Rockstar’s brought them just to shut them down, I’m calling it now. Probably cheaper and more reliable than pursuing legal action for the same result.

Same here. I’m gonna be more than a bit annoyed if it turns out to be a total mess after two delays and with a $70 price tag. But I’m hoping it comes out good.

I’m cautiously excited. Because if they do pull it off, it’s gonna be great. But just keep in mind that Cyberpunk 2077 looked like “the Cyberpunk 2077 CDPR pitched from the start” in the trailers. Until reviewers get their hands on copies, take everything with a pinch of salt.

It’s been delayed twice at this point, so hopefully it’s gonna come out better than other Bethesda titles have in the past. It’s still a Bethesda title at the end of the day, so don’t expect miracles. But hopefully the launch will be acceptable. Or at the very least, not completely awful.

My advice is work out where you draw the line, and don’t cross it.

I’m gonna be honest- if you’re buying games through Steam, you’re already giving money to a deeply unethical firm: Valve. Valve takes a 30% cut of all transactions on Steam. Valve is also the studio that introduced lootboxes and similarly predatory microtransactions to the western market, and continues to profit from them to this day.

Where I draw the line is when a studio drops below the already low bar set by the industry. When a studio sexually harasses an employee to the point of suicide. When most of the game’s development cycle is pure crunch. When a studio puts predatory microtransactions into a singleplayer game.

I also draw the line when a game (or any other work of media, for that matter) is directly giving money to bigoted scumbags. If a studio employs bigoted scumbags, that person is getting paid whether or not I buy the game. But if a studio is making a game based on the IP of a bigoted scumbag, they’re getting a cut of each sale. When a copy of that game is brought, they’re getting a bit of money they wouldn’t have got if the game wasn’t brought.

Or Reddit. You know, the website where a community dedicated to sharing CSAM was one of the biggest on the site and its lead moderator was a sitewide celebrity (oh, and Reddit’s current top admin was also a moderator on that community).

Some people are just spiteful shitheads. Also, there’s been a bit of a wave of DDOS attacks against US-registered sites lately- Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, got DDOSed a few weeks back. Seems like they’re going after any site that doesn’t have good DDOS protection and is based in the US.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon. I think there’s an anime adaptation.

Stellaris. It’s been “that game” for me practically as long as I’ve been into gaming. I’ve got nearly 1000 hours on Steam alone.

Those are my thoughts as well. Like it or not, licenses are the way software has been sold since the very beginning of the industry. The problem is that most licenses can be revoked at any time for any reason; and the solution for that is passing a law that prohibits that.

If firms want to be able to revoke a license, they should have to clearly and prominently outline the conditions for that to happen- preferably before you even press the “buy” button.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access. I’m honestly enjoying it a lot. If there’s one thing that really stands out to me, it’s the sheer amount of choice the game gives you. I’m genuinely looking forward to the full release in slightly over a week.

Not gonna lie, if they make good on their promises (I’m still rather suspicious of CDPR after the absolute mess that was 2077’s launch), it might just tempt me to pick up 2077 and Phantom Liberty next time there’s a big Steam sale.

I’ve not been buying Ubisoft games since the sexual harassment scandal back in 2020, and this only reaffirms my choice not to buy anything from them. It’s not just scummy, it’s pointlessly scummy.

Admittedly, physical copies of games don’t resolve this issue either: legally speaking when you own a physical disk, all you own is the disk itself- not the contents. The only way to actually fix this issue is better consumer protection laws.

Called it. I’d be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta’s just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole “planned Fediverse integration” for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.

Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they’d have been talking about “Metaverse integration” instead.

I’m pleased to hear that they’re moving. Fandom’s had a monopoly on the community-created wiki space for far too long, and it’s had a dire effect on the usability of so many wikis. It’s like they’re trying to make their site everything but a easily usable resource for community wikis.

On a related note, I highly recommend the “Indie Wiki Buddy” extension for Chrome and Firefox. When non-Fandom/Fextralife wikis are available, it’ll direct you to those instead; and when they’re not, it’ll allow you to view the Fandom wiki through a much more usable mirror.