Do you think you end up with a more realistic development timeline by remaking things you’ve already made? Your comment can end up downvoted for calling one of the most common industry practices, for very practical reasons, “cutting corners”.

tl;dw A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan. They lie about their terms and their PC specs. They advertise no contracts but absolutely have contracts, and the terms are awful.

Individually spreading the word is also how you eventually reach someone with a large platform to signal boost it.

Do asset flips even happen anymore? I feel like they were a problem that Stephanie Sterling brought to light a decade ago when Steam opened its floodgates to anyone who wanted to sell a game, but it seems to me as though standard market forces made them nonviable in just a few years’ time.

The solution was to not reinvent the wheel. Any smart developer reuses assets.

Yeah, the sequel was much better for those reasons. You definitely can’t spoil it in a sentence like you can for the first game.

I can confirm that when you know “the thing” about KOTOR ahead of time, it ruins a lot of the magic.

Let me spoil it for you: Sony’s is a non factor. Their games play on PC, and there’s nothing they can offer over an open platform like a handheld PC.

Awesome! That first one can be a lot of combat, but it is good combat, and Pillars 2 is, in my opinion, just a better game in every way that the first game feels lacking.

It didn’t even require a boycott for me. I think plenty of people like the repetitive stuff, so they play it all without thinking about the microtransactions. I was never once tempted to pay for them, so my feelings about the game represent what the game is like without paying for them, and it was a poor experience. So rather than a boycott, it’s just not buying games that I don’t like.

Correct. They make games that are dozens of hours long and filled with repetitive content, and if you skip the content you don’t want to do, you tend to be under leveled for the stuff you do want to do, and they’ll sell you boosters to hit that level instead.

They sell level boosters that you could otherwise circumvent with Cheat Engine.

You charge the highest price you can for the people who don’t want to wait, then drop the price once you’ve run out of those customers. The temporary price of a sale creates a sense of urgency that it won’t be this cheap again for a while, and positive word of mouth from the sale customers drives more sales for a little while once it returns to full price.

Starfield wasn’t worth $70 to me, but I bought it on sale for $45 a few months later.

That second part is exactly what I just said. Is it caring for the poor to lie to them about economic realities, or to raise the cost on everyday items via tariffs when money is already tight? Again, I’m no expert, but I’d rather vote for promised solutions that I understand to actually work rather than the ones that sound good and don’t work.

Anyone promising to return people to previously prosperous economic conditions will be popular, even if people don’t know that the promise can’t possibly be delivered. Coal isn’t coming back either, and there’s no “clean” version of it, but if all you’ve done in your life is coal, you’ll vote for the guy who says he’s bringing coal back.

We don’t have infrastructure to produce a lot of the components in the things we buy, and even if we did, it would inherently cost a lot more to produce than in the countries that are about to have tariffs placed on them. That the US ever was a manufacturing powerhouse was, in my understanding, a very “place and time” sort of deal after World War II. Not only were all of our competitors recovering from being bombed, but we also advanced to a services based economy very quickly, raising the standard of living beyond a point that manufacturing jobs can typically afford to support. I’m no economist though; I just watch one on YouTube, and “the middle income trap” is a frequent topic.

All I can see is a controller who looks really surprised by whatever it sees in the lower right corner of the screen.

Seriously though, my gut reaction is that this looks worse than the old Steam controller for track pads. I hope it’s more comfortable than the Steam Deck.

They are doing that.

Skullgirls is the best game you can play on any machine, and it will run on that laptop. But if you’re mostly interested in RPGs, check out the Pillars of Eternity games, especially the second one. Wasteland 2 will likely run on that thing just fine.

It also adds on to the story mode that’s the draw for a lot of players, but yes, at $50, that’s a hard sell. I’m paying $30 for a season of characters of Street Fighter 6 or Guilty Gear Strive, but I agree far more with the system mechanics of those games and spend more time with them online.