Especially when they go out of their way to provide direct APKs to Android users who do not use Play Store.

They already had to make the APK for the Play Store, providing it directly doesn’t require extra dev work.

Of course. I’m not an idiot, clearly there are people affected.

But even if EVERY Helldivers 2 sale were affected, of the 1.85 BILLION estimated PC gamers in the world, we would be looking at around 0.6% people affected. It’s a tiny sliver, despite Helldivers having over 12 million sales (and that’s both PC and console).

The fact of the matter is this doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme, and most people have likely never even heard of the game still even with the controversy. The industry is unfathomably massive and one game is tiny, even one with 12+ million sales.

All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.

To be honest despite the publicity, most players don’t actually give a shit. Most players don’t read gaming news. And many players don’t care, either because they already have a PSN account, or they just don’t care about making another account to play the game.

I wouldn’t be surprised if over half the players had never even heard of the PSN controversy at all. The SteamDB player chart actually indicates when those shenanigans were compared to player numbers, and the daily player numbers had already been declining at that same pace for a month up to that point and continued at about the same rate after.

https://steamdb.info/app/553850/charts/#6m

But I can’t get an Orange Julius online.

Uber Eats, Door Dash, Grubhub, etc. all exist for this exact type of purchase.

Although you will pay for the convenience, as opposed to it being cheaper like most other products since the physical store is still involved.

Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.

Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.

A couple of primarily YouTube-based music artists I follow made OF pages before the adult influx and still use them. It works great since that’s what it was designed for.

Players are complaining about the difficulty of a genre-defining game, in a genre known for its difficulty.

Just Git Gud.

So it should launch as good as a modern game 7 months post launch. I’m not even going to think it will be a proper launch, but I’ll begrudgingly accept a minimum of the quality of a modern game 7 months after they’ve had time to fix issues at launch.

I loved my Palm Prē. So many things they innovated that we take for granted now.

Such a shame they weren’t able to stick around long enough to properly compete.

A class action lawsuit with a related FTC warranty fraud investigation is a pretty tough thing to fight.

And in return Gamers Nexus is teaching all of their viewers what their consumer rights are, and how to report fraudulent activity to the proper regulatory authorities. This isn’t the first time Gamers Nexus has gotten regulatory agencies involved with computer part manufacturers fucking over customers, and the history of those incidents didn’t go very well for other companies involved.

On the other hand Gamers Nexus has also gone out of their way to point out companies that have done the right thing when issues came up, to make sure those companies are getting kudos for NOT fucking over consumers. Because sadly that’s all we really want.

If the FTC gets enough complaints to warrant the manpower to investigate ASUS warranty fraud, there is no doubt in my mind that they’re gonna be fucked based on what we’ve seen so far.

They’ve had this ability for years, to remove copromosed apps from devices, they’re just giving it to users now.

The minimum requirements are there for them to set a lower limit on what they’re willing to support. You do whatever you want, just don’t complain when something doesn’t work, or breaks because you’re bypassing those limits.

People do this all the time and then complain and blame Microsoft for issues when they are using an configuration they were told was unsupported and might have issues.

After a while, piracy doesn’t really affect income as strongly

Piracy affecting income in a meaningful way is generally disputable. Executives and shareholders just refuse to accept that fact.

Most piracy is instead be from people that were never going to pay for the game anyway. So in many cases DRM like Denuvo just causes issues and slowdowns for the people actually paying for the game, making it worse for them. Meanwhile the people that weren’t going to buy the game anyway, still don’t buy the game once the DRM is removed or bypassed.

Piracy primarily comes from two major sources:

1. People that would buy the game but do not have the money to buy the game. On the larger scale this is often due to lack of price localization outside the major markets like US/EU. Games are often simply prices out of reach of people in smaller markets like Brazil for instance where one game can cost a large portion of a monthly paycheck. Or from children who simply do not have the money to buy the game. Pirate Software talking about localization. He localized the price at 65% off, and piracy in Brazil is essentially nonexistent, in fact it’s 25% of income from the game despite being 65% off.
2. People that cannot buy the game where they are, usually because it is not available in their region. Usually an issue outside major markets that companies just ignore in general, or markets where a game might be banned for various reasons. This is how CD Projekt (Developers of The Witcher games) started, providing games in markets they were not released in.

There are plenty of stories online of people in those categories later on buying the game when they are able to because they weren’t actively avoiding paying for the game, but rather just not in a position to at the time for whatever reason and correcting that later on to support the developer.

There are of course a very small number of people that can buy a game, and specifically choose to pirate it instead. The actual impact of these however wouldn’t even be a rounding error for most developers, these are people that were never going to buy it anyway, there is no actual monetary loss since a sale was never going to happen.

It is protected, but you can disclose whatever you want to whoever you want. It’s your medical data, you are not prevented from sharing it, healthcare professionals are prevented from sharing identifiable information including that.

Since HIV is such a big issue in the LGBT space, so much that many blood/plasma donation places won’t even let gay patients donate at all, or if they e been sexually active within like 2 months, even though they obviously test all donations anyway. Being upfront with that information is important, so for a dating/hookup app meant for those users, it’s essentially like having a space to put your height.

Personally I think this is pretty likely.

Watching Johnson when he talked recently about going forward with the aide package he no longer looked like he was a hostage. I think that’s because the Dems promised to help him keep his seat in exchange for a little compromise.

If he were to be unseated, the Dems have a decent chance of taking control with so many Rs leaving recently. It would only take a couple Rs breaking ranks with the extreme MAGA representatives pushing to remove Johnson, to give the Dems control.

However Dem control I don’t think would matter much at this point. The Republican messaging would just switch to blaming all of the bullshit they’ve done this session on the Dems. A large majority of the Republican base just accepts what they’re told at face value, so they would 100% accept being told that nothing being accomplished was because the Dems prevented it rather than the Republicans refusing to bring things to the floor in the first place.

There is no real advantage to the Dems taking control so close to the election, just giving Republicans a new soap box to spread lies to a base they know doesn’t look past the headlines on their own echo chamber networks.

Because they trust McDonald’s and Starbucks wifi even less.

Truth Social is already literally a Mastodon instance. They just don’t federate with anything else.

Trump could open up federation, but that would ruin their safe space, I mean echo chamber.

If they don’t follow the guidelines then the sentence will just be appealed and replaced with one that does. Sentencing guidelines are about trying to remove biases like race in the sentencing process.

As for remorse, yes, that is one part of the guidelines that is left up to the judge to determine. Again however, the Judge doesn’t just get to decide how much to reduce the sentence, the requirements for reduction are specified in the guidelines.

For instance:

Acceptance of Responsibility
3E1.1(a) (a) If the defendant clearly demonstrates acceptance of responsibility for his offense, decrease the offense level by 2 levels.