Their publisher pulled the plug on the game they were making due to the accusations, so they probably can’t afford to stay open.

The assumption is that Valve made their procurement deals before the sudden price hikes, in which case the costs might actually be sane until the deal runs out and they need to renegotiate prices.

I wonder if it’d be out by now if they had picked a different engine. It can’t be easy finding devs experienced in fucking CryEngine, especially when you’re using a heavily-customized fork of an ancient version of that engine.

He’s also using the funds to live out his dream of being a movie producer, something he desires as much (if not more than) being a game developer, with the Squadron spinoff mainly being an excuse to hire big-name actors he likes to deliver his script.

Not that that’s a bad thing, but he hasn’t really changed much over his decades-long career, flaws included.

I loved when old games had a basic mechanic you could ignore for 99% of the game, but you’d softlock yourself if you forgot it exists.

Crouch-jumping was another offender.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The original PlayStation release is the only one that has the terrible (in a good way) translation and voiceover work. It also holds up perfectly - I only played it for the first time a few years ago, and it’s easily my favorite Metroidvania. Decades after it came out, it still remains the king of the genre that partly bears its name.

It’s closer to ripping off ARK, but removing all the misery-inducing wastes of time so it’s actually fun to play casually. The Pokémon stuff is there, but 90% of everything else is ARK with the serial numbers filed off.

This kind of game becoming successful would have been impossible before Steam. In the old days the brick-and-mortar stores would refuse to stock any game that was even remotely controversial in content or age rating. Steam has been hands-off regarding what they allow outside of things that are illegal (or, recently, that their payment processors disapprove of - if you want to talk about influential monopolies that shouldn’t exist…).

San Andreas and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion were even pulled off of store shelves temporarily due to their age ratings being adjusted. Places like Walmart are a hundred times worse gatekeepers than Valve has proven to be.

“That’s not flying, that’s falling with style!”

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Gargamel would be patient zero of The Last of Us: Blue Edition.

Didn’t he want to eat them or something? That sounds like a one-way ticket to a body horror ending…

Unless their goal is to catch common mistakes to improve their code analysis and quick fixes, in which case this plan is secretly brilliant.

I was having terrible performance problems in Windows a while back, and it turned out it had marked every drive as removable and the write cache was filling up due to an extremely slow external HDD, causing even the internal SSDs to grind to a halt until the buffer was flushed whenever a large amounts of writes were made to the HDD. Which, since the external drive was used for backups and large Steam games, was almost every other day.

If this happens often, you can disable write caching for that drive. It’ll feel slightly slower (since it’s actually operating at the speed of the hardware instead of caching operations in RAM and gradually writing them to disk in the background), but you’ll be able to remove the drive almost instantly.

Especially since they started with drones unlocked!

They’ll use AI to do all the work while still reaping the benefits for themselves. Just like algorithmic trading didn’t kill off stock market experts, it just made those at the top even richer.

On the other hand, the Public Investment Fund is focused on long-term profitability to reduce Saudi Arabia’s economic dependence on fossil fuels, so there’s a chance EA might improve.

Though their investment isn’t a great thing for other reasons, of course.

Destiny 2 must be absolutely amazing for people to still play it. It seems like every few months there’s another change that completely ruins the game for a huge chunk of the playerbase. Its user review score looks like a seismograph reading.