I mean you can and they probably will. Unless something is easy enough to make yourself in your garage there will always be a free market to expand into and then extinguish.

Using browser exploits to steal commissions from affiliate links without even the user knowing. Let’s say you follow an affiliate link to a product and you go to checkout. When Honey pops up and tells you either that it found you a discount (or even if it pops up to tell you it didn’t find you anything) it secretly opens a new tab to the page which replaces the cookie in the browser that contains the code that identifies who to give the commission to. Instead of the person who gave you the link getting their commission, Honey gets it instead.

Then if you used PayPal checkout, they would also “find” you discounts but swap them out with lower ones and pocket the difference. For example you buy something for $10 and they find a 30% off coupon, but tell you it’s a 10% off coupon. You go to checkout with PayPal and they charge your card $9 but only pay the merchant $7 and pocket the other $2.

I’m forced to see the game’s lack of a manipulative business model due to the objective absence of any and all manipulation in the business model. I cannot choose to see something that isn’t there, in much the same way that I can’t choose to see the earth as being flat.

No characters’ story modes are locked in Skullgirls.

Both Double and Valentines story modes are locked until you complete the story mode of every single other non-dlc character.

Why do you think the costumes in Magicka didn’t have a battle pass tied to them but Helldivers II does?

Because progression and rewards are an integral part of video games and their appeal and have been since the early days of gaming. You unlock weapons, upgrades, and cosmetics in the base game of Helldivers 2 because it’s fun. Why on earth would they remove the progression systems for new content? Paid instant-unlock content for games is cheap and devalues the content itself. The gratification of using a cool skin you worked to unlock is intrinsically tied to the appeal of video games.

What you’re telling me here is that you would actually balk at one of the Skyrim DLCs like Dragonborn because in order to access the content inside of it you have to actually play the game that you like enough to pay for more content for, but when they released the “horse armor” DLC you looked at that and just said “Hell yeah”? If that is truly your opinion then so be it. But you need to understand that you are one of very few people who would hold it.

The person who put the game down earlier because they are bored of the game is not going to spend money on additional content that they aren’t interested in playing. And if they do, and have fun, then they aren’t being manipulated. They’re having fun with a product they purchased (just like all video games). Removing the FOMO part absolutely means it isn’t manipulative because that is quite literally the only thing that makes battle passes manipulative in the first place. For you to argue against this is to argue that all video games are manipulative because they were all created to get you to play them more than before you were before you bought them.

The game I’ve put the most time into, on Steam at least, is Skullgirls. It has no progression whatsoever.

Not true, there are a couple of characters you unlock story modes for after beating it with other characters. Guess you’re being manipulated into playing the game more, huh?

This argument of yours is completely devoid of any rational thought.

They have rewards tied to… playing the game. Just like every other video game ever made. That’s how video games work. The only way for there to be “an incentive to keep playing beyond when you want to” is by making the additional content limited in time to generate FOMO or worry that you’ll have wasted your money… which in this case is not happening at all. There is no FOMO because you can buy any of the war bonds whenever you want, and complete them whenever you want. You paid money for something you will keep forever. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That is literally the best possible approach to new content. By your reasoning, every video game ever made is manipulative because they made the game and put… content in it to get you to play the game more than before you bought the game.

“Buying the rewards directly to play in the game” on the other hand is the wrong approach. Why would you prefer to play the game less? If you don’t want to be playing the game why are you spending more money on it?

Only timed battle passes manipulate you into playing it more than you enjoy it for. The ones in Helldivers 2 never expire so if you were to get bored of the game you can just stop playing. Then come back to the game a year later and continue on where you left off.

You have to feed it an OpenAI key. You can deactivate it by not giving it the OpenAI key.

A post about a pre-built gaming computer? Im not sure how much more fitting to a general audience you can get. Given that the “general audience” for a community called “technology” is probably at least vaguely technical.

Then what would be the point of the general c/technology if we required every post to be in a more specific community?

Ah yeah that’s a good catch. It is a solid game and should have won.

I can’t think of a single city builder released this year that isn’t in EA.

I’m not sure that can be the case when it’s increasingly the case that buildings are built to be accessible by wheeled humans currently, often mandated by law.

Were there any city builders fully released in 2024? Is this a matter of an EA title being chosen because there are no non-EA titles?

This reads to me as a feel-good whitewashing piece so fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’

That would be more of a white conservative thing to say. And that’s only if they’re not complaining that the prisoners are avoiding hard labor.

TubeArchivist is kind of an all-in-one software for you to watch YouTube videos in so its own web interface and is pretty heavy. But PinchFlat is very lightweight and is actually designed to be used with your Plex server being the medium you watch your videos on. So I’d recommend starting with the latter, as it’s kinda built for your exact use case.

I’d vote for Pinchflat. Tube Archivist is good software but very heavy.

Yeah no, neither of those. I think they’ll continue watching YouTube videos without the ads

He’s not forced to go to YouTube.com, he wants to watch YouTube videos. He’s forced to watch ads on those videos.

No they’re just forcing him to watch ads