And 54 cents a month is more than the ad revenue generated by a non-premium user running adblock, hence Google would prefer it.

It’s certainly the option Google would prefer, which essentially always means it’s unethical.

My understanding is that Immortals of Aveum was the first output from a pivot of the genuinely terrific EA originals brand that gave us the likes of It Takes Two, A Way out, Unraveled, and lots more. It used to be a program that helped indie devs publish their games with EA only recouping their costs. Immortals of Aveum, ironically, had none of that magic. It was basically a Marvel story baked into a CoD campaign with magic instead of bullets.

Ideally, this will tell the suits that this pivot was a mistake and they’ll go back to “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. But they’re much more likely to overmonetize everything into oblivion while laying off massive chunks of their workforce.

Things got very dire in the '10s, but there’s been a bit of a course correction in recent years, at least with EA. It Takes Two and the Star Wars Jedi games were microtransaction free and wonderful experiences. Only It Takes Two could really be considered weird and quirky, but it was phenomenal. First party games are also typically exceptions to the modern AAA paradigm.

I’d gladly agree to pay more in exchange for a legally binding agreement that higher prices mean video games free of predatory monetization and reasonable pay and job security for the people making the games. But we both know that they have no intention of doing the right thing, no matter how high the box price. They’re already raking in record profits while laying off huge chunks of their workforce and giving the c-suite ever-increasing annual bonuses.

They’ve perpetuated the lie that microtransactions were a necessity and the $60 price was unsustainable for such a long time that people actually believe it. Now they want to increase the box price while keeping the predatory monetization, having their cake and eating it too.

This. I genuinely believe that in the near future indie games will be the sole torch-bearer for what I would call “traditional gaming”. Tighter, more focused experiences with no microtransactions or sanitized, inoffensive bloat. Games that are offline and don’t require any server handshake to function. And as the technology available to them advances, it will enable indie devs to be more and more ambitious with their vision.

It’s a compelling proposition, and not one Microsoft can compete with. At least not in the mobile/tablet space. Cloud gaming is all well and good, but native hardware will always be superior. Microsoft is crazy not to be considering a 1st party handheld like the steam deck. Or at least a gaming-centric UI for small screen devices. Even just integrating something like the Xbox UI would be an improvement.

Your point isn’t without merit, but your framing of it certainly is. The comparison made in the initial post is apples to oranges, but your experience is nothing more than anecdote and implying digital is universally cheaper is absurd. Allow me to counter your anecdote with one of my own:

Only a few months after release, I picked up an Xbox copy of Cyberpunk 2077, brand new from a big box retail chain and with a complimentary steelbook case, for $5.

Ah yes, let’s patch a harmless exploit in our purely single player game. Surely that’s far more important than any of the gameplay-degrading/breaking bugs the game carries, many of which have been carried forward from Skyrim. Can’t be giving the player the freedom to choose whether or not they want to accumulate credits faster than intended.

Even if your PC isn’t up to the task of running the game, it’s worth a shot to install it and see if you can do just enough to open the console, even if it’s at 2 fps. Unless you’re running a Celeron processor or something, in which case don’t bother.

That’s a valid point. Games released in the next 2-3 years should be probably be given a pass. My admittedly layman’s perspective is that any indie game deep enough into development that switching engines isn’t feasible most likely wouldn’t require another 4 years to ship.

Apple is no doubt considering moving more heavily into the gaming space. They’re looking for more revenue streams to keep feeding the corporate fantasy of perpetual growth, and there are only so many sweat shop laborers they can exploit. Wouldn’t surprise me at all for them to buy a publisher like EA and create some steam competitor (or just leverage the Mac app store).

How do people reenact famous battles? Recorded history, real or fabricated, can still be instructive. Take Ezekiel 9:

Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side 4 and said to him, “Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.” As I listened, he said to the others, “Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. Slaughter the old men, the young men and women, the mothers and children, but do not touch anyone who has the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the old men who were in front of the temple. Then he said to them, “Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go!” So they went out and began killing throughout the city.

An order given by God himself, to slaughter an entire city for the grievous sin of not worshipping him. Not even the children were to be spared. And yes, like most stories in the Bible, it’s likely almost entirely bullshit, but the human cruelty it conveys, and the moral justification it provides, is all too real. And if you’ve ever dealt with any real religious nutjobs, like the snake-handling, tongues-speaking Baptists I grew up around, then you know that the human brain, when fueled by delusion, is more than capable of conjuring a perceived supernatural experience.

Whether these perpetrators received the afterlife they expected, or whether such a thing exists (if it does, it certainly has nothing to do with any manmade religious doctrine), is largely irrelevant. The salient point is that they believe it exists, and that whatever they do is ultimately justified because, as the Bible so keenly reinforces, it’s okay to do objectively monstrous things (e.g. slaughtering an entire city’s worth of men, women and children) as long as you’re doing it in service of your god.

As long as people cling to these fairytales and fables as the inspired word of the creator of the universe, valuing their god more highly than other people, I don’t see how it can change. The solution would be to deconstruct and demystify the fairytales, revealing them for what they are, but when someone has bought into the delusion as hard as religious zealots tend to do, they’re much more likely to lash out than listen to reason.

Every accusation is an admission.

Thanks for the context! But why does an omnipotent and omniscient deity need me to slaughter an animal and smear it’s blood on my door to keep him from killing an innocent child? Since he’s omniscient and all, couldn’t he just, ya know, pass over my house anyway since he already knows my child isn’t one of the thousands of innocent children he intended to slaughter on this particular night?

It’s bad faith because you’re willfully ignoring the parameters set forth in the op. Obviously reading the Bible isn’t going to land you in jail (at least in the west). The act of reading anything isn’t going to get you incarcerated. The whole point of this post was “read and act”.

It may not be explicitly stated as a rule to follow, but on almost every page there are certainly actions that could be emulated. The OP didn’t specify rules or commandments; they said “open to a page and do what is written on that page”.

Slaughter an entire city of men, women, children and livestock? Yeah, that’s on the list, and was in fact an order given by sky daddy himself.

Fuck your daughters? That’s in there too.

Sacrifice your child to prove your loyalty? Bingo. Another sky daddy special.

If someone genuinely believes that them knocking on your door and talking to you could actually save your soul in the afterlife

The act of knocking on one’s door is annoying but ultimately innocuous, true, but that ideology is a slippery slope. How better to write yourself a blank check that absolves you off your heinously cruel actions than to delude yourself with the belief that you’re acting on some holy mandate from sky daddy? The Salem witch trials and the crusades jump to mind as stark examples of religion carried to its inevitable endgame.

Let me preface this by saying I would not be in favor of this acquisition, even though Nintendo are a bunch of overly litigious pricks that abuse the copyright system in the name of profits and treat their partners with open hostility and their eShop is a shovelware shitfest running on hardware that was already antique by the time it launched. But I really don’t see how this is anything more than Phil Spencer being a bit too transparent. Jim Ryan and Sony would jump at the chance to acquire Nintendo just as eagerly. Both PS and Xbox have been aggressively pursuing acquisitions and consolidation for years now, and Nintendo would be a crown jewel in any gaming publisher’s portfolio.