ThunderingJerboa

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Yeah it does make it a bit hard to listen to those audiobooks in the car…

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.

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.

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.

That is funny but not as bad.

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.

No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.

I mean couldn’t they just still make their own “class base” shooter in S&box without the TF2 IP involved? So you get the enjoyment of those tropes while not “stepping on the toes” of Valve and out compete the game.

Edit: hell it would even let them try new and different things with the formula. Change up the look of the game maybe even bring it closer to the classic TF look.

It is funny or sad depending on how you look at it that the fan modding community has done more for VR in these last few years than most of the big names. Then again it does make sense since there isn’t much big money to be earned in the VR space right now. Hell while not a big fan of what Meta is doing with titles, they appear to be the only ones paying out a premium to have games developed for them resulting in a closed garden but for some indie devs, it actually pays the bills.

Can’t wait to see what 2024 has for VR since with the release of the Unreal engine universal VR wrapper, we will likely see a boom in VR mods at least for the Unreal scene. Great job to all the mod developer out there putting so much effort into the medium.

once we have gotten past the ethical quandaries and doing it the right way. It would be cool to just synthesize voices for npcs and PC from a list of “character types” and maybe add accents for the main PC. So all games can have voiced audio (could be cool if it can also work in a retroactive way, like play a classic CRPG but have fully voiced characters would be pretty neat), which can be a mixed bag in modern day since realistically there is a budget and voice acting can take a ton of money if done right. So it means we as gamer if we can mod in new quests, we can use such system to truly expand thee game. Like I love real VA performances so I can see this as a “stopgap” so you can get the main questline done and many of the “good” side quests done but you can use this AI trained voice for the more smaller tasks that may not get as much love or as I said use it for modding.

He was certainly above that. Hell his story “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” also known as “White Ape”. Is literally a book about the “one drop rule” to the point its actually funny because of how absurd it comes off as. Its so insanely racist, it fucking becomes funny based on the character’s reaction. Its not a great short story but basically he find out his great great great great grandmother was a “white ape” (which is not human per say but lets read between the lines since the white apes come from the congo region), his response to this news was pouring gasoline on himself and burning himself alive. Like yes its fiction but the fact he made a fucking short story where the focal point is discovering that you are mixed race and learning that is so mind breaking, death was the only logical option is god damn hilarious.