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They also do that because they want to cling to the idea that “actual” or “regulated” capitalism works fine for everyone.
They also do that because they want to cling to the idea that “actual” or “regulated” capitalism works fine for everyone.
Isn’t she the granddaughter of a Nazi?
I didn’t know anything about Canada actively importing so many fascists. Thanks for sharing this!
50 dollars were console games. On PC you’d often find the same game at 30 dollars (disk) or 20 dollars (steam) on release. The difference was due to console makers taking a standard fee cut from every sale.
The first AAA games back then to be released at 40 and 50 dollars on PC were COD MW1 and BF3, which set the trend for all other games since then. This was pure profit for the publishers, since there was no cut for console makers on PC. And before you say it, no, the Steam cut back then wasn’t even comparable (much less since it was a % cut and not a standard fee). In fact Steam hiked their cut because of the price hike triggered by EA and Activision, which is what then made EA pull their games off Steam and create Origin.
The budget is also a marketing ploy. The average person hears about a game costing hundreds of millions to make and they think “well then, it MUST be good”. It’s more or a pissing contest among publishers. Most of that budget does indeed go to marketing and executive wages/bonuses.
And from the publisher’s perspectives, that’s really a good investment of the budget, because it doesn’t just drive up sales. It also cultivates customer loyalty and fanboyism (e.g. “we are spending all that money because we believe in the game, and we want to give our loyal fans the best experience possible” is a very common line in pre-release interviews).
For example, there’s a false equivalency among gamers, propagated by this kind of propaganda: “I have to pay the high prices and engage in microtransactions/DLC, because that supports the game developers and their high budgets”. In reality, the people who actually make the game see very little of that money. Their wages, in most instances, are shit and do not reflect the hours they put in. However, gamers rarely want to understand that, and instead extend the publisher pissing contest among themselves (“the game I’m playing now spent more money than the game you are playing, therefore it’s the superior product”).
Spencer’s analysis is just an overview of the current symptom.
This is the real disease:
because it sees a new platform it can scale to feed the financial growth demanded by investors.
Investors/shareholders demand infinite growth, but there’s finite space to grow (millions of games, few customers). This is why, in the past 2 decades we’ve been seeing the scummiest of practices being employed again and again, as well as a 300% hike in base prices. Capitalism has eaten gaming.
But we’ve been observing this trend in AAA and AA publishers/developers mostly. Indie gaming is alive and well and evolving towards being better and better. Why? Because indie developers are not usually beholden to investors.
Once you hear a gaming company you used to like has gone public, say your condolences and then run away.
US trying hard to not repeat the Killdozer
You can’t because the engine is bad, and they need a lot of loading screens to connect the small-sized playable areas. Other Bethesda titles pull the same trick, but you don’t realize it, because there’s no loading screen. Instead it’s doors that handle that (which is quick because rooms are small) and pre-loading of neighbouring grids when you are outdoors (which is why sometimes you’ll see creatures popping out of thin air, or walking out from behind walls/trees/rocks to hide the popping.
Bethesda always advertises their “new engine”, but really it’s exactly the same engine they’ve been using since Morrowind, with minor logic improvements and updates to the graphical assets. It’s to the point where a lot of bugs have ancestry trees.
Maybe not at the personal user-end, but most corporations and other organizations are completely reliant on MS365 and/or Windows. Especially, in the education and finance sectors, Microsoft has taken over. COVID lockdowns made things worse as everybody switched to using Teams for corporate communication.
Edit: it might seem really silly that corporations went that heavy into Teams or Office, when there’s free alternatives like Discord and LibreOffice respectively, that have the exact same functionalities and are arguably more reliable. The reason is MS products offer a lot of tools to surveil employees
I’m guessing your company’s server (or whatever other form of central hub you are using) has Edge as the default browser. Alternatively, it could be some admin default setting your IT forgot to switch off for your accounts.
Show me the numbers. Curious how population growth rate in both USSR and China rises unprecendently, after these two came to power.
That’s a pretty vague definition you came up for to dismiss people.
Oh yes, wanting to raise people out of poverty is totally what fascists want.
You don’t know what you are talking about. You are just repeating something someone in authority once told you to believe. Ironic.
Everyone
China
The USA
The map doesn’t show it, but I think it was Israel.
Or you can use an ad-blocker. Also youtube is profitable just fine. If it wasn’t Google would have shut it down a long time ago.
And you appear to be an idiot. Downvote, block and move on.
Do you guys even read your own links? From your article:
In the first half of the year, wind and solar farms produced more electricity (560 billion kWh) combined than the country’s hydroelectric dams (450 billion kWh) for the first time.
China’s energy transition is real and is proceeding rapidly.
But coal-fired generation and production is still likely to increase for at least the next several years because of the country’s inherited reliance on coal-fired units and the need to meet rapid load growth.
And nowhere in there does it say that they are mining/importing/using record levels of coal. It’s saying they haven’t shut down coal power as much as they would like because of a protracted drought. I am assuming you are not an idiot and understand that droughts are not controlled by the government.
Your article goes out of its way to point out that the high coal usage is NOT a result of Chinese state policy (unlike Europeans, such as Germany recently, and the US, which use fossil fuels over renewable resources as a matter of policy).
We are literally talking about the exact same people who kicked Jeremy Corbin out, support Israel and Ukraine, and in these elections said that they’ll basically change nothing.