Especially when they go out of their way to provide direct APKs to Android users who do not use Play Store.

They already had to make the APK for the Play Store, providing it directly doesn’t require extra dev work.

That’s exactly why Google Search has gone so far downhill that it’s pushing people elsewhere. Searches are supposed to be fast at giving you the answer you’re looking for. But that is antithetical to advertising. It’s why Google has been scraping data for years to build their own internal responses to easy queries like simple calculations, definitions, basic wiki results, etc. since you never even need to leave their site. Can’t get faster than that, until those results can no longer be trusted.

Now those quick results can’t be trusted, thanks largely to their blind AI fixation. That trust can never be earned back, it is lost permanently. Many users will instead start looking for alternatives that don’t feed them bullshit responses and instead just give them the links to good info, like Google used to.

Of course. I’m not an idiot, clearly there are people affected.

But even if EVERY Helldivers 2 sale were affected, of the 1.85 BILLION estimated PC gamers in the world, we would be looking at around 0.6% people affected. It’s a tiny sliver, despite Helldivers having over 12 million sales (and that’s both PC and console).

The fact of the matter is this doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme, and most people have likely never even heard of the game still even with the controversy. The industry is unfathomably massive and one game is tiny, even one with 12+ million sales.

All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.

To be honest despite the publicity, most players don’t actually give a shit. Most players don’t read gaming news. And many players don’t care, either because they already have a PSN account, or they just don’t care about making another account to play the game.

I wouldn’t be surprised if over half the players had never even heard of the PSN controversy at all. The SteamDB player chart actually indicates when those shenanigans were compared to player numbers, and the daily player numbers had already been declining at that same pace for a month up to that point and continued at about the same rate after.

https://steamdb.info/app/553850/charts/#6m

But I can’t get an Orange Julius online.

Uber Eats, Door Dash, Grubhub, etc. all exist for this exact type of purchase.

Although you will pay for the convenience, as opposed to it being cheaper like most other products since the physical store is still involved.

deleted by creator

This, plus just how egregious was it?

No one is wanting to read these messages like they’re 50 Shades of Grey or anything like that. Well, there’s probably somebody but that’s not why most want to see it. Clearly it was not bad enough to get the police involved at the time, so we’re talking less than To Catch A Predator.

Ignoring the age difference for a second, because that part is not relevant to my specific point here… What some people consider flirty, others consider creepy. On a similar note, the same comment coming from a person someone considers attractive and from someone they find ugly often has a completely different reaction.

Doc says that it crossed a line, that’s not under debate by anyone at this point. He says there were no pictures, etc. exchanged, just messages and there was no intent to meet up or anything like that. On the other side one of the original tweets claimed they were sexting. Peoples definitions of sexting can vary dramatically as well.

So clearly the messages went over the line of being inappropriate, no argument there from anyone paying attention, but how far over that line was it? Were they truly explicit messages, or just inappropriate within the context of a 35 year old talking to a minor?

Ah see I stopped playing or even looking at it when the NYT bought it. At the time, that was the assumption since their other games are behind the paywall.

Instead, loading it up right now, it just looks like they have insanely large ads taking over 1/3 of the vertical space on lyn1440p monitor and forcing me to scroll to even see the full on screen keyboard.

Pretty shit UX there, as expected from every news site in the modern age.

How long until the New York Times buys it out to put behind their paywall like Wordle?

Their only concern is making stock price go up over a short timeframe

To be fair, that’s why the Board of Directors is hiring them. Everything else is secondary to line go up.

I mean, Lemmy.World doesn’t make enough money from their donations to cover much more than operating costs currently. Operating a site this size is not cheap. Would you prefer to see a ton of advertising and monetization like reddit?

It’s an officially recognized spec, so Apple will ignore it as long as they can. Until they can find a way to make money from it or spin marketing as if it’s some miraculous new invention of theirs, for something that should just be how it’s done.

Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.

Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.

A couple of primarily YouTube-based music artists I follow made OF pages before the adult influx and still use them. It works great since that’s what it was designed for.

Blood and Wine was exceptional. Much like Shadow of the Erdtree, there was enough content added that they could have almost justified releasing it as a full game. There are full games released today with less content than Blood and Wine brought to TW3.

So the only products that met the budget actually approved by management.

The British Museum should take notice. Even a random US tourist knows that historical items should be returned to the country they are taken/stolen from.

Players are complaining about the difficulty of a genre-defining game, in a genre known for its difficulty.

Just Git Gud.

It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/