Those aren't the same or similar. Those are options in addition to buying that allow access to a large library of games (except humble, which is just buying games). They aren't "pay this subscription or you can't play the game you bought".
If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
And you think battle royales have too much down time?
I don't play them because they're all prey to the modern aggressive cash grab bullshit most online games are, but most of the downtime you're discussing is actually active and engaged. You need to be consciously making a decision during the parachute part to decide where you want to land. All the "collecting" is constantly under stress, because if you aren't aware of your surroundings at all times, you could be dead. The whole game mode has a tension to it that most others don't, because dying in death match doesn't cost you anything but 10 seconds to respawn.
I was damn near 1k hours in D1. I think I'm still under 100 in 2, because somehow they managed to make every single map in the entire game a heaping pile of dogshit.
I bounce around between games a lot, so I was never going to be done before anything else came out, but they should definitely scratch different itches, also. They might both be big RPGs, but I fully expect to be able to play Starfield with stuff in the background and there's just too much narrative to do that with BG3. I also just itch for more actiony stuff at times (right now that's a 2D pixel art game called Chasm). Even if I drop 20 hours in a game before switching to the next one, one game isn't going to actually be the only one I play for that long, personally.
It's basically all I use, and most of the headaches are more about publisher hostility than any actual issues with Linux (no, you not being able to install your fucking rootkit is not a failing). I basically don't even look at any of those statuses because I don't feel like I need to. Almost everything actually does just work.
But we're comparing it to a console lol. That, to the point of baked in performance settings tuned to the exact hardware, are their whole purpose.
I do almost all my gaming on the deck. It's great because of what it is as a handheld. If you don't intend to use those features, the lack of power makes a serious dent in the value it provides. And "no fuss" is correct compared to other PC handhelds, but crazy compared to an Xbox.
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
I genuinely do understand the realities of manufacturing niche stuff making the high price kind of unavoidable, but you have to have high build quality to justify it to the consumer.
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.