The days of dial up were the wild west online. Waiting sometimes hours for your music and porn to download through Kazaa or Limewire. And inevitably getting something totally unrelated just to troll you.

Yeah it’s really more about monitoring usage and educating them. The tablet/phone is not a babysitter, but many parents seem to treat it like one.

I bet you 90% of those didn’t have any parental controls or even parents monitoring their usage after the fact.

Not by a long shot. There’s a reason Steam has an entire section of the library page that shows controller compatibility. Not to mention Big Picture mode and all the living room gamers. Keyboard sand mouse on a couch is terrible, no matter what hardware you have or how you try to convince yourself it’s not.

I personally use a controller 99% of the time. In both casual and competitive games.

I totally forgot about the Guardians game. I don’t think I ever finished it. Got lost in the hustle and bustle of life.

Gonna have to go back through that.

Oh Pearson definitely does thst as well. But not everyone lives near or has reliable transit to a testing facility. Online testing is essentially a requirement for those people.

Pearson is a testing company. They use all sorts of sketchy shit under the guise of anti-cheating. Much of that requires specific plug-ins and stuff that only work in Windows.

Even if you could get it working, but they’ll likely just say you were cheating, and take the $300+ you paid to take that required test.

It’s always been that way. The ones ones that ever claimed differently were those people. Because they couldn’t comprehend the thought that they didn’t earn and deserve what they were actually handed.

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Well you’re in luck, that should be coming soon.

I’d bet 99% of those deceased individuals are receiving benefits to an account that hasn’t been accessed since they died. Meaning the government just never processed the death notification to stop the benefits.

So not actually fraud, just beureaucratic incompetence inherent to these overly complex systems that would be solved by things like UBI or other real social safety nets instead of having a million qualifiers for access.

Oh no nothing so user-friendly. They’re gonna require them to be loaded via adb every time. And they’ll say that’s the only way they could do it for security or some shit.

$100 says they’re just going to make it require adb.

That was 2023, and one of very few things made not to specifically promote their hardware or as a cheap spinoff of existing IP. And define “actively maintaining”, because general bug fixes for decade old multi-player games and managing item marketplaces doesn’t require much manpower.

Going further back there’s Aperture Desk Job which was a tech demo for the Steam Deck in 2022. Then an extended cut version of Artifact originally meant as a sequel in 2021, which is a Dota 2 card game, but still remains unfinished, so effectively abandoned. Then Half Life: Alyx in 2020 which 90% of gamers can’t play because it’s VR only, and clearly made to further promote their VR hardware. Dota Warlords in 2020 which was originally a community game mode. The original Artifact in 2018, which had abandoned iOS and Android ports. The Lab in 2016 which was made to promote the launch of the HTC Vive. A zombie CS spinoff in 2014, Dota 2 in 2013, CS:Go in 2012, Portal 2 in 2011, and Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009.

If you remove the spinoff and niche stuff from the list you get game releases in 2023, 2020 (arguable since it’s VR only and thus inherently niche), 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009.

That’s a pretty big gap of not much for the last decade game-wise. Its been previously documented and published that Valve has issues getting games developed because of the flat organization structure. Articles like this.

Which is also one of the reasons so few new things get done, and why they (until now) haven’t been able to count to 3.

To get anything done you either have to be able to do it entirely by yourself which is unlikely, or get enough others organized and on board to make it happen.

The numbers just show that they are 8x as efficient. I only referenced Facebook because they’re the next closest company for comparison.

I never said they were worse than Facebook. That’s your assumption, reading what you want, not what’s actually being said.

Notably Epic charges less than 30% (something like 12% IIRC) to try to get more of that market. They even give away games. But their app is still inferior so it gets less use.

That’s because they make an insane amount of money by taking 30% of every sale on their platform, which nearly everyone uses because they’re a near monopoly and the alternatives are terrible. Around $3.5 Million per employee, nearly 5x the next highest company, which is Facebook at around $780,000 per employee.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-profit-per-head-from-steam-commissions-is-out-there-and-at-usd3-5-million-per-employee-it-makes-apple-and-facebook-look-like-a-lemonade-stand/

While the main cooling system is important, the thermal interface material they pick is also a big deal with systems intended to not be user serviced and with long lasting lifetimes like consoles… It honestly depends a lot on what TIM they decided to go with. Traditional thermal pastes are cheap but almost always dry out after just a few years causing much higher temps. Liquid metal is great, but more expensive and you must design it right, vertical orientation can cause leakage if not properly designed (some laptops end up having issues because of this). Phase change material is probably the optimal middle ground for ease of installation, and simplified design.

It will definitely burst, and might take out some fairly large companies with it. Potentially even one or two tech companies that have been around for decades depending on how large it gets before that burst. One or two companies will end up with the IP all of them are “building” and it will fizzle into the background of daily use just like the previous assistants like Alexa, Cortana, etc. have.