The execs probably get away fine from it as well, even if the company sinks, they'll end up high up somewhere else.
Online service games are just peak venture capitalism, grinding a small studio to dust and causing massive misery followed by unemployment for a 1/50 shot at making a money printer.
I've never understood what twitter style websites are actually for. They seem to have a tiny niche of celebrities and known personalities making a statement with no reasonable conversation stemming from it.
I don't understand how that structure was once one of the largest social media platforms in the first place.
Funnily enough The Witcher 3 is one of the games I always think of for the trope of not following the plot. Often I think of the ludonarrative dissonance specifically between Gestalt's paternal drive to find and protect Ciri Vs Gwent.
For large scale, AAA open world games, I mostly think of Breath of the Wild, which transparently sets itself up as being about taking as long as you need to get strong enough to save the world and Red Dead Redemption 2, which doesn't care about the stakes of the world.
I sometimes can't wrap my head around the fact that Witcher 3, BotW and RDR2 were each two years apart. I don't feel any open world game has occupied the cultural space those games did since.
This is Call of Duty 22.
I used to play call of duty way back in the day and fell off around the time Black Ops 2 came out, mostly because I felt like there are too many games and I didn't need another black ops.
There's now more Black Ops games than I've bought games this year.
This is definitely a selfish opinion but people who block adverts or torrent being a small percentage of users can be a good thing.
If they lose even 5% of their userbase to Firefox over this decision, they'll find a way to make grand modifications to Google search and YouTube in a manner that stops you blocking ads from alternative browsers, and while I'm happy swapping to an alternative search engine, it'll definitely becometedious to sidestep Google's gaze.
But if it's 0.1% of people who swap due to this, and Google already don't care about the small percentage they lose to Firefox then I would rather sit under the radar and not be cracked down on.
To be fair, modern AI voices sound pretty real. Making it artificial would have been a tell in it's own right.
Long before ZA/UM closed, I was certain that we'd never see a new game of that quality again from the same studio.
I'm not confident any of these new teams will pull it off, but I'd rather have four attempts than one.
Microsoft will definitely have the power to bulldoze all other things named copilot, like Facebook did to meta. I'm still not over AI being a lame word now. I miss the time when it felt sci-fi and not like a corporate buzzword.
The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.
In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I'd drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.
I loathe their lootbox system but I'd say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I'd put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.
I don't think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.
It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.
The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.