I'm not sure I really agree with the reasoning on why HL:Ep3 was never developed. Sure, Valve game usually revolves around some game-changing mechanics, but at the same time, Episode 3 was more than just a game, but a sendoff of a big franchise, at least for a time, and a promise to their fans: that 3 episodes are made.

I think that this was one of the signs of the cracks forming in the game developing sector of Valve. It's been well known that the dev team within Valve has slowly developed to a more toxic environment where veterans vetoed a lof of stuff from newer employees, leading to stagnation and developers getting silently shunned for working on projects like TF2 because it wasn't considered "profitable", when there still was, and is, a sizeable community revolving it.

I would have said playing it safe and making a sort of "best of" of popular mechanics used in the previous games would've been the best choice, because that would be the best possible sendoff for the series of episodes. After all, at that point people mainly wanted a conclusion to the story arc, a moment of "this was the HL2 era, thank you for playing", rather than something completely new.

That's why customer goodwill is so important. It can save you from doing a major mistake simply by the fans still buying the next game out of support for the studio.

Also, the "if we don't get funded" message rubs me the wrong. It feels like an appeal to emotion rather than an honest message. Something along the lines of "we'll continue looking for funding, though the project will be put on hold" would feel more genuine without tugging on heartstrings.

Let's see how their new game idea works out. Honestly a prophunt horror game seems interesting, but I feel it's pretty much done to death by free mods/gamemodes already.

While I have no idea about legality, it is quite obvious that X/Twitter is not really run as a company run as a public communications platform, but rather as a fever dream of Musk.

Especially the Eli Lily Co. disaster should've been a wake up call for X of how much harm the fake checkmarks can bring, yet nothing was done. Most likely because Elon Musk didn't care. He basically runs it like it's how little service that he fully owns and controls with full disregard to anything but his own vision.

Therefore including his other businesses makes sense, as the fine that is only based on X's income would probably be negligible in his opinion, as he runs it on a loss anyways. Only bigger fines would actually have any effect in my opinion.

Or at least be sort of a monthly tax, in order to fund it. Generally however, I agree, especially since those who get caught not paying for those tickets after often those who can't afford it, thus ending in a spiral that ultimately puts them in jail, thus costing the taxpayer more money. At least this is the case in Germany.

As well as the proportions being flipped, resulting in the now iconic look. IIRC it was supposed to be a pig initially.

He was Austrian, BTW.

I think the main problem is that people try to shoehorn OOP mechanics into everything, leading to code that is hard to understand. Not to mention that this is basically encouraged by companies as well, to look "futuristic". A great example of this approach going horribly wrong is FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition.

OOP can be great to abstract complex concepts into a more human readable format, especially when it comes to states. But overall it should be used rarely, as it creates a giant code overhead, and only as far as actually needed.

And insurances provide monetary compensation until you become a common liability, too high to be covered by any sort of fee. DDOS protection is just the same. It's only feasible if it happens rarely, like they usually happen. However if it's a common occurrence it will just eat up the profits made by the fees and then some, which just is stupid to do in any case.

Ignoring the shady practices of Brave Software, this doesn't really solve the problem. Sites will still use way too much scripting to be flashy, and that will continue to be a problem for everyone, because some of these sites willbe needed for some and will require all scripts to function properly.

What might help more in the long run is complain to the site owners that their site, despite you having an up to date browser, does not work on your phone. Sure, some of those complaints will fall on deaf ears, but even some changing means progress.

Honestly it's pretty sad how Viruses changed from a sort of artform to just a money making scheme / espionage tools.

Linus Torvals talk at the Aalto University. Specifically a segment where he talks about how hard it is to work with Nvidia when it comes to the Linux kernel.

You could also do the Overwatch thing and shut down the servers of the previous game so people either have to accept the new game or leave. Solves the problem in the eyes of the executives.

One thing I would say justifies a new game is when you want to resolve a problem that's ingrained in the existing content, making these changes fight with the majority of the game. A new iteration, a clean slate, can help with that a lot.