Embracer bet it all on a multi-billion dollar deal with a Saudi investment company that fell apart at the last minute due to Embracer adding more and more demands. This deal failing also caused their stock price to tumble. They’ve been cutting everything, everywhere ever since to get out of debt.

I wish they’d do so by selling their studios whole instead of chopping them apart and leaving them hollow shells of themselves. I can only think of three major sales as opposed to the dozens of studio closures and nearly a hundred projects they’ve canceled.

They also regularly upload machinima shorts to their YouTube channel. It’s like the internet circa 2010 decided to make a games company.

When I was a kid my parents still called the remote control a “clicker” because of these.

Not just a black guy, but one of the most famous and popular characters in portrayals of the time period, in a franchise that shoehorns in every historical figure even remotely related to each game’s setting. But of course this time it’s suddenly too much.

Or the Oblivion cell phone port!

(Please don’t. It was awful.)

I loved Morrowind’s vague directions, they felt so authentic - like visiting a small town and getting directions from a local. Even a basic fetch quest felt like a journey since you had to check your journal and follow what the questgiver said or you’d get hopelessly lost.

Navigating by landmarks needs to be in more games. There have been a bunch of games since that let you turn off quest markers and item glows, but without any instructions all that leads to is the player wandering randomly until they stumble upon their destination.

i remember the massive interest in VR from tech enthusiasts back during the early Oculus days. Meta’s actions after purchasing them destroyed so much goodwill with the developers they needed to make VR a success that they probably set VR back as much as (if not more than) their increased funding pushed it forward.

I don’t think it’s gamers driving those hardware sales - GPU supply has been strained for over a decade due to their non-gaming uses. The introduction of cryptocurrency lead to all the high-end cards being snatched up by mining operations and scalpers, then right as crypto finally started dying down, the AI boom hit.

Anecdotally I know a ton of gamers going with low- and mid-tier GPUs like the 3060/4060 because crypto/AI speculators and scalpers have driven up the prices of the high-end cards beyond the budgets of normal people (and that’s when there are even any cards in stock).

It must have been surreal for Pratchett meeting Emma in person at the Snuff launch party. Since she voices the character herself, it must have been like meeting two separate friends at once - his writing correspondent and research partner, Emma, and his virtual guide/friend in Vilja.

That feels like a scene with the sort of bizarre, semi-irrational emotional undertones that Terry himself would often write about. I wish he was still around to ask how it felt.

Kernel-level anti-cheat?

*reads article *

Kernel-level anti-cheat.

So not a real compatibility issue, just fixing an artificial one they created.

I wish I could parse news coming out of China and tell which parts are jingoistic propaganda and which are actual news. They’ve leaned heavily on the narrative of Taiwan being a part of China and any invasion being necessary to bring them back into the fold, which is… honestly kind of terrifying. Invading for nationalistic reasons means it could happen even if it makes no sense and harms both parties more than either gains. See Ukraine for how that could shake out, except Taiwan is better defended and their allies have even more reasons to support them.

As for the chip side of things, it’s an open secret that Taiwan has their fabrication plants rigged to blow so the mainland can’t get their hands on them. A modern fab requires several years, multiple billions of dollars, and some extremely niche, cutting edge technologies and construction processes to build, and any damage renders them useless. There’s no credible way China obtains the fabs intact short of a coup or immediate surrender, or infiltration and sabotage on a level that they’d be making spy movies about it for decades to come.

Invading would cripple global chip production (TSMC produces roughly half the global supply, and more importantly the vast majority of high-end, nanometer-scale chips used by computers), crater Taiwan’s economy (along with everyone else’s, as microchips are the lifeblood of the Information Age), alienate the world (possibly leading to a major conflict), and accomplish nothing beyond a feather in the CCCP’s hat.

China has been building their own fabrication plants but they are still decades behind in the precision race, and I doubt they can meet even their own needs yet. Even if they press-ganged Taiwanese experts to restart their industry it’d take decades to bear fruit, if ever. Invading Taiwan would harm then just as much as it would the rest of the world.

And the worst part is an invasion seems to be a credible prediction.

Starfield was like a child’s half-inflated balloon: let go with high hopes only to immediately disappoint, then swiftly forgotten once it drifted out of sight. Bethesda wanted to reach the stars, yet only managed to drop trash in someone’s garden.

Chinese authorities [accused] the DPP of selling out to the West in exchange for support for independence.

And yet my first thought was that this was a move by the US to obtain Taiwan’s best-in-world fabrication technology in case China goes through with an invasion in the next few years. So really China should be happy about this!

Existing contracts, a lack of infrastructure, and the cost of shipping and insurance would be my guess. Or simply just the economies of scale making it impossible for anyone other than a major retailer to do it.

Retailers can afford to lose a card or two to damage out of each large order (and usually make it back through upselling warranties that customers rarely use); the many individual packages with direct selling would make it far more likely some of them would end up damaged during shipping at AMD’s expense, and would be more expensive to ship than large bulk orders to boot. It’s far more economical to bulk ship to a distributor and let them do all the work.

Besides, would you trust GPU vendors with your deliveries? The “bad drivers” jokes write themselves!

I’d also give GameStop as an example. Even years after digital media took over, they still had significant influence over publishers, up to dictating advertising and release schedules. Partly due to contracts preventing publishers from pulling away, but largely because a lot of people only buy in stores - most significantly, gift-givers and others who don’t know anything about what they’re buying and need an employee to guide them. Holidays alone kept GameStop in the black for years after Steam/Live/PSN dominated the marketplace.

With graphics cards, I’d be willing to bet most people buying them know very little about their choices and need someone to guide them. Enthusiasts are the minority.

Don’t forget the healthy markup! It’s not a proprietary Sony storage device if they don’t charge twice as much for a tenth the space.

GuavaScript?

Edit: of course that’s actually a thing.

I remember people arguing over 2 vs 3 spaces, back when terminals only displayed 80 characters and every character width saved was a huge deal. (Oh god, memories of all the single-character variable names have returned to haunt me)

I can’t go back, won’t go back. I am so glad the Bad Old Days are over. *returns to coding on my dual-widescreen monitor setup*

This seems pretty normal to me. Isn’t needing to remove copyrighted files when asked by the holder how it already worked?

It’s better than content hosts being held liable by default. Public file sharing would be a non-starter without a safe harbor provision (where the host is only liable if they don’t remove items they’re made aware of).

Out of a cannon, into the sun?

Flashpoint has pretty much every Flash game and animation ever made, no matter how niche, except for a few that the creators asked them to remove from the collection. I believe the full collection is over one and a half terabytes.