No they’d just blame the liberals and maintain 100% loyalty lol.

Lmao

I mean you say that as a joke but cigars you don’t usually inhale into your lungs. Like you’re still at risk of mouth cancer, but if you switched from Cigarettes to cigars, you wouldn’t suffer the myriad of negative health effects that comes with being a cigarette smoker which would objectively be a huge improvement.

I read scifi books and enjoy reading about the lore of the tech industry.

If it’s any consolation, we’re kinda heading into the futuristic dystopian tech hellscape portrayed by so much sci fi. So that’s fun.

The existing Wi-Fi infrastructure was “overtaxed” so they just threw up satellite instead of , I don’t know, improving the Wi-Fi infrastructure? There’s perfectly fine WiFi at sprawling work and college campuses, and stadiums that seat tens of thousands of people. What a joke.

The funny thing about this scenario is by simply thinking that’s true, it actually becomes true.

You can use programs like Ripper or Automated Ripping Machine to watch for inserted disks and rip them automatically. You can even add remixing or transcoding into the workflow so that all you do is insert the disk into the drive and after some time out pops the file in the exact format and size you want, even directly into your media library if you want.

I’d imagine that’s the case for a lot of people actually. People don’t just pirate to get things for free. Lots of people buy easily pirateable games on GOG because it doesn’t have DRM. Lots of people buy and rip Blu-rays instead of torrenting movies.

That vast, vast majority of spam callers are operating out of illegal call centers in India, they’re spoofing phone numbers, and they could not care less that you’re on a do not call list.

Yeah people avoid pre ordering because they don’t want to signal to the publishers support for a game before they know it’ll be good. And that’s a perfectly valid reason not to pre order. But it’s also the only reason not to pre order, and it’s more political than practical.

They are all objectively practical, every single one. They are upsides without a downside. That being said, it’s ultimately your choice whether you choose practicality over the morals of the thing. If you want to choose not to preorder something just to send a message, I get it.

• You get content only available if you pre order
• You get early access to the game
• You get some amount of later expansion content for free
• you can preload the game so when it releases, you can just begin playing it.

There are lots of practical reasons TO preorder something, thought it’s not always all of those things. And you can both preorder something and “Wait for reviews” because the vast majority of the time, reviews release before a game releases.

For example, Civ 7 comes out on the 11th, if you pre order you get the benefit of getting to play it on the 6th, and the reviews for it all released today, the 3rd. That means I’ll know today if the game sucks and I can just… cancel my preorder if I wanted to. Then in a couple days I get to play the game early, so in case the reviews were all paid for I get to see for myself if I don’t like the game, and if I don’t like it, I can cancel my pre order.

In case I don’t cancel my pre order, I also save $10 on Civ packs I would otherwise be paying for. If I waited for release day to buy it, I’d lose out on the benefits of pre ordering, but gain nothing.

Yeah I’ll pre order any game that I plan on buying. There’s no practical reason not to.

I just played through both and it’s definitely 2. The graphical difference between the two is actually absurd, and the QOL changes, level design, and two main characters pushes it into a separate league from the first. Only thing about 2 that isn’t better is the voice acting. The VA is HORRIBLE in D2 it’s actually kind of distracting. No thanks to Vincent D’onofrio who is an atrocious actor.

Ask yourself how many people are successfully selling their products and services on Lemmy, for example

I’m still stuck on asking how many people are successfully selling their products and services on TikTok.

Like, what businesses are these and what are they selling? I wouldn’t imagine any of these social media platforms would be good for selling anything on. What’s an example of something I could go on TikTok and buy? I couldn’t imagine buying anything on any social media platform. I’ve never even seen anyone selling anything on any social media platform. How would I even do that if I wanted to?

I see this sentiment a lot but I don’t understand, which small business are doing all of their business exclusive on TikTok?

Oh it opens them. Reliable playback is something else entirely.

I’m forced to see the game’s lack of a manipulative business model due to the objective absence of any and all manipulation in the business model. I cannot choose to see something that isn’t there, in much the same way that I can’t choose to see the earth as being flat.

No characters’ story modes are locked in Skullgirls.

Both Double and Valentines story modes are locked until you complete the story mode of every single other non-dlc character.

Why do you think the costumes in Magicka didn’t have a battle pass tied to them but Helldivers II does?

Because progression and rewards are an integral part of video games and their appeal and have been since the early days of gaming. You unlock weapons, upgrades, and cosmetics in the base game of Helldivers 2 because it’s fun. Why on earth would they remove the progression systems for new content? Paid instant-unlock content for games is cheap and devalues the content itself. The gratification of using a cool skin you worked to unlock is intrinsically tied to the appeal of video games.

What you’re telling me here is that you would actually balk at one of the Skyrim DLCs like Dragonborn because in order to access the content inside of it you have to actually play the game that you like enough to pay for more content for, but when they released the “horse armor” DLC you looked at that and just said “Hell yeah”? If that is truly your opinion then so be it. But you need to understand that you are one of very few people who would hold it.

The person who put the game down earlier because they are bored of the game is not going to spend money on additional content that they aren’t interested in playing. And if they do, and have fun, then they aren’t being manipulated. They’re having fun with a product they purchased (just like all video games). Removing the FOMO part absolutely means it isn’t manipulative because that is quite literally the only thing that makes battle passes manipulative in the first place. For you to argue against this is to argue that all video games are manipulative because they were all created to get you to play them more than before you were before you bought them.

The game I’ve put the most time into, on Steam at least, is Skullgirls. It has no progression whatsoever.

Not true, there are a couple of characters you unlock story modes for after beating it with other characters. Guess you’re being manipulated into playing the game more, huh?

This argument of yours is completely devoid of any rational thought.

They have rewards tied to… playing the game. Just like every other video game ever made. That’s how video games work. The only way for there to be “an incentive to keep playing beyond when you want to” is by making the additional content limited in time to generate FOMO or worry that you’ll have wasted your money… which in this case is not happening at all. There is no FOMO because you can buy any of the war bonds whenever you want, and complete them whenever you want. You paid money for something you will keep forever. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That is literally the best possible approach to new content. By your reasoning, every video game ever made is manipulative because they made the game and put… content in it to get you to play the game more than before you bought the game.

“Buying the rewards directly to play in the game” on the other hand is the wrong approach. Why would you prefer to play the game less? If you don’t want to be playing the game why are you spending more money on it?