I mean, sure, they have the right, insomuch as someone can buy a game on disc and use it as a coaster I guess. But it ruins the point of it, in my opinion.
I’m not saying people are wrong to enjoy media and spend money however they want, but it’s like a concert venue installing fancy couches to put in the lobby for people who buy tickets to a show but don’t want to actually watch it. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
Would be better to watch a Let’s Play, in my opinion. I don’t know why someone would want to play a game only to engage with none of its core gameplay features.
Doesn’t seem like a good sell if they do it that way, though. Let’s invest money and time into this feature that we will disincentivise people from doing by reducing their rewards if they use it.
Works for people doing these things as a hobby project and accounting for functionality that currently exists, but not great for a corporation that would need to convince devs to implement the feature into their games and design around it.
Imagine just rewinding in Elden Ring? No more consequence for death, just un-lose your souls and dodge better without actually learning the tells.
What would be the point?
Sacred Indian living grounds with a few burial grounds here and there.
Massachusetts passed an unprecedented measure allowing ride share drivers to unionize.
Borderlands being on the list of “Best game adaptations” is some kind of joke
Salmonella. It’s carried in chicken dung, sometimes eggs get a bit of feces on them, so the US washes them to attempt to reduce exposure.
Problem is that without the protective coating, the eggs are more permeable and susceptible to bacterial infection, hence the refrigeration.
So it’s a question of whether it’s better to reduce bacteria exposure or susceptibility. I am sure there’s research out there with numbers indicating one works better than the other, but it’s been such a long-standing thing at this point that I don’t think Americans would trust unrefrigerated eggs.
Zelenskyy will say whatever he needs to in order to try to retain as much US support as possible.
Not likely to work, but it’s a pragmatic take. If someone is threatening to cut off your support, don’t threaten them back, otherwise it’s a done deal.
Some apps/frontends have keyword filters, could just filter out the word “Trump” as a way of trimming down the feed.
I thought the same thing when I saw another article talking about the Pixel Watch 5.
Modern tech news is so boring we have to speculate about what will be coming in 2-3 years based on what chips are under development today.
What 4th wall?
Upvotes and downvotes are not private. You may have to jump through a few hoops to see the information, but user IDs are attached to every upvote and downvote sent across the platform.
A combination of first-past-the-post and winner-take-all systems for nearly all elections, coupled with the Electoral College for the presidency.
First-past-the-post is a system wherein only the plurality candidate wins. Here is an example:
For a given seat, be it a president, senator, representative, or local office, assume Party A wins 40%, Party B wins 30%, Party C wins 20% and Party D wins 10%.
Despite a majority of voters preferring someone other than Party A, Party A wins and everyone else loses. This is first-past-the-post voting, and with no other considerations given to the other votes, makes it a winner-take-all system.
The majority aren’t happy with this, but the other parties continue running their candidates and continue losing because Party A wins the greatest portion of votes each time.
Because the other parties can’t even win any power, there’s no “coalition” or “alliance” that can be made to shut out Party A.
Party B decides to take advantage of everyone’s dissatisfaction. They adjust some of their policies to be more favorable to Parties C and D to attract some of their voters. This is the closest thing to a “coalition” that the first-past-the-post system can achieve.
During the next election, Party A wins 40%, party B wins 42%, Party C wins 12%, and Party D wins 6%. Party B assumes office, starts fulfilling their agenda, a lot of their voters aren’t completely happy, but at least Party A isn’t in power.
This illustrates how only 2 prevailing parties come to be, because it is not possible to win an election in the US unless you obtain the most votes.
For the presidential election, the electoral college is a winner-take-all system determined by the limited pool of national electors.
Like all other offices, the presidential election is still first-past-the-post. Only the candidate who wins the most votes wins the election, everyone else wins nothing.
For the presidential election, the only votes that matter are the electoral votes. Each US state is assigned a certain portion of electors which is based on population but is often very disproportionate in practice (due to a capped elector total nationally, and minimum elector thresholds for less-populous states).
Each elector is 1 vote for the president, and the electors are supposed to vote based on how the citizens of that state voted. This is the distinction between the electoral vote and the popular vote.
With limited exception, this is also a winner-take-all system, meaning all the electors for a given state must also vote in line with one another. If a state has 10 votes and the election is 51% Party A and 49% Party B, all 10 electors must vote for Party A even though it’s almost a clean split down the middle for the popular vote.
This results in cases where even if a majority of voters nationally prefer Party B, Party A’s candidate could still win because they won more electors.
Accepting the system is unfair but being unable/unwilling to change it, the two prevailing parties try to game the system any way they can to swing things in their favor. They identify a handful of states where leads are very narrow and focus all their attention there. These are swing states.
Why do people hate third parties/why do they never win?
For the reasons illustrated above, a third-party can never win any significant amount of power under the current system.
When a race is even remotely close, small factors like people who choose to vote third-party instead of supporting one of the other two parties can turn the tide in a swing state, and thereby turn the tide nationally.
There is a trend of third parties getting financial/promotional support from political groups that are actually opposed to their policies, but are using the third party to attract votes away from their main competition for a given seat. This is called the spoiler effect.
This outlines how, under the current political structure of the US, there can never be a successful third party in government outside of local grassroots elections, and why there is so much hostility towards third parties. Third parties aren’t there to win, they are propped up by larger political interests who use them to take votes from their competition.
This is why you may often see “A vote for a third-party (e.g. Jill Stein) is a vote for Trump” during this election, because the Green Party is being primarily supported by right-wing interest groups this election despite being one of the more “leftist” options on paper.
They probably should have thought longer about the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 before burning their bridge with Larian.
It wasn’t their IP that made it succeed, it was the quality of the developer. D&D as a brand is worthless if they just sell it to the highest bidder and don’t give a damn about quality.
There’s a certain something to giving people cash versus a gift card.
For one, cash today is almost an inconvenience, a lot of places don’t accept cash.
The other element to it is that gift cards need to be used for specific things, while cash is often seen as something to just toss in a bank account and use for necessities or forget about. If the goal of the gift-giver is for the recipient to treat themselves to something, a gift card helps set some limits. Or if the goal is to get something related to someone’s hobby but you don’t know enough about what to get them, the gift card is an option.
I don’t hate getting cash as a gift, but I am going to be honest that it is not going to get spent on anything nice. It’s going to rent and groceries and whatever is left gets tossed into savings.
I’m not much of a gift card giver, but there have been a few times where I gave Steam gift cards as a gift for friends who are into games but I don’t know exactly what they want.
Same story we saw in 2016, Trump has no policy other than destroying American institutions and the status quo, so people get this sort of collapse fetish and pick him for that reason alone.
And that’s the argument that would have to be decided in court. But with the conservative bias in judicial outcomes and the “guilty beyond reasonable doubt” prerequisite for determining felony status, I am not holding out much hope that anyone will actually see jail time for this. I don’t even know if this would get to the point where there’d be a trial, to be honest.
People get unsolicited mail all the time, and as long as the sender paid their postage, the government typically doesn’t give a shit.
It definitely will. Too many games are no longer 100% offline or small enough to load it all to RAM. Even for games that can be taken offline to play, it would mean the feature would only be able to work in “offline mode” or the developers would need to find some way to align it with the design of their other systems.
Or more likely, as with other features Sony uses as selling points like their recently discontinued “Resume Activity” cards, it remains optional and no developers opt to implement it because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.