Technology

Then they double killed it when they started introducing nonsense like flying cars with rocket launchers.

On the flip side, it's given it insane longevity and made it feel more modern. Playing singleplayer feels so annoying at times because of their arbitrary rules (which are still in online, but toned down a little) and gameplay/mission design.

At least GTAO showed everyone rockstar's true nature, and you couldn't turn away or say that it's a small alternative game mode.
So shoutout to online and 5 as a whole for showing me enough to avoid all future rockstar titles lol

I don’t understand why people needed to give them constant money. For real, I played for a minute but never spent a dime. Why buy things when you can achieve them?

Unfortunately, the online component easily becomes a profitable sideline. Sarcastically, it's what keeps some game corporation CEOs afford their lifestyles.

maybe the goal is instead to try to get ahead of regulation by implementing a system that is easily bypassed by most kids (like these video based age estimations). Then they can show this to the regulator and be like: "look were already doing everything we can, no need to actually put the regulation in place".

Maybe that actually makes it playable. But who am I kidding?

Seriously. Our school had a presentation by a guy about kids and computer usage. The gist of it was: Roblox bad, because of paedophiles. GTA good, because it furthers role playing. Basically the opposite of the age recommendations.

more like 99%

$omething tells me that won't happen

This falls on the parents instead because of dumb laws every one has to deal with this, I just hope that not all countries are this insane:

users in the UK have had to take photos of themselves and upload it to a service that uses AI to guess their age. Or, send in photos of ID such as passports or driving licenses.

The point is to make children used to checks.

It's a didactic law.

IRL usually children grow up feeling they are free (except for their parents) to an extent.

This is intended so that identifying yourself in the Internet were normal by the time you grow up for it to matter.

But, of course, there might be some good considerations, if you're into playing devil's advocate. People might remember which stupid shit they were posting when they were younger, and want for future generations to be always conscious of the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity, and superficial anonymity vs real. People might want to make it so that nobody had a false sense of security, leading to really bad mistakes. People might want this to be the step preceding some way to fight bots.

And they might even not have good considerations, but eventually realize that the oppressive system they are building is best rebuilt for something better and used differently. Wouldn't be the first time in history.

It's just that laying down your arms in hopes for that is unwise.

Wrong. You "lose" the age verification feature.

If we’re going to government age verification everywhere just get rid of fucking ESRB and content ratings

This is a game made in Scotland, ESRB is a voluntary US based system.

Moms are still getting plenty of action though, right? Wont someone think of the moms!!!!

They have way more investors to jerk off and please now

My mum enjoyed the bonus level in the mall where you could just kill like 100 people as fast as you could.

Her favourite weapon is the flamethrower.

Her first reaction to the game was "that's disgusting", but I let her have a go and suddenly she was toasting a whole crowd and loving every minute of it.

Is it even hard ro find someone's SSN anymore?

age verification is just a BS strawman. do you remember when we where young? we would access stuff and find ways to buy stuff. but whenever there was a reasonable but fair gap, it would be much harder to get whatever we wanted: buying weed was so much easier, than buying alcohol (without the appropriate age).

pirating is easy (even i figured it out before having enough money to buy movies & games). so the kids will just pirate that stuff and get their way anyway. age verification at the store makes so much more sense. sure, there are ways to circumvent those. but it is a reasonable stop block.

Parents will just have their kids play on their accounts. This only hurts the average person who now needs to worry about who has that information and how it's secured.

They absolutely will