I have extremely sensitive hearing. I can tell when there's an animal scarer nearby.
This brings me to Microsoft Teams. You might have seen people mention that their dogs know when someone joins the call before they do. That's because they introduced "ultrasonic howling" to detect if they're in the same room as you, and mutes their mic.
It hurts like fucking hell with headphones on.
I really enjoyed Apex when it came out, it felt like it had a lot of potential and a universe ripe with content to explore.
Then at some point they decided that all we needed was more skins to spend money on.
And appallingly it seems they were right.
That's on developers for not putting their games on other platforms, Valve do not prevent you from doing so. If they went crazy tomorrow, people can just jump ship.
I swear the only games that could never be on another store would be Valve's own. It's really not their fault that other platforms are so bad or niche.
Like realistically what should they do to not be seen as gatekeepers? Become worse to scare developers and customers onto other platforms?
Are they gatekeepers though? It's not like they own Windows or Linux and stop you from using any other store. Just having the biggest audience doesn't make them gatekeepers to the market.
I never see people talking about what valve should change other than lowering the 30% cut, but arbitrarily forcing that would set a bad precedent.
Instead of virtue signalling here's reasonable things Valve could do:
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure proton is free to use and you can install stores and games not from steam on a Steam Deck, so again I really don't know what they're gatekeeping.
Game mechanics can be patented. It's stupid, but things such as "loading screen mini games" and "overhead arrows pointing to your objective" have been patented. The second I believe even got enforced once.
I think these kind of things have been getting approved less and less, but I wouldn't be surprised if "balls that contain monsters" was patented back in the early days too.
Increased tuition fees? I guess 50k in debt isn't enough punishment for a decision 18 year olds are pressured to make.
Are European universities struggling as much? Because my (same age) co-workers say they only had a few thousand in debt for their entire courses, so there must be another way of doing things.
Nope! Just jump right into 2's single player mode and enjoy the ride.
Obviously he doesn't spend enough time causing issues for his own companies and country, that he has to try and stir shit across the pond to cure his boredom.
How about doing something good with that spare time for once?
As a casual who didn't start playing shooter games until late, if it wasn't for SBMM I wouldn't be playing them at all.
The real evil is engagement based matchmaking. I don't want to beat players even newer than me every time I haven't won in 20 games, and I certainly don't want to be steamrolled by players who have been playing their whole lives when the same happens to them.
Ah yes, Europe never had to deal with such far right-wingers. We'd like borrow the term you guys came up with to describe them in case we ever face such violent fascists. What was it again?
Oh right, Nazis.
I'm in an identical situation as you (also from the UK funnily enough), except I did keep in contact with her, albeit at arm's length at first. She's explained to me over the years that it was internalised hatred, made worse by her family's very outspoken views about anyone not straight and white.
When she finally had a chance to get away and start thinking things through herself, she began to accept herself and others. She's a lovely person to be around now, and pretty vocal in trying to help other people learn about and understand trans healthcare and mental support. But most importantly, she's happy.
Oh my god I had completely forgotten about that game!! I vaguely recall being taught some exploit that trivialised it but it was so fun to come back to every now and again.