I don’t get it. Do payment processors want less money? Do they hate being entrenched and bringing in revenue just for existing? Do they want us to try and find alternatives to them?
this bullshit is surely coming from the recently intensifying family friendlinessification of the internet, but why the fuck do payment processors care? i have no idea. are they taking a cut of advertising revenue? do all ceos just want to appear as massive prudes? do they see children as an untapped market to exploit? or maybe they’re just fucking stupid? what is actually going on
Capitalism is creating a level of censorship that exceeded what the US government was ever able to do after the Warren court. Parts of this have been there for a long time. You can drop f-bombs on cable TV all you like; the FCC can’t do anything about it since it’s not over public airwaves. They generally don’t do that, because advertisers don’t like it. Capitalism set the rule, not the government.
YouTube has put this idea into overdrive. You can’t make a straightforward, monetized video about the Holocaust anymore, because the language you would have to use would violate YouTube’s written and unwritten rules. Meanwhile, actual fucking Nazis have had little issue using YouTube to spread their bullshit.
Credit card companies have had issues with porn sites in terms of fraud reporting. Not necessarily because of actual fraud–if the site you use is under CCbill, it’s fine–but because some guy’s spouse sees the card transactions, asks what this particular line is for, and he lies and says it’s probably fraud and he’ll call it in. Get more than a few of those, and the processor will always be flagged for review.
They do outright stop some of the more fringe porn. Bree Mills (of Adulttime) has said that they get limited by the credit card industry far more than the government. All the faux-incest videos go out of their way to mention in dialog that everyone is a step family and over 18. You won’t find scat on Kink.com, again because their payment processor won’t allow it.
That’s been the situation for a few decades, but it has gone beyond that in the last few years. They tried it on OnlyFans, and the company maneuvered things to show why that’s an incredibly bad idea, and then the card companies backed down. But they’re trying again elsewhere, and they’re starting to be successful. I severely doubt they had any significant fraud issues on Steam or itch.io, NSFW items or otherwise.
Ultimately, this stuff is a tiny slice of their revenue. If they want to shut it all down on a moral crusade, they will barely notice the hit to their numbers.
On a side note, I’d like the advocate that you should pay for porn if it’s within your means. You’ll often find better quality stuff at sites that properly run their sets with consent. If you like queer porn or unconventional body types, there are a lot of sites for that which just don’t show up on PornHub.
I think someone once told me its about charge backs. People will pay up for hours and hours of content (more for addicts) and then issue a chargeback, or otherwise say their card was stolen (how dare you insinuate I’m into that fetish! Type shit) and because there is no physical product to seize, the company is left with repeatedly eating investigation costs into fraudulent porn addicts.
E: I’m not judging anyone’s porn content, idgaf what you smack or flick to. Merely an observation of people not realizing how much they will charge their CC until statement time, and freak out and then chargeback, making the company susceptible to puritanical influence because “those damn porn users” keep costing the company money.
They make money hand over first for doing practically nothing… They’re perfectly happy with their current situation and the most important thing to them right now is not rocking the boat.
There’s more, but I suppose…back then shock was a tactic, the gaming industry wasn’t as clean cut and commercialized as it is now, and they were appealing to a certain demographic?!
Back in the early 1980s fresh off the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo was on the verge of releasing the Famicom in Japan, and needed a way to market the console in America.
There was just one rule. In America, video games were dead. A fad. Disco was dead, and so were video games. So it wasn’t a Famicom. It was a Nintendo Entertainment System.
In stores like Woolworths (think Walmart but not terrible) and Hills (think Target, but also a bit shady) they tried marketing the NES as an Entertainment system. It wasn’t a video game. It was an appliance. Like a VCR. It was the only way to get stores to agree to stock the damn thing. No store wanted the risk of a video game.
Well, after a year of selling, and research Nintendo found kids were the main target of their product.
So they shifted away from the electronics section and into the toy isle. There was just one problem. Toy stores in America were divided. Some isles carried toys for boys, and the other half of the isles carried the toys for girls.
A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.
What happens next is the key to the PS2 ads.
Nintendo chose to carry the NES in the boys section of the toy isles. Which had an IMMEDIATE influence over not only the marketing in America, but also the direction developers took their games.
There was a clear shift towards the games AND the marketing being geared towards boys 5-13.
Nintendo then DOMINATED the video game landscape. Seriously. If your mom today is roughly 80 years old, theres a pretty good chance she calls all video games “Nintendos” (regardless of brand), the same way she calls all tissues “kleenex”. Or if you’re from the south (especially Georgia) all soft drinks “coke”. Could be orange soda, it’s a coke. Just like it’s one of those Xbox 1080p Nintendos.
Well by the time of the PS2 days, that influence, even though Sony had nothing to do with it, had caked over. Video games were now very male centric, and the age range grew up with them.
In the late 80s, you were 5 years old playing super mario bros. In the mid 90s, you were 13 playing tomb raider and argueing with friends over the validity of a nude cheat code. And by 2001 you were 18 and horny, and…hey, look at these ads for the PS2. They’re edgy!
And that is my TedTalk on why raunchy dreamcast ads, and raunchy PS2 ads goes all the way back to the atari 2600 game crashing the whole industry worldwide 20 years earlier.
A bit of market research showed that interest in Nintendo shifted slightly more towards boys. 55%‐45%.
Need a source on this. The more appropriate action in those days with those numbers would’ve been to sell a blue version to boys and a pink version to girls.
I disagree about the batteries. Give me replaceable AA cells any day over a built-in Li-ion. Rechargeable AAs are readily available and quickly swappable if you keep hot spares. Much better option for long term serviceability.
I think the availability of AA batteries is higher, 18650 is much less standard than AA in most people’s homes. I would rather have options, so saying AA but having a swappable battery tray is how I would go, but I like kludgey stuff anyway.
That said, I just did a battery replacement for a lithium pouch on some TWS headphones and it was a fairly simple process. Making it a port rather than soldered wires would make it much easier and would make battery replacement a quick and routine task. Hopefully more companies will more towards ports for batteries and maybe even a standard port that is the same for a given voltage/amperage combination so swapping out can be done with confidence.
Microsoft did something like this with xbox controllers. There are additional contact points inside the battery chamber for a li-ion pack, so you could use a pair of AAs or their rechargeable pack that just fits into the same space.
Going to bat for xbox or Microsoft right now is a death sentence on the internet so by internet law I have to downvote you. Sorry, it’s just the way things go…
That said, I agree. Being able to buy a $30 plug and play pack with rechargeable battery packs or being able to buy rechargeable AAs or just normal AA batteries is the best of all the current first party options.
I am not really seeing it. I did finish it without a guide back then. It was the Windows 9x port, but I don’t think it changes much.
Really in my case a guide would not help for the hardest parts, which were mostly the crazy moves needed to push those floating things to break rocks and to swim against currents with boulders.
Yeah, that post tried maybe a little too hard to portray high score games as always losing. You win, if you get a better score than before or whatever score you’re happy with. Of course, this requires setting challenges for yourself on which to grow, so it could only ever have come from turbo-capitalist 'Merica …or something.
Yeah my hands started acting up when I was in my 30s. Now that I’m in my 40s they cramp and become useless when they’re any amounts of cold.
My wife likes to rock climb but she will only go to the gym if I go. I can handle the pain but my fingers will literally just stop opening and closing. I haven’t gotten the courage to talk to her about it yet.
I tried gloves for kayaking since my hands lock up during that but I didn’t feel a huge difference.
I probably just gotta see another doctor. The last doctor I talked to wanted me off of adderall before they’d prescribe me anything but then I’d lose my job.
Yeah I got the steam deck in the early spring this year and am still trying to get through Witcher 3 and fallout 4. I have a handful of games I got for PC back 15 years ago on steam that I still need to work on after that
I vote with my wallet. I don’t buy games that have scummy conditions or requirements. There are too many other choices out there to justify supporting companies who treat their customers poorly.
This is the answer. If you don't like live service don't buy live service games. If the majority have the same opinion there won't be profit in it.
Games publishers are businesses and they want to make money.
Now in reality I think they make more money from those that are buying microtransactions and so long as that makes them more money than selling a plain single player game, it's a no brainer they'll keep making the.
First, try force dismissing broken companions, you’ll need to get their refid first though (so maybe load an older save, or just search for the refid with the help command - ie. help mountbatten 4 npc to search for ‘mountbatten’ in refids that are classed as ‘npc’)
For reference, since I have it written on a post-it in front of me, Mountbatten is 082c1edc (08 may be different if londonworldspace.esm is in a different slot)
Console commands should not be a requirement to play a game that they claimed was in a releasable state. Also, some players are on a steam deck, where console commands are difficult to make use of on the go.
It’s a bit hard to describe. Overwatch 1 was a bit magical when it came out. It was the WoW of team FPS. Everyone (and their mother) played it. This made it this fascinating thing where your default way of hanging out with friends would be to be on voicechat and chat away while playing OW.
It’s unbalanced and ridiculous cadre of character loadouts also enabled just about everyone to play the game. Do they have amazing reflexes? Give them Genji or Hanzo. Do they have damn awesome aim? Hanzi, Widow, Cassidy (McCree at the time). Do they not have aim worth speaking of? Symmetra, Mercy, Bastion, Reinhardt, lots of options in fact. So you could always talk friends into buying it, and they’d enjoy it!
Now, of course, as such as game ages, players get better and better at exploiting the imbalances, so naturally there’s a bigger pressure on balancing.
But the crucial breaking point IMO came not with OW2, but a long time before that. When this need for more balancing arose, instead of embracing the ridiculous nature of many character loadouts, Blizzard worked against it. In their desire to become the biggest esport, they saw a need to make every character as skill-based as possible, to focus on individual player contributions and individual aim and reflexes. Lots and lots and lots and lots of balance changes slowly pushed the overall core of the game from first being about finding out who you as a player are, then picking a character fitting you, to having to mold yourself into “an FPS player”, because even Torbjörn, Symmetra, Bastion and Pharah need to aim quite a bit now.
And as this progressed, I could see my friends drifting away from the game. The game became effort to play. Not something you can have in the background while spending an evening chatting along on Discord, catching up. And Overwatch was at its core this social thing, so once some drifted off, so did more and more. And eventually, so did I.
Overwatch 2 was merely… how do I say… the end of this chrysalis stage of Overwatch’s life? What emerged from it was the final form of a more esports and twitch-aim-centric game. Gone were the double tanks leading to extremely slow kill times (which in turn meant players who lacked the reflexes to engage in twitch-gunning no longer had the time needed to react to anything), with it gone were the days of cohesive teams where everyone had a singular role, instead you needed to first and foremost be able to fend for and defend yourself, only then would you integrate with the team. Because otherwise you were long dead already.
But this was merely the result of finalizing the change that began all the way back with early post-release OW1 balancing.
IMO, OW1 could have been an absolutely fantastic social lightweight team FPS, if they had embraces the chaos and non-FPS-y nature of much of it. Instead they abolished it. OW2 is but a shadow of this former glory. It’s a decent enough team FPS, but eh, it’s also nothing special any more.
This is really well articulated and puts into words the reason I stopped playing. I was one of those non FPS players who really thrived on Sym and Moira and Mercy and I felt welcomed and appreciated when it first came out. I just had fun and that made me want to try to get better and kept me coming back. As they kept retooling things, especially with Sym 3.0, I felt they were deliberately pushing me and people like me out. Instead of having a fun, wild and playful team game for my friends to all have a good time in, it became just another FPS game.
Used to be that 5 out of 6 on the team could be dead but the 6th was a Mercy with her ult charged. She swoops in and pulls off a hail Mary 5 man resurrection that totally wrecks the opposing team.
Or Lucio was able to speed rush an entire team onto point with a well times speed buff.
Those kinds of whacky plays kept even the most skilled players on their toes.
They patched all that out of the game in the first year or two.
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