I’m a bit surprised nobody mentioned the kernel-level anti-cheat, especially with Lemmy being a very security/privacy-centric place. That was implemented years after people spent money on the game and then basically stole the game/content unless you agreed to a huge change to the policy.

I stopped playing because they implemented that. There’s zero reason for that to ever be a thing in order to just play a game. Especially with the amount of machine-learning we have on what is and isn’t possible for humans to do, detection is completely possible server-side.

Half a million… Yeah, it’s California, but that’s still crazy.

I did get a chuckle out of “Has view: Yes” 🤣

My wife and I saw this ad in the theatres before the movie and just looked at each other like, “what the fuck?”.

Even making it from the daughter’s perspective would have made it so much better. AI is helpful for writing to get some ideas, but why is it so hard for companies to understand people want human interaction in their projects… Who was that ad even for?

As a final note, the “just like you” felt so weird and made me uncomfortable; it took the daughter’s voice away basically.

I would love Andy Beshear to be the VP. He handled the Covid pandemic awesomely in KY and has been doing a lot of things for greener energy / extreme weather responses. Also, he values education and universal preschool. The only thing I fear is that if he does become VP, KY is going to choose a conservative governor that undoes all he has done.

While I understand that I’m giving up “owning” the game, Steam has a good track record of trying to make users happy. It being a private company means that it’s beholden to users rather than shareholders. In this instance, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, at least for me. I don’t have enough space in my home for the 100s of games I have on top of not having to worry about disks getting scratched or corrupted. Then I also don’t have to worry about downloading game patches from a 20 year old site that may or may not still be up (AoE 2) to keep playing on a modern OS. Also, there’s a centralized space for users to communicate, upload mods, host servers, etc. without having to jump through different hoops for different games (Hamachi, GameSpy, etc.).

That being said, I appreciate that there are alternatives for people that feel differently. And I appreciate there are alternatives and competition (even people like you) keeping corporate greed in check and making Valve have to work to stay good for users.

When Gabe Newell dies or leaves the company though, I’ll be watching closely to see who the new CEO will be and figure it out from there.