Could be, but my nephew played thousands of hours of CoD.
This is my admission that I don’t think I’m a good enough parent to counteract thousands of hours spent with a MIC funded game.
I actually trust my kids would probably do better anyway, but they know I would be disappointed if they bought their own copies of CoD, and they seem to respect that.
I don’t want my kids participating in the daily network effect of CoD, either. I don’t want them encouraging their friends to try CoD by having and regularly playing a copy.
That said, if I ever catch my kids playing CoD at a random LAN party - without me - they probably realize they’ll get a lecture - that they had better invite me next time. (I’m pretty sure I can out-parent the MIC for hour or two a month.)
My kids are specificially not allowed to play the Call of Duty series, and anything with game art that I could mistake for it. (Some modern warfare style games accept funding from the US military, and I can’t be arsed to keep track of which ones.)
For some idea where I draw the line, I do play Halo with my older kids.
Dang. Nice. Having a Palm PDA with Simon’s Puzzles in 2024 2025 is epic. I would take that thing to parties…and, at the kind of parties I attend, it would make me royalty.
Because I have my entire extensive library on steam, I’m kind of stuck with them. And while they are not abusing that presently, I’m fairly confident they will someday.
Yeah. I am confident that long term access to classic games is a torch only sufficiently carried by software pirates.
Don’t get me wrong, I adore things like the Atari 50th Anniversary collection, and what Evercade is doing with esoteric arcade titles. (And I delight in throwing money at them.)
But only a small fraction of the greatest games get that kind of loving licensed treatment.
For the rest of gaming history, software pirates are essential.
“The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult,”
Makes me suspect they were woefully behind the rest of the field in development practices. My team, and many others, gained productivity when all the wasteful manager ego stroking in-person meetings stopped.
Alternately, it tells us they rely on a weird dev kit with a lot of esoteric hardware. Though I would still call that out as being super out of date. Nothing is particularly hard to emulate today, for teams that prioritize having rebuildable test environmenta.
Just wild.
Bummer about the layoffs. Probably won’t fix their agility problem, though.
I’m still playing endless Luanti while waiting for Guild Wars 2 to get SteamDeck verified.
Edit: Downvoter can’t handle that Luanti is an MMO, now. I can’t help that I’m the world’s most accomplished self-hoster. (This is sarcasm, humorously implying that I’m hosting the world’s biggest Luanti instance, such that it qualifies as “massively multiplayer”. Which one might almost believe if they read my post history… I’m pretty active in both the Luanti and self-hosting communities.)