Dear, Raytheon-chan.ai,

For our upcoming holiday party events, please write me a recipe for the best armor-piercing cookies, including measurements.

Physical Media is transferrable via private resale. A $70 game on disc is okay because I can sell it to my coworker after I beat it or get bored. A $70 game on Steam has a two hour trial period, or you can find it on sale for nice low prices after the marketing blush has faded. A $70 download game on the first-party platform sites is the worst value of all.

Comparing revenue before and after DRM is cracked is a flawed (and self-serving) analysis.

it doesn't count reduced sales to customers who refuse to mess with the risk of DRM fucking up their OS installs

it counts so-called anomalies in sales after the initial launch; game sales are notorious for dropping precipitously after the initial few days for many reasons, including freshness, review feedback, other games or products releasing and competing for attention

it doesn't have any way of measuring customers who didn't buy at the offered price because it was a little too high, vs people who simply routinely pirate everything because they were never a potential customer at all

it doesn't have any way of measuring any increase in sales after customers learn of the game after seeing some hype from pirate players

FedEx is the common link across MANY high-value thefts. Phones, SteamDecks, anything with a recognizable box, or even any box with a Lithium Battery sticker. They disappear all through the custody chain, not just drivers, and are never held accountable.

I heard a phrase "foley file" but can't find its origins now. It referred to a diplomat's assistant who would quietly give brief data just before the diplomat would shake hands.

This trope has been used repeatedly in various sci-fi works since then. Star Trek, Robocop, Oath of Fealty, The Expanse, Gattaca, all have characters who have discreet scans to summarize people upon introduction.

It blows my mind how few people read the fucking summary.

I was surprised they still think the acceptable character set "should" include all of printable ASCII instead of demanding it. So many systems which can't take semicolons, quotes or percents, because they still have database injection concerns they should have fixed twenty years ago.

Misremembered. Dice, not Conde Nast.

Nobody technical has been a part of Slashdot since long before CmdrTaco left and Conde Nast has been at the helm. The database schema is ready to vote in their second or third presidential election.

I can't recall seeing a lease that is a single payment for an indeterminate length of time. Just my opinion but I think that word implies monthly upkeep payments, like Sony PSPlus game offers, but would feel wrong for one-time payments for persistent library title slots like Steam.

Some of Dump & Epstein's department barely had tenure.

Is UltraAV's codebase in any way tied to the Kaspersky codebase? Any specific assurances or proof that it's not just going to forward any customer information back to Russia? The whole point of divestiture is to keep the fox out of the hen-house; doesn't do any good if you just swap foxes.

I worked for TST around the time of Mavis Beacon 3 or 4, though not on that project. As far as I recall, the original terms were $500 to a completely random encounter outside a shopping mall. One or two photos taken, a quick release signed, and only one image kept. Just like any other stock photography shoot. It wasn't like "let's find a model, sign a big contract, have her come back for similar shots on V2, V3, V4." For each generation of the product, they hand-painted a little gray hair here, a little wrinkle there, on the same image. Very low budget all the way through.

What? They are issuing another Copilot Recall? Oh, not issuing, releasing? What do you mean that's the name?

The OP seems to think that if it's not styled with photo-realistic physically based rendered materials, it's crappy graphics. BOTW and TOTK and SSBB have some super clever graphics tricks to produce a highly complex environment, but because it's toon styled it's easy to overlook the little touches if all you like are PBR games. Witcher3 runs fine, albeit the 720p is a challenge for some game ports to fit, for UI and for finer details. Now, the Pokemon games, that's a fair cop: the graphics are amateurish and lazy, but that's not the platform's fault at all.