I'm sorry to pop your bubble but while Denuvo sucks for consumers, it actually works at least on the PC front. Many cracks you would see require emulators since the pc ports are pretty solidly protected. Like Total war warhammer 3 is still uncracked after 2 years.
And those are fundamental problems with the 2 hour refund system but the loophole they closed just makes sense. You shouldn't be able to play a game for 48 hours while its in AAA "early access" Ie you preorder the game's special edition (Starfield and that new ubisoft star wars game are doing this) and you can play the game a few days before launch but since the game isn't released you can get a no questions refund. To be honest, I assume those kind of games already followed the 2 hour restriction but I guess it was very uncommon until very recently but now this is a new way for Publishers to screw consumers because it means consumers can start playing before embargoes for game reviews come out.
Not early access games but more AAA "Early access games", which means you preorder advanced edition you get to play like a week early. The biggest examples being Starfield and that new Star wars game by ubisoft (with the insane price of 130 for its super special edition). So this is just a logical loophole getting closed. We can have disagreements with the 2 hour refund window on steam but I don't think it was ever intentional for you to play 48 hours of a game then being able to refund the thing since its not official out.
I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I'm glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.
Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I'm really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn't, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I'm not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.
Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.
Are we going to ignore that VR adoption is basically held up by Oculus/facebook. I hate facebook and their support for their titles on the VR space are dreadful for instance it is unacceptable what they did with Echo Arena but you can literally look at the steam hardware survey and see that Oculus/facebook makeup nearly 70% (67.4% to be more accurate) of VR headsets in the market today for PCVR. Who the fuck is funding many VR game devs right now? I can tell you it ain't many publishers and the biggest one right now is Facebook as much as I hate to say it. Facebook absolutely is a crutch VR needs to survive in this market but we gamers should make use of them for as long as possible then ditch them whenever its convenient for us.
Hell the PSVR2 looking very juicy if that has great PCVR support and it doesn't require any ps5 nonsense to work but PSVR2 is a perfect example of how VR is not in a great place and a big part of it is price related. Like VR nuts (like I) would gladly pay higher tier prices for a good headset but to some average joe, they see a headset that costs as much as a fucking console that only works with a limited number of games. Hell the thing can even make you sick trying to use it. Most people aren't going to pay 1000+ dollars to try VR to see if they "like it", hell they aren't even paying $550.
Again I'm not here to advocate for Facebook but I will sure as hell make use of their investments in VR because they are sort of throwing that money in a fire pit with how the market is. Facebook plans on trying to fill that fire pit with so much money it becomes a bridge that is profitable and it might be in the future but right now if you want someone to try VR, a oculus headset is probably the best bang for your buck headset especially if you buy it used since realistically most people are going to play with it for a month then be done with it and try to hock the thing.
I mean not really. Again the index is a great headset but look at how long people actually use their headsets for. Is it better to throw your money into a pit that is $400 or $1000. VR is a weird since you either love it or hate it. Most people are going to hate it and many people aren't really into the idea of reselling their stuff. This isn't to say facebook good or some nonsense like that but from a prospective customer's standpoint why spend so much money on something you might not even like. You don't have to drill any holes in your walls to put up base stations while inside out tracking isn't great it gets the job done and again its far more convenient. I like the option to have base stations but again realistically putting in so much work for something you might only spend a week or month on is not a great investment of your money or time. If you like VR, I would highly suggest getting a better headset than a quest or oculus headset but a newcomer I will 100% suggest a quest over anything else especially a used model to save them extra cash.
Vr is very price prohibitive and Oculus/Facebook sell headsets at a loss to make their marketshare. Its not great but if you want to "try vr" especially something you hear will make you physically sick to use and you might not even like. Its just logical to spend the least amount of money on it for a "proper headset". Like if you value your privacy that is fine and completely understandable but lets be honest here, most people don't. Especially with the popularization of social media and smart phones like we can even apply the same logic with your argument with phones like why would you buy a device that has so many cameras and microphones and wave it around your home and toilet. Hell I think the phone is actually worse since most people bring them everywhere while a headset is a bit more constrained on where you can take it.
Because the reason why we did it the other way, with the $ in the front was because of checks since checks have gone out of fashion for nearly 20 years now. It makes sense to put the $ sign to the back since you say fifty dollars.
Depends. You have to wait for the pressure to equalize to open the door. So once the car is filled up fully will you be able to open it. The problem is if you drove a car into a body of water, you might be panicking and not thinking through your actions
Footage of a police shooting that occurred during November has came out. A cop detained a suspect who they believed to have a supressed gun, they cuff and search him finding no gun and put him in back of a police car. So the deputy was walking past the car when an acorn struck the car. He shouts "shots fired" and basically unloads on the car with the unarmed suspect while screaming he is hit. The other cops on the call also start unloading on the car and thankfully the person in the car was not hurt. So from the onset its a humorous story about a cop overreacting to a stimuli and we are only laughing because noone was killed in it (well I guess some people would still be laughing if it was deadly but probably less). The cop apparently was a vet, so this seems to be a case of PTSD and its not great that an officer was able to make it that far along while such a mundane stimuli was able to set them off possibly getting someone killed. Hopefully the officer in question gets the help they need but its clear they shouldn't be in that position at all if that is how they will react.
I mean if they have read some of his stories, it should be pretty obvious he was pretty fucking racist. The cat thing is a fun meme but if anyone has read at least call of Cthulhu the work most people know about its pretty on the nose. Every human antagonist is either black or a foreigner and he is pretty blatant about it. Hell don't get me started on Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (or The White Ape), that one is just so funny with how bloody racist it is because the conclusion is so absurd, you can't take it serious.
I agree with most of that however The King in Yellow was made when he was around 5 years old. People sort of put it into the Lovecraft universe because of the themes but nope has 0 connection at least in its inception. The whole Lovecraft universe is sort of a hog podge of other's authors work as well who sort of expanded and formalized parts of it. Its honestly very cool what a group of authors can do when IPs and such aren't hoarded in a huge vault being left untouched until its economically advantageous to use.
The Internal Revenue Service says it could collect around $560 billion largely from rich tax cheats and big corporations over the next decade—as long as congressional Republicans don’t succeed in clawing back a recent funding increase that allowed the agency to ramp up enforcement....
I think you aren't thinking out this problem. While its not great that the IRS "targets" the poor. Its just simply they are the least likely to fight back against and will pay their debt in full. The rich, they fucking drag that shit out with lawyers, they have to try to hide it so you need well trained financial forensics to notice it and document it all and at the fucking end of it all, you are only getting a fraction of what you are literally owed. We want the government to be "efficient" yet we are complaining about the IRS doing their assigned task in an efficient manner because newsflash the lower income audits typically are far more automated, so they are simpler to do when your budget is limited.
Edit: Also I would like it to be remembered that the IRS are merely enforcers of the tax code. They aren't exactly the ones who set it in place, they are just doing what they can with what they were given. Hell I'm fucking happy they allocated time and money for the free filling system. Its a step in the right direction because fuck the tax refund companies who lobby our government to make the taxes as painful/annoying as they currently are, when the tax man sort of already knows most of the information they are requesting like many other countries in the first world.
I mean sort of. While I get what you are saying but it seems a bit weird, as long as the person isn't being fired for being part of a protected class I see no issue with a company trying to distance themselves from someone who function is to be a "Brand Mascot" where what they say will be associated with the company hiring them. Fame is a rather fickled thing and reputation sort of plays into the worth of a "celebrity", like sure behind closed doors these asshats can be as vile and shitty as they want to be but the second they are exposed in the public, the public's desire to see said person probably drops dramatically since they are isolating a section(s) of the audience who will be wanting to watch something with them in it.
Hell a decent example would be Ellen Degeneres, after it came out publicly that she was a bit of a cunt to her workers. The rating for her show dropped quite a bit (apparently about 40%) after the backlash leading to many of her side shows getting canned and her not getting renewed for a new season for her talk show. At the end of the day its just a big popularity contest where everyone is vying for people's attention in an already saturated market.
Like I agree with your general point but this has nothing to do with online games licensing besides its being pulled from digital store fronts. Brick and mortar stores can have product recalls as well and this would likely be in that same category of problem (its a bit weird with preowned games since publishers were already given their cut) so they can continue to sell those but a brand "new" copy may have suffered a similar fate but we have to remember Spec Ops the Line is from the 360 era so I doubt there would even been many "new" copies around. Also I can't fault publishers from just "deleting" a game from existence because spending thousands for merely upkeeping the licenses for a game they realistically haven't sold in major volumes for nearly half a decade (at minimum) seems a tad bit unreasonable. Most music labels likely aren't even going to sell a perpetual license as well, so its a can of worms of people wanting to get their cut.
I mean the only reason smallpox was wiped from this earth is because it took 20 years of dedication by the WHO to fully wipe it out.
The top 10 countries with measels cases as per the CDC are
Yemen
India *
Kazakhstan
Ethiopia
Russian Federation
Pakistan
Kyrgyzstan
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Iraq
Azerbaijan
The top 10 is based on data from the dates of June 2023 - November 2023. Each one of these are over 3k cases and the top one being at 23k and #2 being 13k.
So yes, some parts of the world has problem with Measles and unless we dedicate the time to fully eradicate it, it will never truly be gone. The antivax nonsense in the first world countries will only make this worse. Can't wait for the fucking return of Polio (however polio may be the next disease eradicated since its currently only in 2 countries and there were 6 reported cases in 2021) or TB
Note: WHO classifies all suspected measles cases reported from India as measles clinically compatible if a specimen was not collected as per the algorithm for classification of suspected measles in the WHO VPD Surveillance Standards. Thus numbers might be different between what WHO reports and what India reports.
In a bad-vibes moment, they’re denying a huge outlet like IGN a review code. No matter what I think of IGN in particular (nothing good tbh), that’s not something I can find a real explanation for other than “We made DC’s Gollum and want to avoid bad press as long as we can”.
You are referring to Doom 2016 actually. While that turn out decent, one of their key arguments was due to it being online focused. We all know Doom 2016 had rather generic multiplayer.
With that said, it feels silly not to have issues when publishers refuse to send out review keys. Its a huge red flag for a game, this doesn't mean it will be bad but its a trend we shouldn't be happy about. Its only done to help preserve preorder numbers.
I agree with you but that sort of ignores the reality that many people preorder fucking games. Also you think its better there is less material out there in the world before a game releases? What kind of bullshit is this, I rather have fucking reviews out than letting the fucking companies just do as they may. Suppressing reviews is bad, having companies trying to weaponize gamers against reviewers is also bad. This isn't to say reviewers can't be shit but this braindead take I keep hearing is "reviewers bad, so this isn't a loss" is fucking stupid, I rather we have more voices than less voices in this discussion and reviews are awesome if you find the right reviewer who has the same taste in games as you, hell looking at reviewers you disagree with is also awesome since maybe something they like you will hate and you will be alerted about that in the game. People don't have infinite time to watch fucking streams of a game they will play especially a story driven game. Hell relying on the 2 hour refund policy of steam is also not sufficient since games can be quite fun for the first few hours but slowly becomes a slog. Dead island and Dying light are fantastic examples where you get a great first few hours then just so much fucking filler until you get some better stuff near the end of the game.
It doesn’t, I’m saying that people that do pre-order games need to stop doing it because there is no real reason to do it.
Who knew telling people to stop preordering video games means they will stop preordering video games. Its almost like this shit has been said for well over a decade now with no impact at all, if not the problem getting worse due to volume.
You can just not buy the game until after reviews come out even if they don’t come out til after the game releases. Crazy, I know.
And those reviews have to come from the people who bought the game on day 1 especially if review copies aren't given. Crazy, I know. So someone has to bite the bullet to actually say what a game is like.
Edit: Again really, are you pointlessly supporting the act that corps will just hide their game's dirty laundry until launch day, this helps noone besides the suits, we should strive for more voices before a game launches, not cheer for the silencing of voices because we find some of them obnoxious.
Can't say too much but god I hate this so much. Used to work a call center and someone had a username that was all 1,l,I s and there was no way to easily identify between those 3 characters. For someone to verify who they were they needed to tell us their username and some other info. So I had to waste nearly 30 fucking minutes dealing with this stupid shit before we could proceed forward and we couldn't just DC the person.
I mean 30 bucks seems pretty standard. Actually the same price as ARK which also was an early access title at that time which increased its price to 60 once it released. Especially after the kicker that ARK got a bloody dlc while it was still in early access.
I mean sure but the toddler in question was a 2 year old. I just have my doubts a child that can barely string a few words together at this time can call emergency services. Like seems you can possibly teach them as young as 3 years old but I would imagine its more likely to be taught at the age of 4 or 5. This is just a very sad circumstance.
Denuvo Outage Makes Hit Single-Player Game Unplayable (gamerant.com)
Steam will stop issuing refunds if you play two hours of a game before launch day (www.theverge.com)
Closing the early access loophole.
Dragon's Dogma 2 MTX
So there’s obviously been a lot of existing discourse on DD2’s micro transactions, and I’m curious to get the thoughts of people here....
Quest 1 becomes near-E-waste Apr 30 (lemmy.nowsci.com)
Musk slanders innocent man who was falsely accused of assaulting cops. (lemmy.world)
Mitch McConnell’s billionaire sister-in-law Angela Chao made panicked last call before dying in ‘completely submerged’ Tesla on Texas ranch: report (nypost.com)
OnLy GoD cAn JuDgE mE (slrpnk.net)
Maybe Lovecraft wasn't as talented as people think? (lemmy.world)
IRS Could Collect $561 Billion From Rich Tax Cheats—Unless GOP Guts Funding (www.commondreams.org)
The Internal Revenue Service says it could collect around $560 billion largely from rich tax cheats and big corporations over the next decade—as long as congressional Republicans don’t succeed in clawing back a recent funding increase that allowed the agency to ramp up enforcement....
Gina Carano suing Disney and Lucasfilm over Mandalorian firing with help from Elon Musk (www.theguardian.com)
2K pulls Spec Ops: The Line from digital stores without warning (www.polygon.com)
CDC warns health care workers to be on alert for measles amid rising number of cases (abcnews.go.com)
There have been 23 confirmed cases of measles since December 2023....
Where's Our Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League Review? (IGN denied review code) (www.ign.com)
In a bad-vibes moment, they’re denying a huge outlet like IGN a review code. No matter what I think of IGN in particular (nothing good tbh), that’s not something I can find a real explanation for other than “We made DC’s Gollum and want to avoid bad press as long as we can”.
18+ Traffic cameras hate this one weird trick (lemmy.sdf.org)
Palworld’s success is partially born from Pokémon fans’ discontent (www.polygon.com)
Palworld is an alternate take on Pokémon at a time when the colossal franchise feels stagnant and slow
Toddler Dies of Starvation After Father Suffered Heart Attack, Leaving Him Alone at Home (thefashioncentral.co.uk)