It had a single player campaign too! Deck builder pvp gets too sweaty for me, but I really like deck builder RPGs.
Couldn't find a good primary source to dig into it. But from Ipsos:
"I believe the preference for physical discs amongst next gen gamers reflects the potential value they derive from the pre-owned market," commented Ipsos director Ian Bramley to MCV, "which is holding up the preference for physical - this is unlike the music and film markets."
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/64-percent-prefer-physical-media-to-digital-distribution
I'm sure there's a lot of generational and market segment differences. I never really understood "collecting" games. But I guess people do that in digital too with their huge steam sale backlogs!
I'm sure not many people care about physical vs digital per se. It's the arbitrary locks by servers, digital storefront, DRM etc. So that when you pay your money you have no idea what you are getting and what your rights are. Physical game media was a simpler time from that perspective (play in perpetuity, don't redistribute, cool cool that seems like a fair trade) and resulted in better pricing and experience for consumers.
I'd accept "move on" if the argument was just "muh pretty box" (god knows there are plenty of ways to buy pretty boxes of vidya IP) but consumer rights are surely worth fighting for, or we get needlessly bled for ever more dollars.
Even better than that. You take the medicine and it reduces everyone else's risk of getting sick, even the ones that refuse to take the medicine. It's the closest thing we have IRL to literal magic.
As an immunocompromised person, thank you to everyone who gets vaccinated against communicable disease, you make my world a little less heinous to navigate.
It continues despite general opposition. That's exactly the problem. Systemic and unconscious biases are really hard to combat, even if there wasn't a vocal reactionary minority. "just don't discriminate" has at this point been proven beyond doubt inadequate to equalize opportunities.
Well how about, before you form an opinion, you go do some reading.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053482221000115
I take it you've never been a hiring manager or worked in HR. Hires are almost never made on an objective basis, the bias of interviewers/assessors inevitably affect outcomes. In the absence of positive discrimination, on average, this means unfair outcomes for minorities (because some people are bigots and most people have unconscious bias against out-groups).
Pretty weak analogy. Wikipedia was technologically trivial and did a really good job of avoiding vested interests. Also the hype is orders of magnitude different, noone ever claimed Wikipedia was going to lead to superhuman intelligences or to replacement of swathes of human creative/service workers.
Actually since you mention it, my hot take is that Wikipedia might have been a more significant step forward in AI than openAI/latest generation LLMs. The creation of that corpus is hugely valuable in training and benchmarking models of natural language. Also it actually disrupted an industry (conventional encyclopedias) in a way that I'm struggling to think of anything that LLMs has replaced in the same way thus far.
Good point. Yeah I didn't love how false start/neutral zone was called the whole game. Honestly the whole year it's pissed me off, seems just total chance what the crew notices.
Missing jaire and Preston. Agree, that level of execution would have made for a very un-fun game against the top teams.
Agreed, de facto, budget cuts have been and would be racist.
Fiscal conservatism actually does mean something though. Like you could imagine a left leaning fiscally conservative government that maintained a balanced budget by raising taxes on corps and the wealthy. That would be basically fine (though I think on balance not as good as running a modest deficit to fund nice policy). If you just go, yeah no those words are henceforth no-bueno, aren't you just buying into their doublespeak?
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I'm not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!