Yes, we want to tear it down. This is a company that was taking a revenue share of any purchase made on their device, whether or not they incurred a cost in facilitating it. It’s universally bad for consumers. It’s why game prices on consoles don’t have competition like they do on PC, and it’s responsible for consumers feeling lock-in to an ecosystem, feeling as though they can’t respond to a bad product by moving to the competitor.

Yes, I know, Fortnite bad, but this is a big deal. The way we got here is often embarrassing, but this is a major step toward tearing down walled garden ecosystems.

Happens all the time. Netflix is moneyhatting, promises someone who knows how to do the job a great salary to do it for them instead.

Or perhaps even find it to be worth the price.

Which could just as easily be interpreted as steering into the skid, like a strategy someone might use when they’re relentlessly bullied. But you’re clearly more interested in Tim Buckley’s life than I am.

You are free to make your own interpretations as far as how he portrays/portrayed women in his comics. It’s been almost 20 years since that comic went up, and standards in social mores and comedy have changed a ton in that time, but when I read those comics back then, only being familiar with Buckley through CAD comics and nothing else, he never struck me as a narcissist or a misogynist. His self-insert character was a Homer Simpson type (“which was the style at the time”), which is hardly the caricature of a narcissist in my opinion. I find it’s very easy to invent a narrative about who someone is from how they portray themselves publicly, and also…it’s been 17 years. Whoever he was 17 years ago is very likely not who he is today. I don’t know that he’s a bad person, I don’t know that he ever was a bad person, and I don’t think it’s admirable to hound someone with a joke about something that they put out into the world so long ago. Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on. I didn’t feel good when I saw that comic the first time, nor was I intended to, but I definitely don’t feel great whenever it’s brought back up either.

I believe that in the life experience that he’s drawing from, that he based his self-insert character on, he’s in every panel, yes. I certainly took it to mean that he too was grieving the child that he expected to be born into the world. I found it distasteful to make it into a meme because the subject matter it’s mocking is fucked up, plus bullying is kind of disconcerting in general.

I can name plenty of shooters that don’t let you take attachments off of guns. That might not be your best example of ignoring feedback, because the presence or omission of that feature can be for any number of very good reasons.

I never saw it as a dick move. It always seemed to me like any other creative person putting their life experiences into their work. That didn’t make it good, but his best work in a comedy comic isn’t likely to come out while he’s grieving. It was sort of a shark jump moment for that site, but it always seemed way more distasteful to me to make it into a meme.

Nintendo bets you’ll buy Mario Kart even if it’s $80. Focus bets you won’t buy Roadcraft unless it’s $40.

Yes, but then their lives are often uprooted, since the entire existence of their job was based on a bad bet.

“Recently” also means something different in a time where BioWare makes one game every 5 years rather two games in the same year.

This one and FairGame$ are both screwed, and they’ll mark the end of an era for Sony and live service. What’s funny too is that Bungie was purchased in large part for being experts in making successful live service games, but it reminds me of something in investing where those who appear to be very smart after a string of successes are compared to being “expert coin flippers” who just got heads a number of times in a row. As we’ve gotten a peak or two behind the curtain after the purchase, it certainly looks like Bungie was only lucky.

Typically, when Steam handles the matchmaking, it’s peer to peer. But in general, they also sort of broker the connection between you and the other player or server. Street Fighter 6 runs its own servers and matchmaking, but if Steam cuts out, I lose my connection to them.

GOG is competitive for my dollar. DRM-free is a compelling proposition, and they’ve got an excellent refund program. There are a lot of things they could stand to do better, but those two things alone give me an actual reason to shop there over Steam.

It’s a lot of cutting out for about a minute, but that’s just enough to interrupt a fighting game match. If it was once per week at a predictable time, that might be okay, but it’s been happening more and more lately when it used to only be on Tuesdays.

As a customer, why would I ever shop at Epic if the game is also available on Steam and typically has more features? Epic doesn’t solve any problems for me and actively introduces others, like a lack of Linux support. Do I want to play Alan Wake II? Of course I do. Am I going to buy it when they could push an update tomorrow that breaks compatibility with my operating system and offers me no recourse as a customer since it was unsupported in the first place? No, I’m not.

There are things worth solving that Steam does poorly (if they also support Linux customers). Finding out if my multiplayer game will be playable without external servers is a nightmare; DRM sucks, and I want none of it; Steam’s multiplayer/friends network has more downtime than is acceptable; Steam Input should be a platform agnostic library; etc. Instead of solving those problems, they made the store enticing for suppliers (publishers) but not customers. If I’m shopping someplace other than Steam, it’s GOG and not Epic.

Are you under the impression that Metal Gear Rising is an Obsidian game?

Do you think there’s any stopping the industry’s shift to digital at this point? Because we just saw another quarter where we went even harder in that direction.

Well, playing through the first KC:D now, I can tell you it was rough to go from Avowed’s combat to KC:D’s, but that’s okay, because KC:D has other strengths. When development gets restarted, it’s not because it was shaping up into a better game than what we ended up with.