Th4tGuyII

The mainstream consoles nowadays basically are locked-down computers anyway, so makes sense that people are skipping the live-services middleman and going straight to PC

Unless you care about exclusives, then PCs are the better all-rounder IMO, and don't need a yearly payment on top of your internet bill

Well that's certainly one way of generating the money you need to pay off your lawsuits.
Let humanity burn so that you can pretend to be Mr. Monopoly a little longer

Exactly. If my graphics card is going to be chugging, I'd rather it be because of the sheer amount of stuff to interact with in an area, rather than a beautiful but vapid landscape

Honestly I'd still argue there's diminishing returns on this front as well.
I play plenty of older titles, and I wouldn't say I notice that much of a difference - though that is my very subjective opinion

Of course there are, and I do - but the focus of the article, and thus the thread was on the AAA gaming space and its obsession with graphics.
Smaller studios and Indies already figured out the whole "you don't need to be able to see every fibre of a character's hair in order for a game to be good" thing

Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it's nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.

I'd easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I'd still bet the difference wouldn't be that noticeable for 4K either.

And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid "open worlds", and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.

I hate that "realistic" graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it's consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.

I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.

Good resellers do, but I think my point still stands - why risk any of that when Microsoft doesn't get your money either way?
MAS/Massgrave works effectively, is open source, is well-documented, and literally free.

Considering the grey market is filled with dodgy keys, it'd be better to just pirate, especially when there are easy and safe ways to do it like with MAS

If you must have MS office, then I'd go with MAS/Massgrave like others have said.

It's well documented, requires minimal setup (if going default route), and is much less risky than going into the grey market for keys or downloading cracks elsewhere.

Exactly. If they'd gone with the carrot approach rather than the stick, I bet way more people would've just gone with it for way less fuss

True. While it's definitely more secure than their other 2FA offering (storing them with your passwords), it's still the same developers making both - so it still feels like putting all my eggs in one basket.

For IOS I can see this as a valid option, because unless you are willing to trust Microsoft, Google, or Authy with your 2FA, which I personally don't think one should, then you haven't got too many options.

But on Android there are plenty others that are known to be reliable, Aegis for example, so the value proposition is lessened for me at least.

Cool idea for anyone who doesn't already use Bitwarden for their passwords, but I would be awfully sceptical of having my passwords and 2FA codes stored on the same service - only one breach required to royally screw me up