Even worse is that it is a trademark. There was a kickstarter for a game “prey for the gods” which could have gotten a trademark dispute over the usage of the name “prey” from bethesda.

So they changed the name to “praey for the gods” to not have to deal with yearlong legal battle and burn the Kickstarter funds.

I don’t know where I read it but IIRC religion is being used as a simple answer to very difficult and possibly uncomfortable questions: why are we here and what is our purpose?

It is fairly easy to believe that something, a god, created us instead of that the existence of humanity was just a fluke, a stroke of luck enabling us to evolve were we are now because it is just easier to grasp even if it is proven. That we evolved from simple beings into more complex organisms instead of just “being created”. Evolution creates so many quite difficult questions that it is easier to understand and believe that someone just wanted us to exist.

When someone is believing in a religion they also always have some form of " it won’t be over" scenario like when you die, there is nothing truly “the end”. You just won’t vanish and this can be terrifying for many because the following question could be, what sense does it make to live at all when our existence is just so insignificant in comparison to everything else?

So, in short, it is an easy too to make sense of things that almost everyone can understand it.

Unfortunately, things like this can and will be abused.

Connectivity or rather the lack of it…

I have a Samsung TV and recently got a new cooling fan and now when I start the fan when my TV is on, it says it detected a new device. I don’t know what my TV would want with a fan maybe control the speed for more immersion?

But there is also no way for me to disable that. I also got regular requests of my neighbor’s to connect to my TV until I disabled the notification for it. No, I couldn’t disable that my TV doesn’t even allow it to be seen, I had to enable to not automatically connect devices and disable that notifications are being shown. That thing isn’t even connected to the internet.

Well, I can only speak from my own experience.

When the PS5 launched I wanted to upgrade but you literally couldn’t get it because it wasn’t in stock anywhere. You could only find it on eBay of some private seller that started at almost double the price, no, thank you. Then Sony introduced this “Register and on the next event you get a slot to buy one from the official Website” which was great. I got invited the first time and literally couldn’t buy it because the website was broken. Whenever I wanted to select my payment method the checkout got blank and there was nothing you could do. Even worse was that you couldn’t hard refresh the shop because this would have killed the session that the website needed to allow you to buy it. So, even switching browsers with the same “invitation link” didn’t work. I reported this to the support, but they didn’t really care. half a year later, I got my second invitation link and the same happened then as well. I reported it again to the support, but they still didn’t know what to do with that information or wanted to troubleshoot this.

And now, there isn’t really a need for it anyway. The Games that I would have wanted to buy on the PS5 released on the PC.

I mean, Helldivers 2 was overwhelmingly positive. 3 days later it was overwhelmingly negative. With almost 100k negative reviews on 5th May.

I would recommend watching the video…

What you say is “easy” is great for a comment on Reddit or Lemmy but it doesn’t really provide anything to the actual problem.

The problem is that a company “just” doesn’t, why would they do this anyway? It would open their IP to be forked, modified and used for something else by someone else. That isn’t what they want you to do.

Since there is no incentive and no one is forcing them to do this they just keep doing whatever they want. It was mentioned in the video that there is absolutely no regulation or anything in that regard available ANYWHERE in the world, not even in the EU.

THIS is what the video and Ross Scott want to achieve, that there either will be regulations for it so that Game developers and Publishers can’t just create games with some mandatory server backend running that is shut down in a couple of years OR that there is at least some way of saying “well, we don’t care” so that the consumer can actually do anything about it on their own end.

So it is easy to say they “just” have to do X or Y but the past and the increasing games relying on things like this have shown that they won’t do anything about it because nothing is stopping them.

Yes, blind optimism is the way to go here. /s

I am sorry but if any gaming journalist is not the least amount of sceptical about ANY release today, then they either don’t play games or are sleeping under a rock.

Without a doubt, Hello Games pulled NMS around and made it into a great title but this took years and we also have seen this blind optimism before with Cyberpunk 2077. Even a “wiser” Game studio can fail and not deliver.

Too many titles over the last years were lukewarm even highly anticipated and hyped titles either were “meh” or failed at release. The number of games that redeemed themselves is only a few and can be probably counted on one hand. A gaming Journalist should know about this!

So, I am not even sorry if I am not hyped about it. It does sound interesting but “I believe it when I see it”. There is too much time that has to go down the road for this to come out and there are a lot of things that can/will go wrong in that time.

I rather wait on the reviews.

Just vote with your wallet

But that is the thing, they do vote with their wallet. They still buy the games.

“Voting with the wallet” goes both ways.

I use a pihole which is a small computer that checks every domain request and blocks them when they are on one of my blacklists. This works great for browsing the web because you just don’t see most ads anymore. I also use adblocks for, for example, YouTube because pihole can’t distinguish between ads or legitimate requests when they come from the same domain.

I also download all videos from YouTube to watch. And I also don’t have cable.

Basically, I see so few instances of ads anymore that any few ads are getting so annoying. The 1-2 ads in front of a YouTube video or in the middle, I just don’t watch that video anymore.

But when I really noticed that was when I was spending the day with my father and we were watching a TV show on some free provider, every 10 minutes there were 1.5 minutes ads. Which is by far better as normal TV in my country (Germany) but damn, this was really annoying after just a single episode and I’m glad I don’t have to see those at home. It just interrupts the flow.