If I’m really interested in a game, and the difficulty proves to be too high from the beginning, or can be changed at any time… then I would try a lower setting.
If I had already invested some time into playing it, and the difficulty proved to be too high… then I would rather abandon the game rather than start from scratch with a lower setting.
Chances are though, that changing the difficulty after some time playing, would feel like a total nerf, and I would abandon it anyways.
Same way I feel about non-cosmetic purchases. I made the mistake of falling for some back in the day, and shortly after abandoned the games… because they felt much less like a challenge, and too much like a pointless money grab. My current limit on micro-transactions is either fewer than 3, or $1.
In their email, Jagex management also told staff: “[…] Our job is not to use the game as an outlet for our own views, but to craft worlds that serve our players, offering immersion, escape and meaning.
Well, isn’t that some of the best BS contortionist corpospeak I’ve seen in some time…
It’s a chat platform geared towards gamers, with voice chat, screen sharing, and streaming options… that’s been coopted by vloggers… but most unsettlingly, it’s being used for customer support and documentation.
A lot of knowledge bases are buried in the walled garden of servers, and a labyrinth of chat rooms.
By adding support for alternate stores, the monopoly argument is gone: everyone can build their own store now. Meaning, everyone with a store can kick out anyone else, and tell them to just build their own.
comply with their own ToS
…which they can change at any moment, but don’t really need to; most ToS include clauses about refusing service without having to explain why. If you ever agree to a ToS, better make sure they’re even supposed to notify you if they ever decide to cut you off.
Read the case, the whole thing started because Google banned Epic from the Play store, and the only reason for it to become a case, was the monopolistic position. That’s gone now, they’re free to refuse service to whoever they want, whenever they want, for no reason at all… and if you don’t agree, go sue them, they’ll show you the precedent followed by the door.
I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can’t even do because I don’t run Google Play Services
Spoiler: you can use the LÖVE loader to run the “PC version” of Balatro on Android, since it’s all written in Lua.
They don’t ban the entire company from distributing any software.
They can do whatever, it’s their store.
Keep in mind that Epic Games v. Google has made Google add features to allow alternative app stores on Android… which automatically removes the monopoly argument and lets Google ban anyone they want from the Google Play store.
There is your answer: if screens exhaust you, do something without screens.
Games are supposed to give you a good time, reinvigorate you, and prepare for your “real life”. If you’re sick of screens, then pick up pottery, or squash, or hiking, or skydiving, or cooking, or… thousands of activities out there to have a good time without a screen.
having a huge backlog
That’s work. Just don’t. Do stuff that makes you feel better, not just tick a box in a backlog so you feel slightly less bad.