In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.

Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…

Fun fact: you can get a machine to do that, for about the price of 3 games. It will even last longer than the games.

Let me know when stuff is no longer locked behind a “Battle Pass”.

I got pretty much all the cosmetics in OW1 without paying for a single lootbox, and definitely refuse to pay for the privilege of FOMO.

what do people use discord for exactly?

Too much.

It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.

A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.

what is gone, exactly?

By adding support for alternate stores, the monopoly argument is gone: everyone can build their own store now. Meaning, everyone with a store can kick out anyone else, and tell them to just build their own.

comply with their own ToS

…which they can change at any moment, but don’t really need to; most ToS include clauses about refusing service without having to explain why. If you ever agree to a ToS, better make sure they’re even supposed to notify you if they ever decide to cut you off.

Read the case, the whole thing started because Google banned Epic from the Play store, and the only reason for it to become a case, was the monopolistic position. That’s gone now, they’re free to refuse service to whoever they want, whenever they want, for no reason at all… and if you don’t agree, go sue them, they’ll show you the precedent followed by the door.

I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can’t even do because I don’t run Google Play Services

Spoiler: you can use the LÖVE loader to run the “PC version” of Balatro on Android, since it’s all written in Lua.

They don’t ban the entire company from distributing any software.

They can do whatever, it’s their store.

Keep in mind that Epic Games v. Google has made Google add features to allow alternative app stores on Android… which automatically removes the monopoly argument and lets Google ban anyone they want from the Google Play store.

game without [being exhausted of the] screen

There is your answer: if screens exhaust you, do something without screens.

Games are supposed to give you a good time, reinvigorate you, and prepare for your “real life”. If you’re sick of screens, then pick up pottery, or squash, or hiking, or skydiving, or cooking, or… thousands of activities out there to have a good time without a screen.

having a huge backlog

That’s work. Just don’t. Do stuff that makes you feel better, not just tick a box in a backlog so you feel slightly less bad.

“Right of withdrawal” is quite easy: allow cancelling the transaction before the in-game content has actually been used.

It only takes a “has been used” flag, and maybe a log entry to prove when.

The newest take on cookies, is “accept all, or pay to read”. Quite shady, if you ask me.

Games reward you in game mechanics, same as most games at a casino.

What are you looking for?

RTX 50 just dropped in, they’re in the “beta early adopter” phase, AKA expensive for people with more dough than smarts. They’re the same TSMC 4N process as the RTX 40, and unless you have a PCIe 5.0 motherboard, the RTX 50 makes little sense. No need to go to used market, but I’d personally stick to the 4060/4070 for the time being, or the Radeon RX 7600/7700.

If you need some serious AI oomph… then go to the pro line, there are some nice RTX Ada for less than $10k, or rent some cloud H100s.

Yes… it will kind of depend on which layer of compatibility will a game require. Debian is Linux + GNU, which is what most people identify as “a Linux system”. Android uses Linux without GNU, but starting with Android 15 it will come with a VM (container?) system to run a GNU userland. Android can already run Linux distros via Termux, which can be set up to run a desktop, but having it by default will mean apps will be able to use it directly. I’ve just tested RetroArch on Android, with DosBox to run Windows 98… but that’s kind of a mindfuck of its own 😂. macOS is BSD, which shares the POSIX interface with Linux, but it does some things in a different way, however there is a GNU userland for BSD, so games using only that, can run on it already. WSL 2.0 is a full first-class VM with full Linux + GNU and a desktop interface that can coexist with Windows… since Windows 10/11 itself runs by default in a Hyper-V VM (the bootloader is Hyper-V).

Steam supports different multiplayer server modes: Steamworks Multiplayer

Some games already use P2P, or provide servers for the community to run, so only the private servers would need replicating. Even in that case, I’d argue that having “some” common API, would make it easier than chasing around everyone’s different implementations.

The nice thing about Steam, is that it’s “too big to clamp down”:

• People used to 🏴‍☠️ on the high seas, for many reasons.
• Steam came up as a “single point of sale”, at the same time as Netflix was doing the same for movies and series.
• Over time, companies tried to carve out chunks of the pie, restoring some of the original fragmentation…
• …but while Netflix has been torn to shreds of its former glory, Steam is still the main “single point” for games…
• …with a “single point” DRM

Steam’s DRM only exists because game updates keep coming out with constantly updating DRM versions. The moment Steam tried to act against its clients, and they decided to leave Steam, every Steam game copy at that moment, would get cracked all at once.

Maybe EA, MS, Nintendo, Sony, etc. don’t see that as a great thing… and that’s why they’ve been setting up their own stores… but I think it’s AWESOME! 😁

Well, this has been a blast from the past. Haven’t set up all the drivers, or an internet connection, but with the turbo button it’s been the fastest Win98 install I’ve ever done 😆

I’m impressed.

I’ve installed RetroArch on Android… but kind of feel this could be pushing it too far. I do still have some official keys for 95, 98SE, ME, XP… *sigh*

Because traditionally there were few Linux devices.

Android 15 is going to change that: it comes with a virtual machine API and a Linux Terminal running Debian for ChromeOS compatibility.

Soon, the most popular consumer OS in the world will be Linux:

• 3.3 billion: Android / Linux
• 2.2 billion: Apple iOS/macOS *NIX
• 1.6 billion: Windows
• 400 million: Windows 11 + WSL 2.0
• 250 million: gaming consoles
• “millions”: SteamOS Linux

Wine might still make sense to keep things standardized for some time, and as a compatibility layer for older games, but native Linux games will also work on the Linux solutions for Android, Apple, and Windows.

You’ve just invented time travel.

Oops, you’re right. Got carried away 😅

could you use the motion vectors from the game engine that are available before a frame even exists?

Hm… you mean like what video compression algorithms do? I don’t know of any game doing that, but it could be interesting to explore.