William

Because what he did wasn't illegal. It was just wrong. They didn't want anything to do with him any more, but he didn't break the law and so they couldn't use that part of the contract to terminate it.

They felt it was so wrong that they paid him $20mil to break that contract. They absolutely would have taken another option if it was viable.

There are things that you shouldn't do or say to minors that aren't illegal, but anyone reading them would still know it's it's unethical/wrong/immoral/whatever. They clearly thought he crossed that line, enough that they'd rather fire him and take a chance on losing the court case for damages for breaking the contract. And then they lost that court case.

It clearly wasn't just "a chat with a minor". The rumors I've heard is that he was attempting to make plans to meet up with them at a convention. That would definitely be in the "big no no" category for a celebrity talking to a minor, even if nothing untoward was suggested in that conversation.

let’s

There's some irony for ya. :D

Yeah, it was a mistake... After they got called on it.

It was absolutely in there on purpose.

They deserve their refunds, but...

This is a lesson that you never buy something based on a future promise. Buy it based on what it is, not what someone says it'll be eventually.

It also uses the name "Portal" in a way that feels official, too. If it said "Revolution: A Portal mod" it'd be fine.

It seems like a pretty obvious lawsuit to me. They announced his promotion, and then never gave it to him, despite making him do the job for months. That alone is an easy win, IMO.

But then there was also a contract he signed? That super easy lawsuit time.

If companies can say they can respond to my concerns within 2 business days, then companies can also take 2 business days to take down reported content. It takes a human being to review that stuff and it's not instant. If it was, trolls would end up with everything being taken down. UFC's outrage that it can take "hours" to remove the content is ridiculous.

I'm really surprised about this. Amazon got called on their arbitration clause so much that they removed it because it was so expensive.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-faced-75-000-arbitration-demands-now-it-says-fine-sue-us-11622547000

Roku is practically asking for people to do the same to them. They could even do it about this clause, IMO. (I am not a lawyer.) This is a really dumb clause to have these days.

"He discovered that the amount of Denuvo code executed in-game is quite infrequent, with calls occurring once every few seconds, or during level loads. This suggests that Denuvo is not killing performance, contrary to popular belief. "

No, it might suggest that this version of Denuvo and the way that this developer implemented it might not be affecting performance.

However, "every few seconds" is actually quite a lot, and if it causes a stutter each time, it's brutal on perceived framerate. So no, it doesn't actually suggest that Denuvo isn't killing performance. It's actually making it pretty obvious that it can easily affect performance.

It sounds interesting, but... Android only? I don't actually watch much video on my phone. It's mostly on my desktop browser.

Non-amp link.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/motorola-edge-2023-announce-price-specs-google-pixel-8-rival/

It's a typical scenario of trying to solve a hard problem with a solution that ignores a minority community.

Unfortunately, this minority community already has a lot of problems, and no one is going to support this decision outside of the company. Even if someone isn't disabled, they can understand the pain of those who are, and might even become disabled one day. Everyone can empathize.

And all because some people have a slight advantage in certain games? Forget about it. Someone always has an advantage. This was an absolutely idiotic move.

I would love to know what they would port to. UE and Godot seem like obvious candidates.

Steam has rules intended to curb this behavior.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts

Specific Discounting Rules

You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 30 days.
It is not possible to discount your product for 30 days following a price increase in any currency.
Discounts cannot be run within 30 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 30 days of releasing your title, within 30 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 30 days of a price increase in any currency.
You may not change your price while a promotion is currently live or scheduled for the future.
It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
it is not possible to create new discounts for a product that would result in the price in any currency falling below Steam's minimum possible transaction price. See details.
Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

As if you can't schedule your announcements to fall just after the scheduled stock sales... Or just before them, if you want.

I don't think politely asking people to change their review so that it reflects reality is a "karen" move.

Even if you release multiple times every day, refusing to release on Friday still makes sense. It's not about expecting bugs, it's about guaranteeing that your devs' time is their own. If you aren't okay with paying your devs for time they spend dealing with their own problems at home (without charging them their PTO time for it!) then you shouldn't be okay with making them work on weekends, no matter how rare it is.

Most good clients should start seeding from an existing file if you find the original torrent on the web somewhere. Or even one that just has that same file in it.

I can see a lot of people using the drumroll thing, and that's going to let it in the door for so much crap.

It's one of those things that you can see slowly coming from a mile away, but there's not a damn thing you can do to stop it.

That's a stay of execution at best. At some point, you'll need to upgrade to a new Unity. It might be because IOS and Android require using an SDK that's not more than 2 years out of date, or because nVidia/AMD invented some new amazing tech, or a host of other reasons. But eventually, you'll need to upgrade.

The worst part is that Android is actually removing apps that haven't updated in years, even if they still work perfectly. So you'll get screwed by that eventually if you do mobile at all.

While I do think toxic communities are a problem, I disagree that you can combat them by taking your toys and going home.

Toxic people will always exist, and they are naturally drawn to things that are popular. You won't convince them to stop being toxic by punishing the entire community. You will only make them more toxic. If you can't target the toxic people directly, you aren't fighting the problem, you're just running away.

I have no problem with the dev deciding that they've had enough toxic exposure and quitting. But that doesn't sound like what happened here. Or at least, it's not what they claim they're doing.

Shoulder the blame, but not the consequences? Yup, that seems about par for the course.

I somewhat agree with you, but some innovation is necessary. There are very few games that are still fun after a dozen levels of the same thing, and most of those are either pure puzzle or pure mindless violence.

When people complain about "just more of the same", they often are overlooking that there was some innovation in the new levels. If it's really the same thing over and over, it'd pale pretty quickly for most people. New levels need to do something differently than the past to keep people really engaged.

There's a middle ground between massive innovation and stagnancy, and all games that get huge sales numbers are hitting that sweet spot, regardless of what people are screaming about.

You missed one: They initially said that web-based games count as installs, too. Insanity.

I'm betting that most or all of those have a TOS that doesn't allow an account to change owners. You might be unsuccessful because people don't want to end up on the wrong side of those companies and end up losing not only your account, but also their original account.

I mostly agree, but making me land on boring planets to farm for fuel will not improve the game. It'll just make it more tedious.

Now, if there was a questline to find and repair or create fuel depots in each system, that could actually be fun.

The problem keeps coming back to planets being really boring outside of a few hotspots. If they solved that problem, a lot of the other problems wouldn't be nearly as noticeable. But instead, they dug in their heels and declared that real astronauts don't find them boring. And I'm not even sure I believe that. The first steps were very exciting, but after that, it was mostly just anxiety about dying and making sure they prevent that. They'd actually be fighting down the boredom to make sure they didn't make a stupid mistake out of complacency.

I agree with closed beta, but for different reasons.

There will always be "dead game" trolls that will find some statistic to back themselves up. Trying to hide from them isn't going to solve the real problem, though I guess it'll solve how mouthy they can get during development, rather than after release.

They have actively made the game less fun for me in the past few seasons. They decided that what people want is a challenge, all the time. It used to be that low-level stuff was a breeze and you could just shoot your way through it. Now, you slog through it for the same weak rewards as before, but it takes longer and is less fun. The hard content didn't get any harder, though. Those are the people that actually want challenge, and they don't get more of it.

And on top of that, the new seasonal content apparently has limited revives and particular things you have to do to survive. Unsurprisingly, blueberries are failing miserably at this. I haven't bothered playing it because it's exactly the opposite of what I want from repeated content, and I don't want to join a guild again. While I loved my guild, I felt compelled to play more so I didn't let them down, and I'm done with that.

Bungie needs to stop listening to streamers and fanatical players and listen to the players that are quitting in droves instead.

I've played it on PC Game Pass, and IMO, it's mostly shock and hype. After a short while, it becomes the same thing over and over. Capture or kill a lot of pals to level up and improve your strength. Then do it again on new pals for more strength. The base stuff changes a little, but it's still basically the same.

Why would it be illegal to give away your game for 24 hours?

It seems pretty clear to me that they definitely intended to include breast jiggle physics at some level, and they decided that that was something that should be decided by the community. That would indicate to most casual readers that it's a priority for the devs. If they didn't realize that would strike a chord with both the pro-sexualization and anti-sexualization people, they weren't thinking at all.

This looks like a cutesy, cozy game that probably shouldn't even have jiggle physics. If they really wanted it in there, they should have just done it and said nothing. The "nasty people" they don't want to "attract" would have appreciated the jiggle, and everyone else would have just ignored it.

The devs brought it into the spotlight and it got talked about. I'm not surprised at that outcome at all.

If it's the quest I'm thinking of, it was pretty lackluster. If it's not, then I've completely forgotten it.

It's at least as wrong as fantasizing about them if they aren't already romantically involved with you.

How wrong that is, is up for debate. It will definitely creep them out and they can never find out about it.

If it's just in your head, at least there's no physical way they could ever find out. You'd have to admit it. But if you have it on your hard drive, a hacker could get it and blackmail you with it, or just distribute it.

So my stance is that there's a non-zero chance of doing harm to them, and so it's wrong. I wouldn't do it. I also wouldn't create it with Photoshop, or by hand, for the same reason.

If you want to jerk off, do it to existing porn, or imaginary people porn. Don't create porn of real people without their permission, even if you think nobody will ever see it other than you. Accidents happen, and they don't deserve to bear the cost of that.

They're similar, but not the same. The analog stick is swapped with the d-pad. They didn't just buy the molds and use them.

Jesus. They really think they can do anything they want, don't they? No, you can't have another company's business secrets just because you want them.

Like you, I don't see that setting, and only see the one you see. I don't think it exists. I think they just had it backwards.

It makes no sense to delete movie files when clicking unmonitor.

It is unsurprising to me that if you manage to have fun with a video game, you feel less depressed.

I suppose it might be slightly more surprising that it's more effective than treatments designed to treat depression directly, but we're talking about an industry that exists almost solely to make people feel happier, and it doesn't make money unless it succeeds. One could argue about addictive mechanics, but most people wouldn't even start on that path unless it brought them happiness in the beginning.

For those wondering: The graphic suggests August is a likely month for it, with betas and "platform stability" in the months before that.

I've had video games refuse to play because of that. Ridiculous.