I read somewhere most of the cost is payment providers, scams, chargebacks and refunds they can't offload onto the publishers.
HackerJoe
uBlock Origin (not on Chrome) + https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/master/antipaywall.txt
There have always been pretty tech demos without much gameplay. There was Incoming it was basically a super simple turret section showing off the awesome (at the time) capabilities of the first Voodoo card. It was impressive and fun for about 15 minutes. Still doesn't look too bad considering it came out in 1998.
Audacity (or Audition/Cool Edit how the old guys know it) is a bit smarter. It can analyze a recording of the noise floor and then just attenuate that. It's bad for quality music but good enough to improve speech, old tape recordings and records.
Glad you like it. It has no right to be this good and campy but somehow I also can't put it down.
If you want something even more crazy another guy made X-Pirates on the XCOM engine. It's a catgirl post-apocalyptic pirate mod (NSFW, yeah, not kidding).
spoiler
The year is 2601. The Earth has been long conquered by aliens. You run a gang of female mutant pirates. Rob aliens and their human proxies for fun, profit and power. Features: - Fight nazis with chainsaws as scantily-clad big mutant ladies, Heavy Metal style! - Meet and kill (or capture, ransom, interrogate, enslave) a wide variety of strangers, belonging to over a dozen of factions! - Explore absolutely enormous technology tree! - Approach tactical problems in an endless variety of ways! - Figure out riddles and riddles within riddles! - Cozy up to Amiga-age gfx and music, while the globe mysteriously spins in darkness! - Read (a lot) or Die! - Around 400 hours of gameplay; in active developement; no two games are the same. - Warning: contains non-sexual nudity (15+) and other content that might be not suitable to US audiences.
Right, he demanded "NO FANS" on most products and caused all those components to overheat. He was a true visionary.
He was a marketing and brand genius I give him that.
X-Com (1993)+Mods, Jagged Alliance 2, Master of Orion 2, Starsector, Avorion and lately Balatro and Peglin for mindless fun.
It's better than spending the money on McKinsey. But not by a lot.
Bleiche mein Arschloch
Ist das eine Drohung?
Until they find out about it and detect the PCIe device by hardware id and ban the cheater.
They even have cheats that connect to the DRAM slots to read character positions from RAM as a wallhack now. Those are still undetectable by anti-cheats, kernel level or otherwise. Only manual review of replays or reports of shooting the wall for half the round might make them suspicious.
It's nonsense:
https://xcancel.com/Seifreed/status/1874245336291488179