Probably because it’s been overtaken by exhausting far right narratives pushed by the companies themselves.

My Facebook page doesn’t even show me stuff from people I actually know any more. One of my cousins had a baby, it didn’t even show me that. Instead what it thinks I want to see are badly written posts about immigrants and “lefties” being to blame for everything, as if the UK government is left wing in any way at all…

Aren’t they using low accuracy FP units that aren’t suited for gaming anyway?

It really is just Ali Express with better delivery times these days.

I cancelled Prime and just buy a lot less shit I don’t need.

Bad take. They’ll give you an install disc and then make you enter an account locked code to access it anyway.

Demand digital rights instead, before a big player goes bust. Because at some point that will happen, and you’ll lose more than a handful of discs.

And then it gets wiped out by one of his own satellites smashing through it at 25,000mph.

They’re often cheaper on disc. Random sales here and there nearly always undercut the PSN price.

The real reason I’ve not bought many this gen was PS Plus. There’s a lot of games I’d have been vaguely interested in picking up on a decent sale, only they’ve never been on one, and then went on PS Plus so now aren’t worth buying at all.

Realistically the loss of physical discs means we need far more robust digital rights. The right to trade games to other accounts. The right to continue playing them if the store closes, loading games and licence keys from USB etc. That last one is going to need some thought to prevent abuse, but I think it’s essential if we’re going to live in a digital future. On PC that last one could be done by transferring licenses to another store maybe.

That’s why I subscribe to Jellyfin Plus Pro Premium Ad-Free.

The others had their chance. They chose greed.

I already am.

I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.

Well if you’re measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!

I feel sorry for them for the team that designed this. They had all this shit ready to go and then the RAM and SSD prices went through the roof, and tbh if you’re speccing a machine for mass production, those seem like the bits that were always gonna be cheaper by the time it comes to actually building it. Why would they ever go up? They never have before.

It was a nice idea, but the timing had completely fucked it. I don’t think it was ever going to compete with the PS5 on price, but right now it’s barely even competing with PC on price…

Even the Steam Deck isn’t competitive any more.

This is what shows in Steam when you search for it.

This is all you can buy.

Yeah, that’s what happens when you triple the price of everything.

2TB drives were about £100 a few years ago and now they’re close to £400. That’s a fuckin’ no from me dog.

Hey ChatGPT, can you make this “article” about 3-4 times longer so I can get paid?

Yeah, once one country has done it, the rest can join in with a flick of a switch.

The big sites are only too happy to hoover up and sell even more data about you.

It will be.

Zero knowledge proof is a thing, but we all know that’s not what they’re going for.

It does feel a little like going after Al Capone on tax evasion, but here we are.

There’s other games that do the sued for things, and they didn’t get sued. Tem Tem, etc. World of Warcraft’s pet system was very Pokemon-like.

Palworld isn’t even like Pokemon games. It’s Ark Survival Evolved with a Fortnite look and Pokemon instead of dinosaurs, as far as I can tell.

Blatantly swiping the art style and several Pokemon designs, and plastering it all over their marketing clearly pissed somebody at Nintendo off. They decided to sic the lawyers on them for something, even if it wasn’t what they were angry about.

Why did people use Internet Explorer before it?

It’s just “the internet button” for most people, the same as Windows is just “the computer” and Android is “the phone”.

The idea that you can change out fundamental software components of a modern computing device is alien to them.

Sure, nobody owns the artstyle. Nobody owns the idea of collecting animals. Not suggesting they do.

But you get enough things the same, lawyers will start sniffing around.

Tem Tem is pretty much Pokemon, far closer in gameplay than Palworld tbh, but they sensibly made it look different, didn’t try to ride the coattails of a lawyer-happy multi-billion dollar corporation, so avoided all this drama and nonsense. Digimon and Yo-kai Watch, again, very games. Different enough marketing that they didn’t get sued.

Sony don’t own metal dinosaurs or post apocalyptic scenarios (although they make so many of the latter they might as well), but when Tencent did this:

… just what do you expect their lawyers to do? Not get paid?

That yellow Gengar with a machine gun on all their advertising for starters.

It’s like when you go to Aldi and see their knock-off products. Although Tunnock’s don’t have a copyright on stripes, diamond shapes, red, gold, chocolate, wafers, or caramel, there’s no accident that their own brand can be mistaken for the real thing if you’re not paying attention.

And sure, it may well hold up in court, but it’s still going to be expensive finding that out.

Well they did pay for it.

“Oh no, this is terrible” cry the social media sites, while working out just how much your passport details and home address are worth to advertisers.

I’m not defending Nintendo, because they are a shithouse of a company, but I do feel Pocketpair could have avoided all these wasted legal fees by not just blatantly copying a bunch of very recognisable Pokemon, and at best recolouring them, or giving them another Pokemon’s ears.