They make cool stuff, but they are ultimately an advertising company (as in that’s their main source of revenue). So by all means enjoy the cool stuff, just proceed with caution and of course assume nothing is permanent!

There’s no .uk and there never was!

multiple human hands

It wasn’t weird until you specified human

Offer device makers or carriers money or perks to preinstall the Play Store

Does this cover GApps in general, I wonder?

it wanted … Google to stop being able to tie Android APIs to Google Play.

I feel this would have been really big news

The Apple case is already over, and Apple mostly won

Seems crazy that Google is forced to open up when Android is already kind of open but Apple get away with keeping iOS very closed

Offer developers money or perks to launch their apps on the Play Store exclusively or first

Lol, as if Epic got away with this given that it’s exactly what they do with PC games!

Ah that’s a shame, I guess the ones I’ve seen in the past must have been a bit simpler

And if you want to not bother with the systems you don’t have I’d imagine that would make it simpler and cheaper too

Why Google allows apps to block a system service from inputting information is beyond my understanding, but it’s absolutely infuriating, and just discourages the use of these tools.

This is the really annoying bit

While it defaults to a console-like experience it is meant to be altered, they give you a full desktop environment as standard and even provide instructions to install Windows if you really want.

My Linux gaming machine is a Steam Deck, it’s been a pretty positive experience and you only really need to tinker if you’re straying off the golden path.

I imagine we’ll see some new Nintendo innovation with the Switch 2, they are at least good for throwing in a load of wacky ideas with new consoles.

Addendum to 2: never believe that what they say is relevant to what’s actually happening here. You have a lot of faith that the people writing error messages knew what they were doing!

Never dealt with an intermittent failure or race condition, eh?

It’s a console, not a goddamn webshop.

Console makers see them as one and the same. This being Lemmy I have to advise that the only solution is to own your own machine, so best build your own hardware, install Linux, and compile all the games you want to play yourself.

Doesn’t every company offer that? “Yeah we’re really done supporting this, but if you want to spend a million quid a month on it then sure, you can have ultra extra extended support”, then every old company that relies on this for their money-printing machine and can’t be bothered updating their ancient code sends them a blank cheque.

The rest of the article is mildly interesting, but if you just took the bait from the headline:

On a technical level, Xbox One is essentially a PC using a heavily modified version of Windows, and this software simply translates native Xbox applications into a form that can run on standard Windows PCs

Maybe that bug report was the motivation for the collaboration! Or maybe the level 1 support aren’t aware of unannounced business decisions.

Complete guess here, but refunds are probably handled differently by the banks compared to new payments, i.e. undoing an error is probably free(ish), but paying people is how they get you

The point of making of open to everyone was so they’d have other traffic to hide their own secret communications amongst, right?

Not to mention every now and then the shop gets ever so slightly worse and more spammy looking. Steam was a god send when it first launched and I’d hate to see it become what it replaced

Was it a godsend? I thought everybody hated it initially. And I feel like it’s only got better over the years as they’ve added more features.

Faced with the return of one of humanity’s greatest threats, you have no choice but to head to THE TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL:

🇬🇧 THE UNITED KINGDOM OF 🇬🇧 GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND

I think we should put this on the tourist brochures

I’ve got a couple of good ones on my pebble