“Harbinger of failure” is the term you’re looking for. Not sure it applies here, though; I think most of these games were commercially successful.

And because I can’t resist sticking my own opinion everywhere, I personally thought Starfield had a ton of potential and squandered it with some highly questionable design choices and poor execution. Some of that may be fixed now, but some of it is baked in. There’s genuinely a lot to like, but as a whole I thought it was really dragged down by some of those bad decisions.

I also liked AC1, though, and was a little disappointed with 2. The first one was imperfect but bold and new and interesting. The second got rid of most of what made the first one unique in an effort to appeal to broader audiences. I still liked it, but it wasn’t special.

I was just about to set up ErsatzTV for this exact thing, but the maintainer announced recently that he’s not updating it anymore and nobody is taking over. It’s probably fine for now, but I’m hesitant to start running it. He’s encouraging forks, but none are really the clear successor yet as far as I know. I don’t know if there’s anything else comparable.

I have a MacBook that I use opportunistically for games. It’s not my primary gaming machine, but I keep Steam on it for if I’m on a work trip and have some down time or whatever. I imagine a lot of the Mac users in the survey are in the same boat.

It’s much less spicy than most other curry. Even the “hot” versions are like barely detectable heat. It also often has apple and honey added for sweetness, and I would say it’s saucier than other curries. It’s good if you approach it as its own thing, but very different from like a British-style curry and even more different from anything you would find in India.

The product in the picture is a curry roux block, which looks a bit like a big Hershey chocolate bar with squares that can be broken off. It’s like a sauce concentrate. You start cooking your meat and vegetables in a pot, add just enough water to cover everything, then add cubes of roux. The roux has everything necessary to make a complete sauce, but lots of home cooks have their own blend of things they add to adjust, like the aforementioned grated apple and honey, or ginger, garlic, mirin, tonkatsu sauce, etc.

I can’t help but feel like they’d make more money if they charged like $20 annually. I’d have signed up years ago just to support them. But considering that…

• I play most games without modding them at all.
• Quite a few of my more heavily modded games have Steam Workshop support, which doesn’t require a second application, updates automatically with the game itself, and is free.
• Most of the rest of the games that I mod have maybe one or two mods installed and don’t get frequent updates, so waiting for slow downloads is an annoyance more than a problem.

…that leaves like one or two games a year that would meaningfully benefit from what they’re offering, which makes it hard to justify spending so much. Plus, intentionally degrading the free service in ways that don’t save them money doesn’t entice me to pay for premium so much as make me resent it. So they’ve made $0 from me.

Tens of millions of us voted against it and did our best to convince those around us.

On the whole, we deserve what we’re getting. We asked for it. I just hope the rest of the world doesn’t forget that so many of us tried.

Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.

There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.

Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.

While this doesn’t directly affect me, I really hate that a payment processor I don’t even use can dictate what is and is not acceptable speech.

I don’t know if Android has an equivalent, but iOS has focus modes that you can segregate work stuff into. I have mine automatically switch to work mode when I get to my office and switch out of it when I leave. Work stuff can’t do notifications when I’m not in that focus. You can set up separate home and lock screens for each focus if you want, too. You can even filter by contacts if you have colleagues or clients who don’t respect boundaries.

I honestly had no issue with Indiana Jones at launch on the Deck. My tolerance for performance issues is probably higher than average, granted, but I started playing it within a few days of launch on the Deck and beat the main story within a few weeks of that. It was officially unsupported and there were absolutely some framerate hiccups, but it was totally playable and enjoyable. It actually ran better on the Deck than my desktop (also Linux, to be fair) for a while because of nvidia driver issues. The faster pace of Doom will make it more of a problem, though.

It’s truly a non-issue, unless we’re talking competitive multiplayer games. The only single player game I can think of that I’ve had Linux-related problems with since I switched my desktop over a couple years ago has been the new Indiana Jones game, and that was patched within a week of launch. Proton makes it brain-dead easy. I have a pretty big library and not many games have official support, but they just work with Proton. I don’t do any tinkering with custom proton builds or anything either. On a fresh Steam install, you have to go into settings once to enable Proton in games that haven’t been tested with it, but then you just forget about it and play like you would on Windows.