sylver_dragon

If something requires an “app” and a connection to “the cloud” for basic functionality, don’t buy it. This sort of abandonment by the manufacturer will always happen. Maybe it will last longer. Maybe it will be next week. But once the company has your money, the last thing they want to do is to spend any of that money providing you with support.

He was also constrained by some of the history of the game. There have always been spells in D&D which are better or worse. It’s become a bit of a joke that the first spell taken by any wizard is Magic Missile. Why? Because it’s been one of the most useful 1st level spells for wizards since early D&D. So, into the spell book it goes, and it was very often the one spell a first level wizard memorized.

I’m just glad that the designers are willing to take a critical look at their own work and say, “you know what, this sucks, let’s fix it”.

Since the article seems to have failed to link to it, here’s the actual data: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

My apologies, I was not familiar with the difference. I’m going to have to test this when I am back at my system. Looking at the docs, it does seem to be experimental in Linux. But it seems odd that it would turn off automagically.

That’s interesting. I’ve not had that sort of issue. On my phone (Android), my son’s laptop (Windows) and my desktop (Arch Linux) the NextCloud clients all sync perfectly and run at start up. Granted, knowing that the Linux landscape is fractured, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if the client had issues on some flavors of Linux.

If you are willing to self-host, I’ve found Nextcloud integrates well in Linux. I had been using it before I made the switch and it worked out just fine afterwards. I originally set it up to have a cloud-sync option for my phone, which didn’t mean passing everything through Google first. But, it also proved to be a handy way to sync files on my desktop as well.
It just shows up as another folder on my system and Libre Office is happy to work on files from there (with some permissions fiddling due to flatpak).

Every new “feature” I hear about in Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11, the happier I am that I switched to Linux. It’s been mostly smooth and games have just worked. Though I know that much of that is because of Proton.

What, no “convenience fee”?

Maybe, though if you think about it, the idea is basically:
Hey, we borrowed all this money to buy up lots of companies. But rather than pay it back ourselves, we are going to put all of that debt on this one company we also bought (probably with some of that debt), because thay actually make money.

It’s a shell game to allow Embracer to walk away with all the profits and never have to pay their investors back. If Asmodee manages to pay off the debt, that’s nice for them. Other than the fact that they will be hamstrung by servicing that debt, rather than re-investing in the company. If Asmodee folds and gets auctioned off in Chapter 7, that ends up having no material effect on the leadership of Embracer who made the decision to take on all that debt. Either way, Embracer is jettisoning all responsibility for the choices the management of Embrace made.

This sort of leveraged debt buyout, loot the company, then jettison the debt tactic has been used over and over to destroy otherwise profitable companies in the name of short term profit for vulture capitalists.

They really buried the lede on this one. Sure, Embrace paid back a bunch of money using proceeds from the sale of Take-Two. That’s pretty normal business. But:

The company is also moving €900 million of its debt into tabletop publisher Asmodee as part of its plans to split into three separate entities.

It sounds like they are about to jettison the rest of their debt using Asmodee. Embracer will walk away with whatever money they have made and Asmodee will end up being crushed under most of the debt Embrace used to make that money. Vulture capitalism at it’s finest.

While Chism may be a worthless leech, he isn’t completely wrong. Valve’s ownership of Steam does put it in a privileged position, which could be abused in a lot of anti-competitive ways. The fact that it isn’t doing that is really only because GabeN isn’t the same type of leech which Chism is. He’s what a lot of people seem to want, a benevolent dictator. That said, when he finally kicks the bucket, or gets tired and sells the company, the future direction of Steam would be an open question. There may be a very good argument for Valve to be put under the microscope of the FTC for possible anti-trust breakup.

No, it’ll just get disabled. Security baselines are a common feature of enterprise IT, this will just be another requirement.

Alcohol, a common cause of and response to children.

Ya, the “hey, pay a bunch of real money to unlock this quest” is a shitty way to monetize expansions. If they want to have a paid DLC, just have a paid DLC. Also, this shit:

It’s instead being sold via the Creation Club storefront that’s also been added to the game as part of this update, for a price of 700 credits.
For a bit of context, purchasing a pack of 1000 Creation Club credits - which is what you’d need to be able to buy this quest…

The execs of any company which has made up “coins” which cannot be bought in exact amount to cover exact items should be dragged out into the street, and have molten gold poured down their throats.

They just want to Reach Out, Hug and Smother. What’s so horrible about that?

So let’s see, I can buy a computer with a new architecture, which will wreck havoc with running my existing software, all for some half-baked AI version of Clippy. That’s gonna be a, “no”.

Ya, not surprising. I’m in my late 40’ and game. My father was gaming in his 70’s until his death. My mother, also in her 70’s, plays Minecraft. Video games aren’t the domain of kids anymore. The kids who played them grew up and some folks started to take to them in their later years. They are just another form of entertainment now and not some nerdy, niche thing. Quit trying to gatekeep fun.