Oh shit, I'm sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying, I thought you were referring to them purchasing and running their own physical server hardware as opposed to running their servers off of a cloud platform.
That's kinda a weird take, since the private server model was the only model until 10 years ago or so. Companies definitely know it. It's just not financially efficient comparing to benefiting from economies of scale with hosting. Plus you don't lose a ton of money or piss of players if you over or under estimate how popular the game will be.
Had they gone with private servers here, they would have lost even more money than they already have. The problem here is they spent too much money on a game no one wanted to play, chasing a fad that ended before it launched.
I actually looked into this, part of the explanation is that in the 80s, Sweden entered a public/private partnership to subsidize the purchase of home computers, which otherwise would have been prohibitively expensive. This helped create a relatively wide local consumer base for software entertainment as well as have a jump start on computer literacy and software development.
Gas-filler. There's a couple states in the US where you aren't allowed to pump your own gas, someone else has to do it for you, and you're expected to then tip them.
The job is essentially getting me to pay to be inconvenienced. I'd prefer to pay to let me pump my own gas.
Stealing is a strong word considering it gives credit in the bottom right
I've seen so many "this new battery technology" articles over the past decade, I can't bring myself to care until it enters production.
Yeah, who's gonna say "Oh, I'm not blocking ads on YouTube, better take the time to make sure I see ads everywhere else as well."
I think a reason that Valve has been able to be consumer friendly for so long is that they aren't public and not beholden to shareholders.
Absolutely makes sense for most planets to be rather barren.
This idea is something I've heard a lot about Starfield and is why I don't think I'll pick it up, at least until a big sale. To me, it seems like they made a fair number of design decisions around what "makes sense" rather than what's fun.
Cyberpunk 2077. I was pretty skeptical of it before it came out (didn't really feel like it was doing anything unique), but it was such a big release I picked it up to have an opinion on it.
Don't think I'm gonna do the same for Starfield, though, that's just a pass
And corkscrew genitals