Few powerful people deciding everything and millions falling in line and the few outliers being affected even if they opt out due to decisions of millions of others who support the few powerful sums up the world.

It makes sense now why in old scifi movies everything looked all dusty despite being the future.

Youtube is Google. I don’t see a positive to handing over personal information to Google which is necessary to give them money, and just makes it easier for Google to have all information tied to one signed in account. Having no Google account is best.

Freetube is nice alternative to using youtube without an account, since things like subscriptions, playlists, history are saved locally without an account. And you can back up that data.

And with Google being behind youtube its better to avoid signing into their accounts anyways.

Also blocks ads, can download videos, sponsor block, dearrow, and block channels.

Sometimes freetube breaks and that’s when I’ll fall back to youtube with adblock on browser, but I won’t log into youtube. But, you can still use it to get your subscription feed and click on the video to launch to browser.

For mobile I use pipepipe which is a fork of newpipe with sponsorblock and channel blocking.

It sucks the entire world turning into a privacy nightmare. Will any country remain the lone hold out against pushing stuff like this on their people?

I skipped on remake too since I figured wait for everything to come out would take yeara and years.

I play those games for free with friends, but spend zero money on them preferring to spend that money on games that aren’t live service.

That’s the difference I’m noticing in money spent not on why people play them.

I see no added value in cosmetics and these games tend to give away cosmetics too and enough points to redeem battle pass for free, so you aren’t stuck on default outfit if you dont spend.

And using either of them doesn’t guarantee your data won’t get out anyways for products provided by corporations like the recent tiktok outcome showed where a billion dollar company would rather sell out than close down to protect users.

Its not me but the person I responded to that is using one phone, so their work may not provide such things.

Also the case with Marvel and Star Wars is the quality dived off the cliff and alienated even original fans.

If people didn’t like it just because it is old then Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon wouldn’t still be popular.

Triple AAA titles that are now 75% off or lower with complete editions from a couple of years ago is also what new AAA titles are competing against.

That was at its infancy though. And the market for video games is bigger than the movie and music industry combined, which wasn’t the case back then.

Makes sense for niche hobby to be expensive and then fall over time as the potential userbase for it grows, so price adjusting to maximize profits by finding one that reaches as many people as possible versus trying to stay afloat off fewer consumers.

Pokemon games come out often.

I think that’s the big difference. In a single console generation like the PS3 you had Naughty Dog put out Uncharted 1, Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3, and Last of Us 1.

For the PS4 they put out Last of Us 2, Uncharted 4, and Uncharted Lost Legacy.

And for PS5 nothing.

Games aren’t released often by individual studios anymore. The ones that stay part of the public eye frequently release games like Call of Duty or have a live service model like GTA V that has people keep playing like it is Fortnite. Or keep releasing sequels like Pokemon does as opposed to 1 or 2 releases a console generation.

It’s also interesting they spend their money on cosmetics over buying games. Meanwhile, I’ve bought no cosmetics for f2p games I play like The Finals, and instead spend that money on buying single player and coop games.

Not a good idea to mix personal and work devices. I’d recommend getting a cheap budget phone to use for work.

I buy complete editions. My trick is I just visit isthereanydeals and see what the sales price is and buy games when it is cheap. I don’t consider retail price the real price.

Yeah it is. That site and isthereanydeals is what people should visit before buying any game. Retail price is meaningless. Sales price is what people should be paying and the sites do an excellent job of showing price of games across different stores and sales trends.

You don’t have to pay retail price if you do a little research before clicking buy.

Retail price doesn’t even matter anyways. It’s more a placeholder to make sales seem more impressive with X% off to make people feel they are getting a bargain.

Too bad companies seek exponential profit due to line having to go up, so pricing games higher wouldn’t lead to killing off microtransactions even if priced at $200.

Companies don’t hit a point where they go this is enough money. They became companies because their mentality is this isn’t enough, and its only the a mount consumers are willing to pay that keeps price from inflating more like companies want.

Yeah, IOT is the version to choose at install with it getting 10 years of support compared to 5 years for the regular enterprise.