It's from PC Gamer, so I think it's safe to say they mean worst gaming company in the world. They could have said that though.

Even limited to gaming, EA, Ubisoft, and Activision have always been pretty much tied for it. Now Activision is part of Microsoft, and I think with both Activision and Bethesda and the shit the latter has caused lately, I think we can bump Ubisoft out. And I think when Copilot gaming rolls out, whatever they're calling that, they'll be worse than EA was before. The problem with EA isn't so much what they were before though, it's what they'll be under SA leadership.

Gaming by megacorps has never been good for gamers, and it's going to get worse. And yet people keep supporting them.

Has a lot to do with the size of the developer and popularity of the game.

Ironic how OP's avatar is taken from Deus Ex. One of the few games that lets you kill children. Most people don't try, but I'm pretty sure everyone still finds a creative way to kill Louis Pan (he's a boy in the Hong Kong map who goes around extorting businesses, and releasing rats when they won't pay. He works for one of the triads, and though you do quests for them, they do not care if you kill him, though I think they remark on it).

Worse, in Deus Ex all the children are male (due to resource limitation). In the sequel, all the children are female and you can still kill them. There's a whole school of them and you can basically do a school shooting. The game isn't meant for that, but you can totally do it. Sold on Steam. Both of them are. Frequently on sale.

One of my favourite game series. I'm not knocking it. But it does show that Valve is willing to relax the rules for some.

Oh yeah. In Fallout 3, you can straight up sell a 5 or 6 year old girl into sex slavery. And there's a reward for doing so (an item you can only obtain in this way). You have to follow a few unlikely steps to get it, but it's also not hard. There's a slaver faction, and they won't shoot you on sight. You want to get in there for a Bobblehead (permanent skill increase, in this case Barter, which helps your buy/sell prices and speech checks), so you enslave one person, or kill them. Another quest has one slaver target sniping you, and experienced players circle round and kill him first, so that gets you into Paradise Falls (the slaver settlement). If you complete all the slaver contracts (enslave three other people by making them put a bomb collar on their neck and give them marching orders), the slaver leader tells you he has a client with certain tastes, and he wants you to go find the youngest girl you can. There's a settlement (cave) full of children, and you must pass through to complete the game. There's one girl, Bumble, who is explicitly declared as the youngest, little more than a baby, barely able to fend for herself. And you can speech-check her to follow you outside to hand her over to the slavers. Slaver, it's actually just one. And, fun fact, a lot of veteran players do this, because there's a bug where you can "reverse pickpocket" weapons and armour onto NPCs to equip them better. Including kids. So what we do is, we take Bumble out, then we reverse pickpocket good armour and a flame thrower on her. These increase her internal/hidden confidence stat, so when the slaver threatens her, instead of running and getting caught, she attacks. And she wins. And then proudly walks back in her armour. It's funny.

A lot of older games had stuff like that in it, either references or outright stated. I've never heard of Valve going after them.

This is for remote streaming. Can Jellyfin be accessed outside the network? I thought that was the difference.

Like if I didn't like Plex and I ran Jellyfin (and I have done), I could access it locally but I couldn't access it, say, from a hotel a thousand miles away. Or it requires a lot more work (and maybe some paid service) to do.

Plex may have gone up, but a bunch of us got it for $100 or less years ago and we are not affected by the new limitations. Still free for our family members accessing remotely. Wasn't free for us to set up.

Yeah, fuck Apple! Let's give all our personal data to Google and let them sell it to the highest bidder, and charge us iPhone 17 Pro prices for iPhone 11 performance at the same time! /s

Sure would be nice if there were a third option, because right now, you're choosing between privacy and freedom to install cracked apps and more easily steal media. Because let's face it, that's what people want to sideload for. Both stores offer emulators now. That excuse is straight out. It's basically down to whether you can install a torrent client or not. Or porn apps, but you can use those through the web. (You can also torrent through the web, via a seedbox, but it's not as straightforward and it's not free.)

Remember, Google took away a lot of the things that made Android different from iOS. They took your headphone jack. They took your memory card reader. They even took your buttons to make the bottom of Android phones look more like the bottom of iPhones. They're coming for sideloading next. They made a concession and said they wouldn't take it, after all, but they said the same about ad blocking in Chrome. They backed down, they backed down... but ultimately, they did it. And since sideloading is about ad blockers and their threat to Google's profits as an advertising company, the same will happen with sideloading. They'll back down once or twice, but ultimately, that is the direction they are going to go.

As someone who uses both... I just wish Apple could make a keyboard. I have a 2019 Android phone and a 2024 iPhone. If I'm gonna be spending time typing online, I will boot up the Android phone, hotspot it off my iPhone (it's WiFi only, I don't have a SIM card in it), and type on that. Because Gboard on Android is that much better. Web browsing too, you can't beat Firefox with uBlock Origin.

I know... there are open source (/Linux) phones out there, and I'm excited for them, but they won't come to the US because to do so, they'd have to get approved by the carriers, and the carriers won't do it. They'll need to put spyware and adware on them. Apple doesn't let them do it for now (that was their original deal with AT&T, and everyone else who wanted to carry iPhone has had to honour it), but Android phones get it so bad. They get a splash screen at boot. They're forced to install apps and games. They get ads from the carrier in the notifications. It's terrible. So I imagine some Linux phone maker trying to break into the US market will be subject to the same. And who knows, maybe iPhones will at some point, too. But we aren't there yet.

It's not about what the theft will do to prices. Trump is looking for an excuse to declare martial law, which he can use to suspend elections. He tried to go after Medicare/Medicaid but the Democrats stood firm on the issue and the government shut down because the two parties could not agree on a budget. So now Trump is going after food stamps (also called EBT, also called SNAP). The idea is to push poor people to crime so he can justify marching the military into cities.

Pretty typical dictator shit.

Worry more about what the hit on distribution does to prices. It's a big country, they will want to monitor and limit movement between states/major areas. Of course they will let food through, but delays will lead to shortages. Of everything. And that's the idea.

Yes.

But let’s be real, most of us aren’t going to read all of them.

I really tried with Cyberpunk. I love that game. But the credits just went on and on and on and…

I did it with Animal Crossing though! But every time I ask K.K. Slider to play a song, the credits roll. And there’s an achievement for doing it 50 times. It takes a year. He shows up once a week. I mean it takes a year if you play Animal Crossing every Saturday after 6pm.

I can’t wait to roll credits on Blue Prince. One dude made that game. Like Stardew Valley.

That baby is still chasing the dollar 30-odd years later!

Dude just wants to get paid without having to lift a finger. I don’t blame him, I blame the system that enables him and the society that failed to instill within him a work ethic.

They were hot garbage before. They exist to make money from gamers. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but you basically have two kinds of game developers. Those who love gaming, and those who are tired of or burned out from gamers and just want to exploit gaming. Live long enough, you'll see a lot of companies go from the first camp to the second (Bethesda, Blizzard). Developers and publishers in the second camp are best avoided. Problem is, people keep buying their games. So you've gotta try to support the ones in the first group. And, sometimes people actually like games from trash developers. Some will tell you their games are not that bad or that they found something they love.

EA's been in the second group for a long time. I don't think they will get any better. I think I will go on ignoring their games.

That doesn’t sound accurate. Plenty of places use ballasts and those are legal. A ballast is a barrier, typically concrete but some are plastic and filled with sand, and they are commonly used to keep cars out of pedestrian spaces. You might not even notice them sometimes, but if you think about what keeps cars off the sidewalk or out of parks, you might notice them.

It's not even the 6th yet! ...which tells me he's in Europe and that makes Nova a little cooler.

iPhone guy but of course I have Nova Prime on my backup phone. I wanna say I had a couple other apps he made, too? Tesla Coil sounds familiar. But it's been almost 10 years since an Android phone was my main phone.

So Nova should be usable for a few more years at least... but... what's everyone gonna replace it with? For what I use my S10 for, it should be good enough. I mainly need the launcher to support custom grid sizes, larger icons, and custom icons since my Android phone is a cosplay prop. (It's meant to look and act like the NookPhone from Animal Crossing. It's fully functional — you open Nook Music and it's Apple Music which I'm subscribed to, as long as it has WiFi it will play, and it has a lot of stuff downloaded. And of course the browser is Firefox with uBlock Origin — it's just Redd the fake art purveyor on a globe rather than the red panda we all know and love.)

No. But we can sideload. Two apps for free, have to be authorized every 7 days. (It’s actually three, but the app that does this for you takes a slot, so that and two others.)

You can also get a developer license for $99/year that lets you do unlimited with a much longer authorization window.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.