Always has been 👩🏽‍🚀🔫👩🏽‍🚀

Companies have no moral, if they could get more money by selling children to the highest bidder, they would.
Many already make use of child labour in asian countries anyway.
Not to speak about the changing laws in some US states lowering minimum age for working, bringing back child labour.
It's always money.

Wasn't the Disney stuff under Trump's administration?
It seems Biden (from an outside perspective, as I am not from the US) is at least trying to reign in companies a bit, so this block isn't that surprising.

The EU decision surprised me more, but I can understand their arguments.

As a gamer, this could be great in the short term, with Activision-Blizzard getting good leadership and hopefully new games from franchises which are not CoD or Diablo.
Medium/Long term, it could be awful, with Microsoft getting more and more market share and then turning around and fucking us in the ass really hard after they lock us in their ecosystem

I think I use too many on Firefox ahahah

Ads and privacy
UBlock Origin (AdBlocker)
Privacy Badger (Blocks some trackers)
ClearURLs (removes tracking elements from URLs)
DeleteNonio (in my country, all newspapers are trying to force you to sign up for this service with an annoying popup)
Don't Track me Google (removes tracking from Google search result links)
Startpage.com (search engine)
Firefox Multi-Account containers/Facebook Container (so cookies cannot be accessed between all sites freely)

Reddit
Old Reddit Redirect (I really don't want the new design)
Reddit Enhancement Suite (nice features to have)
LeechBlock NG (to block Reddit during the blackout. See you next week...maybe)

YouTube
Enhancer for YouTube (some QoL features)
SponsorBlock for YouTube (skip sponsor parts in videos)
YouTube Auto Like (auto likes the videos you watch, depending on what you decide in the settings)
Youtube NonStop (no more "Video Paused. Continue Watching?")

QoL
Rikaichamp (translate Japanese on hover)
Augmented Steam (to check prices between stores, mostly)
Dark Reader (turn dark mode for select websites)
Firefox Translations (website translation, like Chrome and Edge have)
LanguageTool (to help me write fewer mistakes)
Metrification (convert imperial to metric on the fly)
Tampermonkey (to add some useful scripts to sites you want)

Visual
Firefox Color (to customize the theme)
Tabliss (new tab page)
Wide Github (change repos to be full width)
Stylus (add custom CSS to sites you want)

Thank you for your service! (I was too lazy, sorry ahaha)

I love LTT. It's entertaining, and he shows cool stuff. And you can even learn a thing or two.

And I am gonna be even more unpopular than you.
I find Steve from GN to be boring as fuck to watch regularly (though I watch him when I want to see a specific review, like I do with other channels, his content is very good in terms of information), and he resorts to clickbait regularly, even if a different kind of clickbait (that waste of sand thumbnail, if it was LTT, would be criticized forever).

And more, even if you want to buy something instead of watching for entertainment, you shouldn't rely on 1 single review anyway, so pretending GN is the be-all-end-all for tech reviews is ridiculous.

Basically, they want their cake and to eat it too.
I remember a few years they were crying because Facebook was stealing their traffic, people didn't go to the websites to read the news, so they didn't click ads. Facebook was basically stealing their money!!!

The problem is that this view is shortsighted, because with these new laws you talk about, people still don't go to news websites, and in fact get their news from alternative sources (and most of them, not good).
So now they are crying, again, but for the opposite reason.

A few weeks ago they did a video about mech keyboards, without the face or clickbait title, and it was performing much worse after 3 days than even the daily video. The difference was in the hundreds of thousands of views.

Even now, it is one of the worst in terms of views from the past month (excluding the last 3 days, which will probably increase in views still) with 1.1M views, against the 2nd lowest which has 1.2M views, but it is a video about Mac gaming, and that isn't a particularly performing topic.

Right now?
No, I don't think so.

But Windows is getting worse, and GamePass won't be cheap forever.
Same with them putting the games on Steam, it can change on a whim.
I mean, even on PC, nothing stops them from walking back and just making everything Xbox exclusive in the future again.

They can make changes that make it impossible (or extremely hard) for their games to work on Linux using Proton.

There are many ways they can use these company mergers to fuck the consumer in the future.

Consolidation is always a bad thing, in my opinion, because it takes away choice from the consumer and puts it in the hands of trillion-dollar companies whose sole objective is to make ALL the money all the time, forever.

Ape Escape, MediEvil 2, Tombi

Basically games from my childhood that I wouldn't mind getting the Spyro Reignited Trilogy treatment

The original DualShock has a special place in my heart.
The PS1 was my first console, and it came with 2 controllers.
1 of them is missing, the other still works, kinda. A pin got lose and them stuck in my pc adapter.
But if I connect to the adapter, it works perfectly!

Also liking the 8bitdo Pro 2, it's great controller. Wish it was a bit bigger though

I think it's probably weird, but you do you. As long as you have fun, it's all that matters!
It's what I love the most about PC gaming, giving us options.

Haven't played since 2020 (thanks pandemic for helping me <3) and it was already pretty shitty then.
They had a nice resurgence in 2019 (when I started playing) and took that as an incentive to nickel and dime even more

I can recommend Lego Lord of the Rings. Me and my gf had a lot of fun, and it is the only Lego game I played with her that didn't bore me to death.

We tried Lego Harry Potter, and while she loves it (she loves the Lego games), I just found it boring as hell, so it depends on the person

Exactly, I don't see how Microsoft taking Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Starfield, and other games away from Sony and Nintendo increases competition.

It just forces people to buy into their ecosystem (Xbox or Windows) if they want to play the games they could play in their prefered platform before

The first I remember was in my cousin's computer in 99 or 2000, and it was Motocross Madness or Motocross Madness 2.
I remember just going out of bounds for hours just to be thrown into the air ahahah

When I got my personal PC in 2005, my first game was, Need for Speed Underground 2, followed by Pro Evolution Soccer 4, CS 1.6, GTA: San Andreas, and Football Manager 2005

Btw, Lego Harry Potter is divided in 2 games, but you can get them pretty cheap in a Steam sale (the summer sale stars on the 29th)

Just gonna salute the Metro Skin devs for giving us a great skin that helped keep Steam looking modern for so many years before this update.

I quite like the new design, I have to say

I am nearly finishing Breath of The Wild, using CEMU instead of using my Switch (which my gf is using to play BOTW and Pokemon Violet), and I am playing Football Manager 2007 for a bit of nostalgia.

I will then finish Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night which is a great metroidvania, for those who loved Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (because it's the same producer, Koji Igarashi).

Yeah, probably looks good to investors

I mean, it is hard for it to get worse than with 343 ahahah
Have they even been able to release a good Halo game since Bungie left?

Yeah, it sounded more like an Anthem situation, where for most of the project everybody was just fucking around wasting the company's money, until the owner put the foot down and forced them to actually work on it and finish the game, quality be damned

Redfall seemed more like an "Anthem" situation, where they didn't know what they wanted, just fooled around with company time and money for years, and when MS bought Zenimax cut that shit out and forced them to finish it and ship it.

It was so badly mismanaged that they hoped MS would just cancel it.

Nice!

You also have Cat Quest 2, which is cute and fun game.

Portal 2 also has a co-op mode and is pretty cheap on sale.

Football Manager 2009

It's the first 3D game and it shows.
After FM2008, my favourite, it was a bit of a disapointment.
Then FM2010 was good, improved on FM11, and FM12 is considered by some people to be the peak of the series.

Coincidentally or not, the last Championship Manager was in 2009/2010, and FIFA Manager's last was 2013/2014, and now Football Manager has been stagnating a bit (or getting worse in some places) because it has no competition in the market anymore.