Embracer is also splitting into three separate companies to shed the tainted Embracer name, all still owned and run by Wingefors of course.

Asmodee Group (for board games) and Coffee Stain Publishing (for indie games) are the only two with official names last I heard. The unnamed third is the big one and Embracer’s direct successor, but I guess they’re delaying naming it to minimize bad press associated with the new name.

Embracer bet it all on a multi-billion dollar deal with a Saudi investment company that fell apart at the last minute due to Embracer adding more and more demands. This deal failing also caused their stock price to tumble. They’ve been cutting everything, everywhere ever since to get out of debt.

I wish they’d do so by selling their studios whole instead of chopping them apart and leaving them hollow shells of themselves. I can only think of three major sales as opposed to the dozens of studio closures and nearly a hundred projects they’ve canceled.

They also regularly upload machinima shorts to their YouTube channel. It’s like the internet circa 2010 decided to make a games company.

Or just excitement at getting “exclusive” early access as a small streamer. If you don’t know there are thousands of others, it’d feel like an opportunity to make it big.

Not just a black guy, but one of the most famous and popular characters in portrayals of the time period, in a franchise that shoehorns in every historical figure even remotely related to each game’s setting. But of course this time it’s suddenly too much.

Or the Oblivion cell phone port!

(Please don’t. It was awful.)

I loved Morrowind’s vague directions, they felt so authentic - like visiting a small town and getting directions from a local. Even a basic fetch quest felt like a journey since you had to check your journal and follow what the questgiver said or you’d get hopelessly lost.

Navigating by landmarks needs to be in more games. There have been a bunch of games since that let you turn off quest markers and item glows, but without any instructions all that leads to is the player wandering randomly until they stumble upon their destination.

i remember the massive interest in VR from tech enthusiasts back during the early Oculus days. Meta’s actions after purchasing them destroyed so much goodwill with the developers they needed to make VR a success that they probably set VR back as much as (if not more than) their increased funding pushed it forward.

I don’t think it’s gamers driving those hardware sales - GPU supply has been strained for over a decade due to their non-gaming uses. The introduction of cryptocurrency lead to all the high-end cards being snatched up by mining operations and scalpers, then right as crypto finally started dying down, the AI boom hit.

Anecdotally I know a ton of gamers going with low- and mid-tier GPUs like the 3060/4060 because crypto/AI speculators and scalpers have driven up the prices of the high-end cards beyond the budgets of normal people (and that’s when there are even any cards in stock).

doctor pyrotechnician

Kernel-level anti-cheat?

*reads article *

Kernel-level anti-cheat.

So not a real compatibility issue, just fixing an artificial one they created.

I wish I could parse news coming out of China and tell which parts are jingoistic propaganda and which are actual news. They’ve leaned heavily on the narrative of Taiwan being a part of China and any invasion being necessary to bring them back into the fold, which is… honestly kind of terrifying. Invading for nationalistic reasons means it could happen even if it makes no sense and harms both parties more than either gains. See Ukraine for how that could shake out, except Taiwan is better defended and their allies have even more reasons to support them.

As for the chip side of things, it’s an open secret that Taiwan has their fabrication plants rigged to blow so the mainland can’t get their hands on them. A modern fab requires several years, multiple billions of dollars, and some extremely niche, cutting edge technologies and construction processes to build, and any damage renders them useless. There’s no credible way China obtains the fabs intact short of a coup or immediate surrender, or infiltration and sabotage on a level that they’d be making spy movies about it for decades to come.

Invading would cripple global chip production (TSMC produces roughly half the global supply, and more importantly the vast majority of high-end, nanometer-scale chips used by computers), crater Taiwan’s economy (along with everyone else’s, as microchips are the lifeblood of the Information Age), alienate the world (possibly leading to a major conflict), and accomplish nothing beyond a feather in the CCCP’s hat.

China has been building their own fabrication plants but they are still decades behind in the precision race, and I doubt they can meet even their own needs yet. Even if they press-ganged Taiwanese experts to restart their industry it’d take decades to bear fruit, if ever. Invading Taiwan would harm then just as much as it would the rest of the world.

And the worst part is an invasion seems to be a credible prediction.

Starfield was like a child’s half-inflated balloon: let go with high hopes only to immediately disappoint, then swiftly forgotten once it drifted out of sight. Bethesda wanted to reach the stars, yet only managed to drop trash in someone’s garden.

Chinese authorities [accused] the DPP of selling out to the West in exchange for support for independence.

And yet my first thought was that this was a move by the US to obtain Taiwan’s best-in-world fabrication technology in case China goes through with an invasion in the next few years. So really China should be happy about this!

And we talk to Americans on the internet, we know that Americans don’t respect their allies. The soldiers of allied countries that sacrificed everything in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn’t even register with most Americans. There is too little sense of honour in the American population. Americans only care about money now, and that’s not a motivation that can be trusted by anyone.

I agree that how the US treated its allies is abominable (our abandonment of local guides and translators, who were promised a place in America for risking the lives of themselves and their families, to be murdered by the Taliban/ISIS should be prosecuted as a crime - not to mention the minorities left to die to appease larger powers, such as the Kurds, Armenians, and now Ukrainians). However, most Americans don’t know about any of this.

Most Americans are living in a bubble that hides or vastly distorts anything outside of it. Our media is hyper-focused on a narrow band of issues that gets guaranteed views (mostly culture wars that said media invented or spread in the first place) and only pays lip service to anything outside of that. For many, “news” means pithy one-liners and relentless attacks on the other side. They’re told some minor issue is the single most important thing right now and are so whipped up they don’t look outside to see the world is burning. The right-wing media is an endless parade of hate, while the left complains about said right while offering no solutions. Neutral media is a joke, and foreign news has no foothold outside individual posts being shared if they agree with a person’s existing position. Major news gets cycled out after mere days and is quickly buried by the next meaningless story. It’s a constant cavalcade of worthless noise that obscures any actual reporting.

If America could somehow shrug off the 24-jour news hype cycle and see what’s actually happening in the world, I think you’d find there’s a great deal of empathy in the populace - it’d be hard to stir up an audience if they didn’t care about something. Sadly, I can’t see such a thing ever happening - the biggest shakeup in news this decade was Fox being called “woke” and what was once tabloid trash becoming accepted sources amongst the right, even getting dedicated reporting positions in the government while traditional media was kicked out. So if anything it’s only going to get worse, with the addiction to drama and outrage leading half the country even further into isolation and delusion.

Or decades of behavior before that. Fun fact, he was denied a permit to open a casino in Australia due to his clear ties to Russian organized crime* - in 1987.

* For those unfamiliar, Russian organized crime is deeply entrenched with the actual Russian government - hence the term “Mafia State”.

I remember stories from Trump’s first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he’d calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.

The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.

None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what’s going on behind closed doors. The “checks and balances” every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.

I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don’t seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.

And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most would should consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.

Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.

Existing contracts, a lack of infrastructure, and the cost of shipping and insurance would be my guess. Or simply just the economies of scale making it impossible for anyone other than a major retailer to do it.

Retailers can afford to lose a card or two to damage out of each large order (and usually make it back through upselling warranties that customers rarely use); the many individual packages with direct selling would make it far more likely some of them would end up damaged during shipping at AMD’s expense, and would be more expensive to ship than large bulk orders to boot. It’s far more economical to bulk ship to a distributor and let them do all the work.

Besides, would you trust GPU vendors with your deliveries? The “bad drivers” jokes write themselves!

I’d also give GameStop as an example. Even years after digital media took over, they still had significant influence over publishers, up to dictating advertising and release schedules. Partly due to contracts preventing publishers from pulling away, but largely because a lot of people only buy in stores - most significantly, gift-givers and others who don’t know anything about what they’re buying and need an employee to guide them. Holidays alone kept GameStop in the black for years after Steam/Live/PSN dominated the marketplace.

With graphics cards, I’d be willing to bet most people buying them know very little about their choices and need someone to guide them. Enthusiasts are the minority.

This seems pretty normal to me. Isn’t needing to remove copyrighted files when asked by the holder how it already worked?

It’s better than content hosts being held liable by default. Public file sharing would be a non-starter without a safe harbor provision (where the host is only liable if they don’t remove items they’re made aware of).

It sounds like they didn’t, but apparently Microsoft forgot to put together a contract for further work they were doing for the Master Chief Collection, so they were able to hold the MCC port of Halo Anniversary hostage contingent on Microsoft removing the clauses that had blocked royalties in their original contract. So they did get royalties for that port that amounted to tens of millions of dollars, but nothing for their original work.