The very first sentence of the article answers these exact two questions.

There’s a lot of stuff that isn’t really efficient to own individually. I need a power drill one day a year or less, it’s just gathering dust in my closet the rest of the time. I bet most of my neighborhood does the same.

I often dream of a local community center of sorts that lends out tools, and other such things, maybe for a small yearly fee. They could spend to get something robust, good quality that lasts for a long while. And the whole neighborhood could benefit. Sort of an expanded version of a library? I guess none of that is very profitable.

It’s really about quality imo. Not all 4k video is equal, and streamed video tends to be especially bad. It’s possible to download decent quality video files, but they are all from blue ray rips. If blue ray goes away, streaming sites might be the only remaining source for digital video files, and high quality digital video will essentially die.

I see the “Republican are always giving up moral superiority to gain an advantage so Democrats should do it too” argument. But at least get something worthwhile for selling your soul. Like, if you’re packing the supreme court you can at least protect abortion rights properly. If you nuke the senate filibuster you can pass some decent healthcare laws, or tax the rich maybe. Pardoning Hunter does nothing for anyone except the Biden family.

Joe is acknowledging that the justice system sucks and powers that be can decide to fuck you over with it any time, but instead of abusing his power to try and fix it, he’s just bailing out his loved ones and then riding off into the sunset, leaving the rest of us to get fucked over. That’s stupid.

I disagree. There is pushing back for political gain, and pushing back for personal gain. Pardoning hunter is certainly an example of Biden abandoning the moral high ground. However it does not advance the cause of the democratic party in any way and only serves Joe Biden and his family personally. This is not a step in the right direction, it gives up moral correctness only to make the political position of the Democrats worse.

How the mighty have fallen eh? Prince of Persia was a big franchise once upon a time. Like, the Sands of time trilogy was AAA tier.

The big reason I’m hearing in this thread is “Denuvo and I don’t trust Ubisoft.” However I doubt that is the reason the mainstream audience skipped over this game. Ubisoft franchises generally sell like hotcakes, and for the most part only nerds care about DRM (like the type of person who knows what a lemmy is).

It’s hard to say why it didn’t sell more units. Certainly it seems their internal expectations were sky high:

similarly to the biggest Metroidvania’s in the market, with millions of units sold in a relatively short space of time

The game is good, but metroidvania is not exactly an easy market; there’s some juggernauts in that genre, and they came out with a completely new and unproven concept. Apparently it sold a million units or so still, to me that’s not unimpressive.

On PC, it initially launched only on Epic afaik, which certainly doesn’t help. And by the time they brought it to steam it was much too late.

What I don’t really get is, why disband the team? They’ve proven they can produce quality stuff. Just hand them some other promising projects? I suppose that’s too much of a risk for a publisher like Ubisoft.

It’s addressed in the article. The brave CEO has stated they will continue to support manifest v2 as long as the needed code remains in Chromium. He made no promises what happens when it is removed, though (“I don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them”)

GOG is getting a nice little pr moment off of this but you’re getting basically the same license, no matter where you buy the game.

The root of evil in digital distribution is the DMCA anti circumvention clause: it is illegal to circumvent a DRM protection to gain access to some copyrighted work, even if you in actuality possess a license to the work. This law gives big platforms far too much power to control how you interact with their products.

It should be legal to modify a work to allow it to be played offline, to make copies for archival purposes, to fix the work to run on newer platforms, etc. As long as you have a license to the work you should be allowed to take steps to ensure your rightful access to it.

By the way, the root beyond roots of evil in digital distribution is the insane length of copyrights themselves. Why are patents 20 years, but copyright extends to 120+? The answer is pure greed.

Technically there is no Hi syllable in Japanese either. There is ひ, which phonologically is neither “Hi” nor “Fi”, but somewhere in between. The exact pronunciation varies depending on surrounding sounds, as well as the speaker’s regional accent.

So I wouldn’t say they really use WiHi. They write WiFi and they say “ワイハイ” which is the closest you can get to WiFi using Japanese sounds. It will kinda sound like WiHi to an English speaker.

Not a US citizen either but isn’t this a first amendment violation?

Microsoft and the European Commission agreed to an initial period of five years. That ended in 2014, and the measure was not extended mainly for two reasons:

1. Data showed the selection screen had had essentially no effect on browser market share whatsoever.
2. This period was basically the height of browser competition, with Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox all showing significant market share.

With competition in the browser market seemingly healthy, and the browser ballot not doing much to affect it, it was seen as pointless to keep requiring Microsoft to display it.

Since Skyrim? I’d say their quality has been slowly declining since Morrowind. It wasn’t that noticeable at first, since oblivion, fallout 3, and Skyrim were still quite good and fallout 4 was decent. But then fallout 76 was a mess at release, TES blades was shit, and starfield just seems lazy.