I might be wrong, but don’t they plan or already do put anticheat into single player games so people don’t cheat-in the various ingame currencies they have to buy XP boosts (where without them leveing is a crawl)?

There thou art… The Big Three. Thy faces, AAA Publishers. Thy actions barely worthy of the name. Didst truly believe thy ploy would succeed? Dist believe Jolly Roger’s would not notice? Publishers thou may be, yet thou hast proven thyselves fools, every one. The supplication of Ubisoft. The whimper of Activision. The death mewl of Electronic Arts…

“Punitive action”? Every nation has a right to control their borders. Maybe if Russia didn’t manufacture a crisis in a ceaseless destabilization effort there wouldn’t be a need for such actions. But, quite honestly, “if Russia didn’t” starts to become the “humanity now if Russia didn’t” meme.

It’s almost like that’s my point. They’re protesting that Finland reacts to hybrid warfare by Russia… by protesting in front of the Finnish parliament.

Of course they wouldn’t do that in Moscow to stop the reason for the closure because they’d be clobbered into the pavement.

It’s hard to distinguish the people and the government, when the people are protesting about what a democratic country did to protect it’s citizens against an autocratic warmongering state, it’s aggression and subversion stategies.

In other words, they should do a protest like that in Moscow, see what happens.

It’s not russophobia. Nobody sane is afraid of russia anymore. But hostile actions must meet reactions.

On one hand true, on the other, a lot of those sponsorships advertise dubious things at best. I love the channels that just shill their own merch, but being entirely fair, you need to be at a certain revenue threshold to afford making said merch.

The problem with those, 3rd party sponsorships is that they’re usually just either mobile games, F2P(P2W) MMOs, overpriced basic products or software advertised in the FUD way. Sorry, I don’t care for Raid Shadow Legends, War Thunder, Manscaped or NordVPN. Especially the last one and the ones like it grind my gears because the sponsorships for that kind of product are borderline misinformation.

All of them, in some way, can be considered somewhat predatory. I’d rather buy a silly hat or a plushie, thank you very much.

Initially it was only the UK opposing it. While I may put my tinfoil hat for this, I wonder if the EU Commission was paid off or just clueless. I read their supposed reasoning for this, and all it focuses on is “game streaming” because apparently that’s a thing that EU Commissions cares or knows anything about. Worked out real good with Stadia, didn’t it.

So what I suspect will happen, if the acquisition goes through is that microsoft gonna set up a shitty game streaming service nobody will want to use, eventually make everything exclusive to ms store and xbox and laugh at the clueless bastards that allow that to happen.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Classic microsoft. I do believe their first shot at what they are going to attempt now was Games For Windows Live, trying to centralize their position with PC and XBox when it comes to gaming.

Of course, that was a horribly executed mess and when it turned out nobody wanted to engage with that stuff, now it will most likely end up being “Microsoft Store with Microsoft account required” affair. For now they are going to play nice and show how fine they will play with Steam and Epic and how they will not make everything exclusive to MS Store and Xbox…

Until they buy out the major players because this time it seems they’ve decided to throw serious money at the problem. The fact that that for a good while the only country opposing Activisions acquisition by Microsoft was UK is a damn disgrace. It’s not about “just call of Duty”, quite frankly I did not play an Activision game in 6 years or so, but microsoft gaming market dominance won’t be good for anybody.

(Especially me playing everything on linux with proton)