Pycorax

That’s exactly what DLsite has done when MasterCard and Visa banned them. Granted, they’re Japanese so most fo their sales use Japanese methods like JCB, PayPay, etc. I’m not sure if this would kill services that didn’t have such a large domestic audience.

Having tried it out at the store, it feels like a downgrade in every way in the usability and functionality department. No pen support, what’s the use of such a large screen if you can’t write on it? Wider screen so now it’s actually impossible to use one handed while folded. They got rid of the under display camera on the inner screen which people don’t use often to begin with.

Are there self hostable alternatives to their discovery algorithm?

Nvidia would have you believe that with MFG and DLSS. Anyways, never trust the manufacturer’s claims, we’ll see what this triple slot 4060 competitor can do when it gets in the hands of independent reviewers.

That’s using a 3 slot cooler just to hit the performance of a GPU that was already underpowered on release. China doesn’t exactly have a clean record either.

Comiket

Porn is serious business man

This is a country that has porn mags being sold in convenience stores and plenty of stores where you can find content for all sorts of fetishes both online and offline. They also have 2 huge indie artist markets every year where at least 50% of the content being sold is porn. Each event gets about 300k people. Only thing I can think of regarding censorship here are the mosaics and those are only really there due to a very old law that no lawmakers are gonna bother with expending political capital to reverse.

In the West, we might focus on preventing people from harming others or hacking, and in China, they’re preventing people from getting politically supportive of China. But in a way, we are all “exporting” our propaganda.

I don’t think anyone can say with a straight face that these 2 cases are both propaganda. So called “western ptopaganda” here is really just advising the user that maybe self harm, etc. is not such a good idea. It’s not explicitly telling the user completely unverifiable false facts.

Wasn’t Apple boasting 4090 performance at one point? lol

It’s okay if their pastors touch little boys though! /s

They’re gift cards that you can buy from a different online store that’s from a different company. Then you redeem them on DLsite.

What’s stopping them from doing what DLsite did in Japan by using credits purchased off site? Seems like an alternative business opportunity there.

I mean there’s that, but there’s also a number of posts and comments about how Nintendo is shit for doing something that they didn’t even do. Like, there’s more than enough things to give them shit for, why invent new ones?

Perfected it by removing features?

You’re using an extreme example which is fine and I agree that what Candy Crush is doing is clearly trying to exploit people. However, I do believe there’s a stark difference between that and the examples we were discussing.

I mean I get what you mean and I do agree that it plays a factor but your example here only makes a lot of sense for multiplayer games. CoD is a really good example of this in my opinion. The skins there are ridiculous and the amount of effort they spend to show it off is absurd for a full priced triple A game. On the other hand, most of Ubisoft’s games are singleplayer so this FOMO effect doesn’t really apply for those games.

I also don’t think we can deny the agency of the player too if they do choose to make these purchases. If someone does do their research and justifies the micro transactions after looking at it rationally, is it fair to say that they’ve been completely manipulated? I’ve personally given money to EA for Titanfall 2’s prime titan skins because I felt that it was a good value and wanted to support it. So I think there are somewhat more ethical micro transactions.

I mean they’re not technically wrong, if it wasn’t fun for people, people wouldn’t be buying them. Considering the context and all, I guess it makes sense. There’s too many whales enabling them. We get the games we voted with our wallets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Headline makes it a bit misleading that Ubi thinks it’s referring to all their players, but the actual line does say specify that it’s for people who choose to buy them.

Also their refusal to admit to blatent usage of AI generated art for their assets.

Not to mention that Japan tends to use their own local services usually so I’m not sure if speedtest.net is even well known there.