I played the demo. After the amazing trailer they had I thought it would be great, but it’s a mission-based point and click adventure game with some multiverse and role-playing elements and a basic turn based combat system. It didn’t appeal to me that much, but I thought the writing and art style was alright.

Just look at what Spotify has done to the music industry. There was a massive contraction in the music buying market and music streaming services now are fully dominant. And Spotify + Apple have used their oligopoly status to fuck over artists and even record labels, forcing them to accept a fraction of a penny per stream.

It’s not a one to one comparison, but I could see subscription-based game licensing crowding out buy to own games eventually if Microsoft keeps consolidating the market as it has been. And then, once consumers are used to never paying for games individually, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, etc will be able to dictate whatever terms they want to game developers.

I highly doubt it will be in the format of a flash portal. It sounds closer to the Netflix model of producing and licensing games for subscribers.

Stadia was basically a game console as a service, assuming you had good enough internet. You had to pay for the subscription for access, then pay for each game individually. The one benefit of that was very little initial barrier to entry, as you just needed chromecast and a stadia controller.

Youtube playables appears to be just lightweight html5 web app games that run locally in your browser, similar to what flash player was like.

S tier phone, my only complaint is that the bootloader is locked down and downward facing speaker. Next phone I buy will be able to be de-googled.

The battery life is head and shoulders above 99% of the market, oled is a killer feature, so is 120 hz.

Watching flash videos and playing flash games on Newgrounds.

Funniest gaming news in a while! But I imagine it’s a welcome feature for players.

This isn’t niche at all, but gbatemp is fantastic. Lots of emulation, modding, romhacking, general gaming discission, etc.

Seasons 1-3 are on the private tracker I use, torrentleech.org

If you’re desperate you could pay for a seedbox membership to get a “free” invite. You must not cancel in the first month or they will ban you afterwards.

Edit: I just did a search on Yandex and found a few promising results. Search for something like “departures torrent travel show”

I buy CDs and encode them myself with Lame or buy from Bandcamp. They live on my computer and I add them to my phone as desired. I also have spotify because tbh you can’t buy everything.

I used to use Google music for streaming my own files, but they put that into YouTube Music. I can still stream the files I uploaded using the YT music app but it’s clearly not the main intended purpose of the app.

Pros: Good selection, direct access to a few scene groups (scene groups upload mostly on private trackers and these are leaked to public ones systematically), a base level of trust that long time uploaders won’t upload viruses, fast download speeds.

Cons: most have requirements on keeping your ratio high which is hard to do if you don’t have good upload bandwidth, there may also be a requirement to seed torrents for 10 full days (total, not consecutive) if you can’t get to a 1.0 ratio on a given torrent. Your account can be deleted for inactivity.

There are some sites with a freeleech tag which means that downloads tagged with that don’t harm your ratio but seeding helps your ratio. In the one I use, you still have to seed for the 10 days. In my experience, because I don’t have a seedbox or a good up connection, I rarely can successfully seed at all to build ratio so I am somewhat limited in what I can actually download (only torrents larger than 14 GB or a box set) without throwing my ratio in the toilet.

I could pay for a seedbox or a premium membership to fix this.

I just checked and it’s not on my private tracker.

I don’t understand how anybody could see this market consolidation as a positive! Yes, in the short term ABK games will be added to Game Pass, but once Game Pass is the only “game” in town, the price gouging monopolistic behavior will follow.

With the stroke of a pen any of these people could prevent tens of thousands of deaths from malaria or tuberculosis with zero change to their quality of life. That’s why their wealth is disgusting.

Their customers had infinite money to spend and they still didn’t build a top of the line submarine. Absolutely deserving of a Darwin Award.

I get results searching for peertube on DDG.

Have you ever tried SearxNG? It’s a foss meta-search engine that anyone can host an instance of, or you can use some one else’s instance.

Machine learning dialoge is almost never going to be as interesting as dialogue written by a human with a real viewpoint.

Had to turn away eventually, it seemed like they were going to show every boss and set piece in the game!

I would post on something like substack and then post those as links, personally. Someone mentioned Mastodon but that’s a micro blogging site so posting a full blog there directly is hard.

Keep in mind if you start a community you will have to moderate it or find helper mods.

I don’t see why not.