Both sides are twisting words. Pirating truly isn’t stealing, but rather closer to unauthorized use. The word ‘steal’ is used because they want to imply that it’s the same thing as taking a physical thing that can be lost. It engenders a certain feeling that they’re wanting to invoke. Stealing sounds worse than unauthorized use. Doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to do, but it isn’t the sort of wrong that they’re implying.

To be fair there are also a lot of ‘green’ company scams out there too. Grifters are everywhere

Nobody seems to care that WoW expansions get rolled into the base install later on.

The trick is to have the merge happen a lot later. Like 1+ years, not a few months. That’s long enough that anyone who’s a decent fan and actively playing is going to typically shell out the money. It also makes it easy for new and returning fans to jump in. I’m absolutely certain that there are lots of potential Sims 4 players that see the $500+ worth of DLC and just… never start playing because it’s completely overwhelming. Especially when you see the titles and realize stuff that seems basic isn’t included in the base game: seasons, pets, etc

My problem with endless DLC isn’t the cost, but the fragmented result of each ‘feature’ needing to stand separately and not interact with any other DLC feature. You end up with some really janky gameplay where nothing works intuitively and the stuff you can implement is all hurt by those limitations.

Not to mention the sheer code hell that all this results in with an exponential increase in possible install states to account for. Which the devs just give up on and the game becomes a little buggier with every new expansion.

Honestly think they should move to a sort of MMO model. Charge for the most recent expansions and older DLC eventually gets merged into the base game. Cuts down on complexity and most of your sales will happen in the first year anyway.

I just tend to think of it as the further enshittification of life. I’m not even that old and it’s super obvious how poorly most companies are actually run these days, including my own. It’s not that we’re doing more with less, it’s a global reduction in standards and expectations. Issues that used to be solved in a day now bounce between a dozen different departments staffed with either a handful of extremely overworked people, complete newbies, or clueless contractors. AI is just going to further cement the shitty new standard both inside and outside the company.

Yep. And the good mods take a while to make too. If your game is dead 3 months after launch, who’s going to still be motivated to keep working on a big overhaul type mod?

I think too many people forget that Skyrim was actually popular enough without mods to bring enough modders to the table to fix the rest of it. Bethesda seems to have forgotten that they actually have to deliver a mostly fun and mostly playable game for a proper modding scene to take root.

I hate that they took away my analyst title. I’m not a software engineer dammit. I don’t even have an IDE installed and haven’t done any programming in 10+ years.

If I’m honest, I don’t think many will care enough to do anything.

My personal theory is that there’s a biological split in our species. Like how some people taste soap when they eat cilantro and others don’t. I think some of us are wired to need and want a leader and others do not. The evolution of not needing a leader has not fully propagated to the whole species yet.

You aren’t up to date if you think modern AI voices sound like Stephen hawking.

Honestly I just don’t think a lot of people will care. They’ll just get used to the lower quality. AI only has to be ‘good enough to still sell’. Do you really think that gamers are the consumers that are going to be ones to fight back against it? The same consumers that have rolled over to basically every other exploitative practice ever conceived of?

Agreed. It’s comical how he’s seemingly able to rapidly build stuff that requires experience in multiple high end fields and then he even surrounds himself with his own tech and is not buried under maintenance hell for it all.

My alternative head canon is that he’s actually only good at building AIs and Jarvis and Friday are the ones who actually make all of his crazy ideas work.

Ironically only the passwords I’m forced to change frequently (i.e. my work password) are something simple and easy to type. All of my personal passwords are like 40 characters of gibberish my password manager invented and the password to that is similar to the xkcd batteryhorsestaple and is changed from time to time as well.

But my work doesn’t allow password managers, so I just have a rolling window of like 12 passwords since that’s their history limit.

Sorry I’m out of touch with this these days, but does the esrb even matter anymore? At least on PC a lot of games aren’t even rated. Or if they are, it’s barely a factor. And lots of kids just play mobile games, which also aren’t rated by the ESRB either.

I still check in to certain niche subreddits that don’t exist on lemmy. Those feel pretty close to how they used to. The other day I took a look at /r/all and… ooof. It’s very apparent quality has completely nosedived. Lemmy /c/all is a much better representation of pre-blackout reddit /r/all right now.

Thanks! I’ll give it a shot

Super excited for this. One of my adult teeth just never grew in. I tried to get an implant, but the lack of tooth also resulted in too little bone there to support the implant. I’m hopeful this would eventually allow me to have a real tooth there instead of my very fragile bridge.

No, I use both YouTube and YouTube music and they need different UIs and ways of navigating. While you could cram all of YouTube musics UI into a subsection of YouTube, it really doesn’t make sense to do so. I’m not just shitting on Google just because, I’m saying that the needs of music listening and YouTube video watching are different for many people.

Honestly sounds like you don’t even need youtube, just YouTube music if all you ever use it for is listening.

The UI and use case for a video platform and a music app are very, very different