the Dark or Outcast was going to come out of the previous IP owners.

They do it because if you have to be online, connected to their servers, you have to look at their store and be tempted to buy something else for the game. It’s also just straight DRM. The industry spent the better part of 20 years complaining about piracy and used game sales, and now they’ve found a way to defeat them by just designing their games to disappear when the servers are gone. That does come with a catch though. Building and maintaining the online infrastructure costs a lot of money, and given how many of these games just instantly flop and die, customers are less willing to invest their time and money into a game unless they know it’s a winner, which has less to do with the game’s quality and more of how many other people perceive it to be quality. This looks to me to be why the industry is crashing right now.

As egregious as horse armor was decades ago, that doesn’t offend me the way server requirements do (you can always just choose not to buy the horse armor and still have the game you bought in perpetuity). If the game requires an online connection, don’t buy it. There’s always another game out there like it without the requirement. A game that requires an internet connection is just a worse version of a game they could have sold you without it, and the online requirement gives it an expiration date. If multiplayer requires an online connection, make sure it supports LAN, split-screen, direct IP connections, or private servers. This information is very hard to find just by store pages, perhaps intentionally so, but I usually check on the PC Gaming Wiki these days; otherwise you have to hope the developer responds to a question about those features in the Steam forums.

This has happened before, for games from other publishers, as per the article. I don’t remember all of the reasons for it, but if I’m not mistaken, this is why Shogun: Total War 2 has a blood DLC for a few dollars, so that they can make everything but the DLC available in Japan.

It’s far easier to explain the world with historic precedent than it is with conspiracy theories.

What you might call a memo, I’d call a poor explanation to confirm your biases. Do some reading on how economists came to their conclusions, and you’ll see why we arrived at an ideal environment of some low inflation. If economics reporters were only serving at the behest of billionaires, we’re in an age of unprecedented access to information, and economics is almost entirely math. If someone wanted to be a whistleblower and show the math to back it up, it would have gone viral by now, and that still would have to contradict a working model of reality that makes sense for what we all understand about inflation. There will always be some percentage of people who don’t thrive in whatever our economic conditions are, and that sucks, but I don’t think anyone’s been able to show a system where we can save literally everyone, because as human beings, our flaws tend to get in the way of that. Still, that low amount of inflation tends to be the best we can do.

We have history that we can learn from where we’ve had deflation and could observe the effects. The wealthy are the ones not buying products in deflationary environments, or otherwise big ticket purchases for the rest of us. Those big purchases involve a lot of money changing hands, but above and beyond that, there’s also a lack of capital investment, because the investor has no incentive to do anything except to put their money under their mattress, once again not circulating it. If there’s constant low inflation, the investor is guaranteed to lose money keeping it under their mattress but has a good chance at making more money by investing it into companies who use it to hire people and produce things that people want to spend money on.

Do you think that every article written about inflation just happens to forget that prices are still rising? Or do you think there’s a reason there are basically no economists anywhere arguing that deflation is what we should have instead?

They’re not missing it at all. In normal circumstances, we’ve always got some low amount of inflation. If prices fell, we’d have an entirely different and much worse set of issues.

That comment seemed squarely about the legacy of a system designed to benefit white men, which it was.

They just made bribes legal and made the president above the law.

Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo. Plus Smash attendance at majors for Melee and Ultimate, from a cursory glance, appears to be on the decline in the wake of Ultimate’s sunsetting. Evo’s only going to take the 7 biggest games and a throwback, so even if Nintendo wasn’t getting in the way, you might fit in Ultimate but not Melee. Smash gets its dues in other places. Like Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, etc., the scene will never truly die.

There’s also a new 3D factory game called Foundry. Having bounced off of Satisfactory, that one seems more promising as a fan of Factorio.

In the US at least, this is false.

Potentially true. Or it was an accident that proved more lucrative than they thought it would. At the very least, it got there first and showed everyone else how to ruin multiplayer games.

It’s a great game, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t change the genre, and all of multiplayer video games, for the worse. Multiplayer games can no longer be designed to just be fun. They must also be addictive, they must retain players, they must keep them coming back, etc. using every manipulative trick in the book like XP bars and unlocks. You might say MMORPGs did this first, but this was the application of that feedback loop to a competitive action game.