Meh, most AAA publishers and studios stayed as far away from that whole shitstorm as they possibly could; it was a hysterical debate (out of which nobody on either side came out well) that came out of the indie gaming scene and mostly stayed in the indie gaming scene.

I doubt most people who buy and play games even noticed it. And I doubt a single AAA publisher changed their strategy as a result of it. It got a lot of blogs and gaming news sites very upset, generated a handful of fairly well-buried articles in the mainstream press and then the world moved on.

But most people involved on both sides were full-blown narcissists, so they didn't really see things that way.

This is a real shame for those laid off, not least because there are so few other employers in that sector in Australia.

But it's not unexpected. Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (BL:TPS) was a commercial flop. Borderlands 2 has done around 10 million sales across all platforms. Prior to the release of the heavily discounted "Handsome Collection" for PS4 and Xbox-One, BL:TPS hadn't even managed a million.

That's partly because the game wasn't as good as Borderlands 2. Reviews and word of mouth were both pretty harsh on it. I've completed it twice. It actually has some decent (if unoriginal) content, but the first 6 hours or so are a miserable trudge.

But it's also because 2k made a big gamble on the PS4 and Xbox-One being commercial failures, and hence the game launched on PS3, 360 and PC. Their gamble was wrong; both of those consoles managed strong sales. Worse, the early-adopters had a huge overlap with "people who buy a lot of games". While the installed base for the PS3 and 360 remains huge, sales for them have largely dried up, outside of Call of Duty and FIFA.

Console transitions are scary for publishers. 2k's bet wasn't entirely unreasonable. The 3DS had a difficult launch, while the Vita and Wii-U basically flopped. The industry saw Ubisoft invest heavily in the Wii-U launch and get burned by it. But of all the major houses, 2k bet most heavily against the PS4 and Xbox-One and their first major release after those consoles launched paid the price.

It was clear that 2k had largely given up on the game. While Borderlands 2 was supported for years post-launch with well-crafted and extensive DLC, BL:TPS was funded to deliver precisely enough DLC to satisfy the contractual requirements of the Season Pass; not an ounce more. Its inclusion so soon after launch in a cut-price compilation was another sure sign that 2k were in damage-limitation mode.

Either they're going to give him an extremely sympathetic portrayal and the film is going to be some kind of "think of the children" moral crusade against games.

Or else they're going to get sued by him. Assuming there's anywhere left that he's still allowed to file suit.

Both equally plausible, I suspect.

I'm paying for 152Mb/s downstream and 12Mb/s upstream with Virgin Media in the UK. That's generally what I get, though it will sometimes dip down to about 140Mb/s in the evening peak.

Reliability is generally ok. I've had a few faults over the last few years, but they've usually sorted them within 24 hours.

The UK's an absolute postcode lottery when it comes to broadband. There are streets less than a mile from me where the highest speed anybody will advertise is 2Mb/s (and this is in London suburbia). Ironically, there's a new-build housing estate put up in the middle of the last decade which just missed out on a round of fibre works and gets worse connections than the much older properties in neighbouring streets.

But I also have a US ISP - Comcast (family has a place in the States that used to be run as a vacation home and is largely just for private use these days). My god you guys are getting the short end of the stick over there. I'm paying more than I pay for my UK connection for what's advertised as an 8Mb/s connection which in reality struggles to provide more than 3Mb/s even off-peak. It's tolerable for a few weeks a year, but I wouldn't be able to live with it - and there are no other options locally, nor are speeds elsewhere in the neighbourhood notably better.

Indeed - but what I'd like to see would be somewhere that does something like a "six-months-on re-review". I suspect that for a few big-name products, impressions of hardware that people have been living with for 6 months will be very different to out-of-the-box impressions.

I shifted to an SSD for my OS and core applications (plus a few disk-speed sensitive games - a fast-growing category) last year. I'd been planning to buy the 500gb 840 EVO, but, by some small miracle, Amazon had a special on the 840 Pro on the weekend I made my purchase, putting its price very close to the EVO, so I bought that instead. The 840 Pro is apparently not affected by this. Phew, bullet dodged.

But it's interesting that the issue is picked up in so few reviews. Indeed, there's a veiled apology for this in an ExtremeTech article about the bug from October. Reviews are generally carried out on the basis of a short but intensive testing period and hence don't pick up serious issues that take a bit of time to show up.

That's obviously been particularly important in this case, due to the specific nature of this bug. But when it comes to expensive bits of hardware like SSDs and high-end graphics cards, I'd be interested in reviews which came out a bit later but gave a better reflection of failure rates and longer-term issues. I've been stung before by buying a well-reviewed graphics card which turned out to have a horrible failure rate over time.

If I were to rank the publicly-accessible online forums I participate in these days, from most civil to least civil, Slashdot would be top of the pack by a long, long way. Seriously, that's how bad it is now.

The unholy trinity of culture wars, console wars and overbearing admins have ruined many other discussion sites that were perfectly good 3 years or so ago.

Your mistake is in using the "classic" definition of "troll" - somebody who sets out to deliberately cause fights on a forum. Trawl through the archives of Slashdot and you will find many instances of this kind of trolling - and yes, the people doing it are often highly literate (and, when they do it right, sometimes very funny with hindsight).

But the term "trolling" has gone political these days and is routinely used to describe any form of online behaviour that the speaker doesn't approve of. So everything from outright criminal behaviour (eg. threats of immediate violence) at one end of the scale through to disagreeing with a forum's established groupthink (however respectfully) at the other.

And yes, it has become a favourite term of the intellectually insecure, whenever they want to shout down an opposing point of view without engaging with it. In fact, conflating those two extremes I mention above under the same term is outright beneficial for the easily offended, as it allows them to group polite dissenters together with the mouth-foaming loons.

That's possible. Though I think the idea of Valve making a console exclusive - even for their own console - would take a lot of swallowing for the company.

Valve has no commercial interest in making Half-Life 3. It's not that the game wouldn't be profitable. It almost certainly would be - lots of people would buy it. But it would risk the wider strategy they've been pursuing for a decade now.

Valve's income these days isn't from making and selling games; it's from charging other people to sell games via Steam. Seriously - you buy a game on Steam and a big slug of the price you pay goes straight to Valve. Sure, they have hosting costs, but there is a lot of pure profit in there.

Ever since Steam started to be a big thing, Valve has focussed on more niche games rather than big-budget fpses. It does not want to be seen as threatening or a rival to its biggest business partners. EA have already taken their toys and gone home to Origin; Valve's dominance of the PC gaming market relies on keeping Activision, Ubisoft and others on board.

And a big part of that is not being seen as a competitor. If Activision wants to pay Valve a lot of money to plaster the Steam front-page with a huge Call of Duty advert, then that's good for Valve. But Activision might get nervous if they worried that the platform they were using was run by a company that was actively pushing a game in competition with theirs.

Over in console-land, Sony and Microsoft's first party exclusives are generally put out there to sell consoles (not always a profitable activity in itself). They build up the installed base to get the third parties interested. The only platform-owner to really emphasise first-party games development is Nintendo, who, surprise surprise, have terrible third-party relationships.

Far easier for Valve to allow other people to put the effort in to making money for them, rather than take the risk of investing in games development to make direct income from sales. Particularly now that Steam is so ubiquitous as a platform that it doesn't need first-party games to grow the installed base.

One CPU (an AMD Thunderbird 900 which developed severe over-sensitivity to heat).

One graphics card (an Nvidia 7950GX2 - bleeding edge cards have a reputation for early-deaths).

One power supply.

Several CD-ROM drives (though my very first one is nigh-indestructible - a 2x speed drive from 1995 which still works, still sits in a PC in my parents' house and is still used occasionally to recover data from very old CD-Rs that, for some reason, it can read while modern drives just shrug).

And more hard drives than I care to think about. A steady drip-drip of them over the years, with a big spike due to Seagate Barracudas over the last 3 years.

In games console-land, I've had the following die on me: 1x Gamecube (optical drive stopped working after 9 months), 1x Xbox 360 (RROD after 3 years), 1x PS3 (YLOD after 6 years), 2x Wiis (one with a dodgy optical drive after 2 years, the second dead on arrival).

Well... up to a point. I can follow the logical connection that would suggest that people who act as informed consumers are likely to make better employees.

However, I've recently switched back to Internet Explorer after more than a decade with Firefox and a short experiment with Chrome. I did so because I find that comparing across the latest versions of all three, IE was my favourite in terms of performance and user-experience. So I made a reasonably informed decision to use it.

Making practical use of data like this would be more justifiable if there was a clear case that the "default" option was inferior (which in fairness, IE has sometimes been previously).

No, but I just looked at its Steam page and it looks like yet another pseudo-8-bit sprite art game. Local multiplayer oriented... no singleplayer to speak of and, looking at the trailer, nothing particular gripping about the concept either. Not interested.

I'll stick to Farcry 4 and Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters for now, until Bloodborne comes out in a couple of weeks.

And yet... I have had masses of fun over the last 6 months with Farcry 4, Dragon Age 3, Alien Isolation and Forza Horizon 2. Big, AAA technical-powerhouse games. And all of them more enjoyable than anything I've seen come out of the indie-sector.

It is a commonly-held myth - but a myth nonetheless - that good graphics and good gameplay are mutually exclusive.

I'd have more sympathy with you if the new-releases list on Steam these days wasn't completely buried by "retro 8-bit style" indie roguelikes which look dreadful and usually play that way as well.

These days, I've gone beyond "it's not the graphics that matter, it's the gameplay" to "they both matter, seriously". The former has become a go-to excuse for lazy development.