Can anyone confirm that my understanding of the source article is correct?

The "Windows 12 may require a subscription" is coming from the fact that the word "Subscription" exists in a Windows config file somewhere?

That seems like a pretty big leap to me. Not that I don't think it's impossible that Microsoft would do this, but the evidence here seems thin to say the least.

WEI prevents ecosystem lock-in through hold-backs
We had proposed a hold-back to prevent lock-in at the platform level. Essentially, some percentage of the time, say 5% or 10%, the WEI attestation would intentionally be omitted, and would look the same as if the user opted-out of WEI or the device is not supported.

This is designed to prevent WEI from becoming “DRM for the web”.

At least this acknowledges that this proposal would in fact be "DRM for the web" if the only thing from preventing it from being that is an additional measure unrelated to the core implementation.

Not to mention, what prevents a future release of the feature either turning the percentage to 0% or removing the hold-back entirely?

I hate how much of a monopoly they have in the space...

It's not necessarily Patreon that's the root problem here. The problem is the foundations of the financial industry (banks, credit card companies, etc) have complete control over the content and products you can exchange for money.

If Wells Fargo decides that your product or content has offended some random executive, they will call up your payment provider (like Stripe) and tell them to close your account. And the payment provider will do it because they don't really have a choice.

The issue in this instance is that's its hard to prove that a company not even close to leading to the market is going to somehow dominate that market through a single (albeit large) acquisition.

When you use Stripe/Paypal as your payment processor you have to be willing to accept whatever demands they (and the banks backing them) decide to make on any given day.

Don't you see. The Switch 2 may have an LCD or an OLED screen! It also may, or may not, have backwards compatibility with the first Switch! It also may, or may not, release in 2024!

How can anyone not be potentially excited about these things that may, or may not, be true!

I don't see why a specific studio gets a pass for story criticisms just because they are notorious for being lacking.

People still on Reddit want someone to take their complaints seriously? Empirically speaking, they will accept this.

Nah, it's more than the communities on places like Reddit and lemmy/kbin are so small and unimportant relative to the overall consumer market that you can pretty much ignore them completely.

Still better than cable ever was. No long term contracts, extra fees on bills, tons of useless channels and tons of ads.

I think people forget how bad cable TV actually is if they haven't used it for a while.

But now a small, indie studio comes along with a grand slam and they don’t like it kind of makes them look bad by comparison.

Larian is similar in size, if not significantly larger, than Bethesda when they made Skyrim.

Microsoft have been acquiring huge companies (Bethesda, for example), hit games (Minecraft), and key development parters from competition (remember Rare?) from the beginning of Xbox.

And yet, they are still in third place in the gaming market behind Sony and Nintendo. If those acquisitions didn't turn Microsoft into a monopoly already, what will be significantly different if they acquire AVB?

I guess it depends on how much you trust a company (both now and in the future) to do something they shouldn't with this kind of setup, whether on purpose or though incompetence.

Personally, I don't software silently installing unrelated services to my machine just in case the company decides they want to have it running on my machine in the future.

Still, casual gamers did think Linux couldn’t game.

The parent comment is right. Most people don't think about Linux. Ask a 'casual' Swtich owner what OS the Switch uses, and their answer is probably going to be pretty close to the answer that a similar Deck user would give.

It proceeded without incident but I couldn’t help feeling nervous to trust that its lidar saw me and it interpreted me as a human.

I can't say I view an average driver with any more trust though.

That applies to open software standards, what does it have to do with buying cash cows?

It has no real meaning anymore. It's now a phrase people throw around as effectively a meme. You won't get anything but a wrong answer to this question.

I don't see the value in complaining about things that haven't happened yet.

This post implies that Sony has more trust is ridiculous. They refuse to secure their online services, leading to recurring hacks. There was whole rootkit fiasco which was crazy bad.

They defended the ridiculous launch prices of the PS3 by saying that they think consumers should just work more hours to afford one.

They still do shit things like hide basic features like cloud saves behind a paywall. That have no problem paying for exclusive games and exclusive content and if they had the money MS had they would do the same thing MS is doing.

"as possible" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.

It's hard to block mergers based on a company involved being a monopoly if none of the companies involved are monopolies or will become monopolies.

Regulators have to come up with a different set of rules to block "large but not monopolistic mergers" without also just effectively protecting the actual leader in a given industry from competition.

“Electronic or appliance product” or “product” does not include any of the following:
(i) Equipment or repair parts as defined in Chapter 28 (commencing with Section 22900) of Division 8 of the Business and Professions Code.
(ii) A product or component of an “alarm system” as defined in subdivision (c) of Section 7590.1 of the Business and Professions Code, including a fire protection system, as defined in the California Fire Code.
(iii) A video game console.

Funny seeing such a specific exclusion being made here.

Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.

Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.

Only problem was that I forgot to get a memory card so I couldn’t actually play the games that my coworker gave me, but hey it works!

That's an interesting take on "works" for a game console. Being able to play games seems like a pretty important piece.

Its alright for people to dislike Dark Souls or not want every game to be a Souls-like. Not too mention that there weren't really any actual criticism of Dark Souls in the post. Makes the rest of your comment fine of as defensive more than anything.

Problem is when you procrastinate because manually importing transactions and correcting them is just annoying enough to make it a hassle. Then the transaction batch gets too large and you can't remember details anymore so you give up and don't track your budget at all.

That's been my experience in the past at least.

I wouldn't say it sucks, just that it's a more complex, lower-level API layer than DX11 and earlier. Which is good in that it allows for more control over game performance, but the big downside is that it's more difficult and easier to screw up.

Hard to care about this without seeing the actual text of the email.

Just in case anyone tries to proclaim this was due to the recent drama, the latest valuation was May 31st, before the vast majority of the recent API stuff went down, and that was only a smaller portion of the larger valuation drop that happened earlier.

One of the better examples of form over function. I really disliked actually using this mouse whenever I had to.

You have the PSVR2 which is comparably priced but requires a PS5 console. You have the Valve Index which is $1k.

So, it may not be "cheap" but it's definitely cheaper than some of the alternatives.

Are you sure it was the FTC and not Microsoft that posted the materials incorrectly?

https://twitter.com/cecianasta/status/1704155135662821763

In this case, OP is stating that he thinks no company should be making games with any type of sexual content. Just in case his kids want to play that game.

That goes beyond "monitoring what their kids play" and that's why people are reacting strongly.

Well, they won't be able to get their news from "news outlets" specifically linked on Facebook. They will still be able to get their news from other sources on Facebook.

Not sure if that's actually an improvement though.

They are such different games that direct comparisons don't seem very useful.

The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.

Or maybe game development is just hard? Why haven't other "better" developers created a game that improves upon Skyrim?

Look at Baldur's Gate 3. It's "small improvements" to the type of game that Larian has been working on for many years at this point.

Not everyone is a coomer who wants to revolve their life around sexuality.

You can acknowledge that sex exists without someone's life revolving around it. Just like "wanting sex to be private" may not mean that someone is just terrified of the topic itself or thinks all sex is gross and should be avoided.

Just because people have different values than you doesn’t make it sad.

Some values become more of a target for criticism than others. "No one should make content that I don't personally approve of" is one that I would categorize as worthy of criticism.

But they can still get news from Facebook, they just won't be getting it from "news outlets" specifically.

That's not what "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" means. You just came up with three numbered items to correspond to the fact that there are three words in the phrase.

The X falls short of the PS5 in almost every category that a premium consumer cares about...

What are the other categories aside from exclusives?

To be honest, I never use Wordpad.

Either I just need to edit something quick, where Notepad excels, or in going to use just about any other option for text editor or word processor.

It's surprising to see how much attention this is getting. And I can't help but think how many people commenting about it actually use it to any real degree.

What information in the leaks do you think prove how dangerous Microsoft is?