warm

They dont want people buying the old games, even their 15 year old ones are still full price on purpose. They want you in the latest game each year, exposed to all the predatory extra-transactions, then they want you to do that again the next year and the next and the next... the games are not priced like that because they "forgot", it's a business strategy.

AAA is just cash grab, they haven't been good or innovative games for a long, long time now. They are very good at marketing to the masses though and they have the pricing tiers laid out perfectly to extract as much money from people as they can.

They start off with their massive price tag like $70-80, plus the deluxe editions for $100-120 for any suckers who want a fucking extra skin. Then after a couple months when sales slow down, they put it on sale for like 20% off, then a couple months more, its like 40% off and so on. DLC has kind of fallen off, as they get people stuck in the battle pass and cosmetic buying loop instead (people are crazy).

If a AAA game looks interesting to you at all, you are literally best just waiting a few months or more, it's a win-win, you either buy it it's actual value or you get the reviews that its a disgusting broken mess or was completely over-hyped (it's these last two 99% of the time).

Steam sales are for getting them older games a bit cheaper, good indie games are worth their price tag multiple times over honestly so unless you are tight on money, I'd support the developer regardless of sales.

I wish Steam would put the 3rd-party requirements nice and obvious above the buy button. Along with "uses AI content", "in-app purchases" and "always online requirement" banners too. And more too, every game should be shamed before users get to the buy button.

So they just want MKBHD basically.

In other news, firefighter learns to use hose to put out fires.

It's a Proton VPN service, where they hop you through multiple servers. I guess OP assumes this is a thing for all VPNs? Or they are calling servers, VPNs.
But they are testing between different Proton VPN servers, one with "Secure Core" and one without.

As much as Twitch needs gutting, Kick is much worse.

Yeah, I can see it working until they come up with some workaround. Like you can buy currency, trade it as much as you want, but then that is used to buy cometics. So probably best to just ban the sale of it altogether.

Ban it all then. I'd personally ban all extra transactions in games to be honest, but we can start with removing virtual currency.

Both are true.

Might be in USD, but that probably doesn't translate to other currencies. Either way, they are using it to circumvent laws, refunds etc. They will still be pricing things so you have just under the amount you need, so you have to buy the next package up... then leaving you with too many coins than you needed, but still just short of another item. It's all predatory and needs to be abolished.

I'm sure they could draft something that allows that sort of thing still. The currency in games like EVE/WoW/RuneScape is technically an in-game item rather than a currency for a storefront.

If that sort of thing would end up being abused, then it'd have to go obviously.