Hard to compete when the government heavily subsidizes the local industry while simultaneously making it very difficult for foreign companies to operate.

Amazing progress. Hopefully the rest of Asia can follow suit in short order.

I met a number of LGBTQ+ folks in China who were wonderful, honest people, but most of them were afraid to publicly display or talk about their sexuality/gender identities due to the risk of social/legal reprisal, given the deteriorating state of policies towards LGBTQ+ rights in recent years.

While other countries in East/Southeast Asia have begun to open up to the idea of same-sex marriage like Taiwan in 2019 and now Thailand, a lot in China see this as a symptom of growing westernization to be opposed. Logic being that if the westernized countries who we don’t like start to embrace the idea, we should reject it. And unfortunately a lot of Asia follows China’s lead in particular.

Fair, but not-shitty companies eventually become shitty companies in almost every circumstance. I hate making the argument that someone is fine because they only hurt a few people compared to the guy who hurts lots.

Well, it’s not siding with Microsoft, it is Microsoft. This is a Microsoft game.

Companies are never your friend.

Valve is like any other company. They’re as good as your money is good.

Is that in American dollars?

If those 300 games were even US $70 each which is exceedingly generous, you’d only scratch $21,000 as the cost of everything. Unless Steam was literally giving you $180,000+ for using their store, you’ve not saved hundreds of thousands.

Unless you’re referring to hundreds of thousands of pennies.

I bet I’ve played a lot more of them than you have.

It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t having fun with Skyrim, and I thought it wasn’t as good as Oblivion. The games weren’t getting any better, just prettier. The writing and worldbuilding was getting objectively worse, too.

Morrowind is the only one I keep going back to, it’s the only one that has some semblance of soul.

Hah, got me there on a technicality.

An example though would be one friend I have who was telling me recently about a story from back when we were in high school. When quoting someone who was talking about her, she chose to use her current pronouns and current name even though realistically those wouldn’t have been used at that time. Even if it’s less “accurate” in a historical context, it’s a positive affirmation to be able to say “this is who I have always been, even if I couldn’t share it publicly at the time.”

And it also helps those in the present who may have never known her back then and might wonder who she was referring to. A bit like how one might talk about the childhood of Lady Gaga and not the childhood of Stefani Germanotta.

A lot of trans people would disagree. Just because someone was forced to conform to their biological sex for years doesn’t mean they felt that way on the inside.

Every trans person I know, without exception, prefers to refer to their pre-transition selves by their current pronouns and would take issue with the suggestion that they were still a boy/girl before becoming a girl/boy.

isles excited to write a comment about Kotaku being excited to write a story about Ubisoft being excited to let you know Prince of Persia Remake is Still Years Away.

Not pay the thugs?

You’re probably not missing much. Morrowind is the last good Elder Scrolls game they ever made. But that has also been PC/Xbox exclusive since 2002 so may as well write the series off completely.

Whaaat? The US willing to stop supporting Israel? That is simply too big an ask.

Next you’ll tell me that the capitalists will voluntarily surrender the means of production to the working class.

But what would the US be able to use as an incentive during negotiations if they have no interest in making Israel stop this conflict?

Give us the hostages and…?

Give us the hostages or else…?

Finally Apple is ready to use all that training data they say they don’t collect.

This is funny to me.

Oh, it costs too much to educate kids? Just put them in schools at a younger age, rip off that bandaid sooner.

No, let’s not talk about the wound that bandaid is covering up in the first place, that’s completely unrelated.

I got past the hinterlands. Skimmed through it, in fact, after hearing online that there was nothing there worth doing.

The rest of the game failed to grip me as much as the first one did, and I didn’t even like DA:O as much as other games in its genre. Granted, I also dropped Dragon Age 2 like a hot potato, so perhaps if I had enjoyed that game more, I wouldn’t have been so turned off of Inquisition for being marginally more tolerable.

No, Inquisition was an incredibly middling game. I dropped it after about 15 hours when I realized I was having no fun.

If you enjoyed it, great. I still enjoyed Mass Effect 3, too. But they weren’t great games.

When those two stinkers are the only content they’ve put out in 10 years, there’s not a lot to really build a more optimistic outlook from.

Even then, Inquisition was iffy and Mass Effect 3 generates bad reactions to this day (though I still enjoyed Mass Effect 3 for what it was).

How does that fix anything? You keep some parts of the world as human breeding mills and send them to the places where quality of work/life balance is so bad that they can’t have kids there either?