drucik

On the other hand I am not sure that most people would be playing the same game for 20+ years - I played CS religiously during my school years, but at some point, even if you keep playing games, you just want something else

The thing is, if I want my Star Trek, I want my Star Trek, not some substitute…

After sales support, as in spare parts and maintenance, is a big part of income for manufacturers of heavy equipment, as such machines run for a loong time given parts and maintenance. To me they really did not want to lose on 'subscription money' in the form of service contracts they missed out on. It came close to the operator coming back to them to fix the trains 3rd party seemingly couldn't.

Article seems to be spot on - it's good to remind people about it once in a while.

When I was a kid I jumped into a semi-empty pool, where depth was more or less equal to my total height. Bad judgment on my part. I couldn't swim so all I could do was bouncing of the bottom, gasping for air with each bounce. That was the only thing I could think of doing. Lifeguard was there but he didn't notice drowning kid, nor did people around me in the pool. Fortunately my father was more aware, and jumped in, fully clothed, to drag me out. I don't remember if it lasted 30 seconds or 2 minutes but I do remember the scared face of the 'lifeguard' when we were walking past him.

edit:grammar, at least what I've noticed

A statement like Randy Marsh made - “F—— the Chinese government” - seems like a candidate for a redemption ;)

Edit:formatting

> Am I the only one that thinks Blizzard is in the right

No, I think there’s quite a number of people being used to the whole world doing censoring on behalf of China. Status quo is comfy. “It’s been like this for long, nobody is getting hurt, why we should do anything about it”. Heck, I’m sure execs at blizzard are saying right now “everybody has been doing this for so long and nobody cared and now everyone is against us”. But the line has to be put somewhere. “It’s good to be decent”. I wish more people started trying being decent.

And regarding your ending - that must be some kind of a fallacy. Yes, everybody knows it’s impossible to start “boycotting China”. Too much manufacturing being done there etc. But change has to start somewhere.

And the approach “it won’t work anyway so why bother” is simply despicable.

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” seems appropriate here...

Everyone has an opinion, but it doesn’t make a word meaningless. Of course there is some grey area, but if “men are not women” is the best example you can think of, I’m pretty sure most of law-educated people will quickly agree where the line is, if there’s ever a need. ;)

It’s a different category of action, but the app comes down to the same. It marks locations, right? Or I suppose moving points. Or am I misunderstanding something?

I thought so too, but I stumbled upon SC2 with it’s war chests, and I like the idea of paying 25$ and getting the whole set of skins* instead of loot boxes.

* - I suppose there’s a little less content. And old sets are ridiculously expensive for stupid skin packs. But the idea itself is neat.

Oxford defines as follows: “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.” And it seems to be a general definition, I think sometimes it’s narrowed to threats or to calls for violence, I suppose?

Let’s not act as if that’s an unimaginable term.

If you are pricing it at cost plus, yeah, it can be worth near-ish the cost of production. Not things with assosciated costs like rnd, but think some of spare parts, for example.

If the less powerful costs the same to make and is just crippled full version, then for me it’s not ethical and calling it a choice is a farce.

Btw obviously I’m not talking about software. Im not talking about pricing things with no marginal cost.

One thing is trading features for money, the other is artificially crippling the product just so you can release a cheaper version. For what, to justify unreasonably high price for complete version?

The second part sounds kinda like “They don’t know they got screwed, so it’s completely fine”.

This is not an error in my argument. You just do not understand what I mean by “customer-friendly(ethical)”.

Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything. There used to be this belief that things are worth as much as the cost to produce them + some margin for the maker. And things were made so they will benefit their consumers. Unfortunately more and more companies these days look for ways to get not what something is worth but to get from consumers as much as possible, to squeeze them like lemons.

The fact that degree is the same means that energetically 1 degree C is equal to 1K. So when doing scientific calculations, for example to calculate energy needed to change the temp by X, they are the same. The fact that the scale is based on water properties seem to be just so values are easier to relate to. We are water based, after all.

Can anyone provide any reason to use Fahrenheit scale, apart from historical ones? Legit question.

In my experience audits done by big 4 are worth nothing. Irregularities are raised, and handled, unofficially, so when the report comes, everything is fine, everything’s legit.

That’s what you get when auditing companies also do consulting.

I suspect it just assumes that the temparature increase of 2 degrees while make it easier to grow food and overall live in some countries, while screw up already hot countries, but I'm not sure that's how climate change is going to work.

But the maps contradict each other nicely.

> The game publishers who continue to pay to use Denuvo indicate otherwise. In a hit-or-miss industry like video games, publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money.

I could say that the game publishers who continue to release games without additional protections indicate exactly this, as publishers are not in the habit of being stupid with their money. That doesn’t seem like a good argument, does it?

The only reason, at least the one I could think of, why some publishers still push aggressive DRMs into their products is that someone is selling them this solution and management believes that they protect themselves from “bad pirates”.

If someone wants to buy the game, he will buy it. If someone wants to pirate it, he will do just that. The only 100% working way around it are multiplayer games.

The other almost as successful method seem to be just making good games, as Nintendo, From Software, CD Projekt etc show again and again.

Well, when the game is designed around microtransactions free to play means more free to pay, as playing without paying is not enjoyable at all. Look at EAs mobile offerings.

If one is a fan of football, and video games, buying FIFA every year isn't that baffling. I actually do it every year - till 2009 it was new PES every year, and since 2010 it was FIFA every year (as fifa got greatly improved on that year and PES is still exactly where it was 10 years ago) It is the best football game on the market, and every year there are some new features, to which I look forward to. It's always cool to see what changed, what is better than it was, what was fixed, what was broken.

I am lucky enough to not care about spending $60 per year on a single video game. So yeah, I will happily do it and play with my friends for a year. But is it honestly worth it? I can list feature breaking bugs that have been in the game for 3+ years, never touched. I can list features which got broken by new features, never fixed, for years. Considering how much money the product makes, for me it just shows what matters for EA.

And EA's focus seem to be solely Ultimate team, on making sure that they will resell the same shitty game with minimal improvement and people will spend buttloads of money on packs, which they have to do from scratch every year (Personally I do not touch microtransactions, too easy to pay few bucks here and there and this is never worth it in the long run). (IMO the fact that they release new version every year shows how predatory their business model is)

So yeah, you can find some enjoyment out of it, but I would say that in case of FIFA it is despite EAs best efforts.

And re MK11, I do not beleive it is released every year. I think the first 4 games were came out in quick(ish) succession, than it was quiet for few years, than several others...? So it's a different case from 'I'm a footbal fan and this way I can play with my current team'

No, it is an economics term describing a type of market, as an opposution to regulated one, as often sugar industry is, for example. Maybe you mean the fact that there are regulations and therefore no one has a free market? If that's so - c'mon, let's be a bit reasonable. It's as if you were saying that people are not free, cause they cannot do everything they want. As someone else wrote here, the role of the government is to make sure that everything is working to benefit the society, and definitely to protect the people.

Free market without any regulations will work as long as people are simply decent. But we are human, poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king etc. So some regulations are needed. But not so many of the lobbied ones, as the corporate interests should not be the primary concern of the government. IMHO etc.

I think ban from an app store for a platform is something more like “if someone commits a crime using your vehicle, you might lose your driving permit”.

From my understanding user will have to consent both to personal and tracking data separately. So yes, users will agree to sharing the personal data - (name, age, gender etc), as this is essential for the service, in this case social network, to work. However, tracking data for ad purposes will need separate consent as this data is not essential for the service to work. Otherwise GDPR would be another dead letter, wouldn't it?

Maybe I'm just naive European, but I'd say that allowing companies to lobby the government does not turn out that great for 'the people'

Tbf fixing compatibility with a very old API might become important _because_ of PR backlash.

KK, thx for clarification. I'll allow myself to not edit the original post, but I promise I'll stop bashing Facebook and Google in my head.

Or maybe Standard Oil was a forefather of modern capitalism? Maybe that was a pure form of it? I'd say the idea that the state does not intervene in the market is heartwarming, but if the state doesn't protect it's people the market will abuse them. Anyway I'm sure that there is some economic forum, where this discussion would be more appropriate :)