Lauren's been great about talking to fans on Twitter over the last year, and is obviously a fan of the lore like Cavill.
As she's said about the show before, the series is a love letter to fans of the books and games. It's made for them first. And that's hard to do well across mediums.

If they're going to make a Snow Crash series, they better be willing to listen to Reason.

Although it has a streaming component you can cache data offline for people with crappy internet.

jacobvandy wrote on Sep 19, 2019, 23:03:
FWIW, they've been saying to people for years that they already have a contingency plan to ensure you don't lose your games.

Though that only applies to products with Steam's DRM. Any third party DRM tacked on to it (of which there are tons of titles now) would leave users shit-out-of-luck.

As for the resales, they could implement this in a pretty simple way. When a user puts their previously used game up for sale, the game re-enters the sales pool. If a new user is buying the game they don't see it as a used game. They just see it as they normally do, and pay for it. The dev would get a cut, Valve would get a cut, and the seller would get a cut. At first glance it would look like that would generate less money for Valve and the devs, but if you make it easy for the sellers to get store credit but not easy to cash out, then you encourage that spending to stay inside the ecosystem.

I keep seeing the repeated the "rape accusations ruin men's life" theme repeated here over and over.
Horseshit.
It wasn't even until recently that it even had much of an impact. And even then if it happens to straight, white men the furor rarely lasts more than a couple of months, and legal ramifications are few - if any.
Coupled with the "women should only mention it in court" bullshit, which ignores the reality that any woman who has been sexually assaulted is treated worse than the perpetrators by both police and the court, it seems like some of the guys here are extremely obtuse or just really have a hate on for women because they won't say yes to them.

You know what has long term negative affects far longer than being accused of rape or abuse?

Being a victim of it.

Or is it you only want the left's POV supported.

It's about time Cutter came right out and said that supporting women is antithetical to his right wing beliefs.

I just found it strange that the victims able to share this to social media but not willing to call police

Do you have any idea how a sexual assault investigation goes?
Cop: Were you showing cleavage?
Cop: How short was your skirt?
Cop: Were you wearing panties?
Cop: What were you doing to deserve what you got?

The RCMP here has been getting national news for being abhorrent about the way they grill victims as suspects until the victims are traumatized even more.

I don't care if you dance naked in the streets during Hell Week - rape is NEVER the fault of the victim. But the police don't see it that way. And the more that victims see how the police treat it, the less likely they are to go to them.
And when they do, the Brock Turners of the world (3 months, if any time at all) are much more common than not.

Gaming addiction IS a real thing. Just like alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, sex addiction, etc.

Anything that provides you with a dopamine hit has the potential to be addictive, primarily for a small segment of the population.

The thing is that games changed how they make money, and that was by targeting the psychological processes of addiction. Vulnerable users become their 'whales'.

You don't hear about someone being unhealthily addicted to The Witcher, Dark Souls, or Mario Kart because they're not specifically designed to hook vulnerable users. They're made to be fun.

They did that with the first one, and buying in early paid off.
I got it in Early Access, played it for a few hours, then put it away knowing I'd definitely come back to it at a later date and I did.

The first one is stellar, and I don't expect any less of this one

Who says they aren't looking at those as disorders as well?
Anything that triggers dopamine response is addictive to people susceptible to it. For some people that's drugs. For others it's gambling. And so on, and so on.
The only reason the 'gaming disorder' is the focus of the ESA and gaming community is because it's gaming related.
That they break addiction down into so many sub-categories isn't really intended for the general public, but for the people who study addictions and WHY some people are more susceptible than others, and what it is about those sub-categories that makes them more addictive to certain people than other things.
Recognizing and studying what it is that makes these things addictive will also help weed out the bad actors who intentionally target addictive types to fund their games, sites, etc.
Like on the F2P games where they refer to that single digit group as "whales" and rely on their addiction to fund the game for everyone else.

Anything that gives you a dopamine hit can be addictive if you're wired for it.
Some devs/publishers of sites and games have based their whole business model around targeting these people.

and re: the comment about Elite in VR. It's effin gorgeous

Yeah, it was really cool in concept, but I didn't get it at the time for some bugginess. Might have been the netcode.

Could be really fun done right today

I consider this a must-have game just for the freakishly cool level design. It's worth it at full price, a great deal on sale, and you're missing out on a lot to pass it up for free.
It's a fun puzzle exploration game and, even if you don't care for the story, the visual effects are awesome.

They probably would have seen a lot higher numbers if more people knew about it in advance. I didn't see anything until it was happening and, while it's not a genre I'm interested in, I imagine that there were a ton of people who would have liked to try it out that never knew it was going on in the first place.

edit: wtf did it change the subject line to Endless Space 2 on my reply for. freaky.

This comment was edited on Nov 11, 2017, 14:56.

I started out pissed by the amount of paid DLC for the first game, and then I got it in a Humble Monthly. There's a crazy amount of work just in balancing the base game, so seeing all the extra factions and units on top of an already stellar experience, kind of shifted my thought.
It's definitely one game where you're getting a ton of stuff for your money.
And the races are optional. Though I think Chaos should have been a base faction in the first game, and we didn't need two Elf factions in the base set for the second game.

"How Zoe Quinn capitalized on Gamergate and lived to take in Patreon bux."

I think you mean "How Eron Gjoni turned a bunch of pillow-fucking whiners into his own personal break-up-tears harassment army."

Steam Link is absolutely awesome --- when it works.
They often fail for no discernible reason and using the reset options is hit or miss. But the streaming quality is fantastic, so on sale you can get your money's worth.

I wondered what the point of the obvious fake/troll games were. Stuff nobody in their right mind would even pay a dollar for. But then how do you get someone to buy the cards for something like that?

Blue: "Thon" is a neutral pronoun proposed in 1858

Sex is a very clear choice that causes no confusion. Physically, a person is either male or female.

Exactly when did you stop taking biology classes, because you just failed.

XX, XY, XXY, XXX, XXXX, XXXY, etc and so on. Our genes and chromosomes do all kinds of neat things you can't wrap your head around, apparently.

Also, people are confusing 'gender' and 'sex'. Two different things. When you see someone say "Gender is a social construct" they're closer to the facts than your inane babble above.

Gender is how society defines perceived masculine and feminine traits and assigns roles to them. Western "Christian" society tended to stick to whatever the bible dictated in order to define your worth as a person by your gender, but other cultures have had multiple gender identities.