Yes, I think calling it fraud is a fair conclusion, but what do you mean with “they knew it was closing”? This decision is completely in the hands of Ubisoft. Something doesn’t stop being fraud just because someone only decides to defraud you 2 months after they sold you something.

Sony actually issued full refunds to all customers who bought Concord.

‘The Crew’ by Ubisoft was sold for several months before they decided to shut it down. This would have at least forced them to communicate that before taking peoples money. I am also pretty sure that publishers don’t want to put this information on the package because it could seriously hurt sales. So the effect of this labelling requirement might be that publishers build the game in a way that enables self-hosting.

I think the commission will take action in some form. The worst case scenario in my mind is that they will only require clear labelling. Similar to what they did with smart phones recently. While this not exactly what I am hoping for, having “This game will at least be playable until XXXX” on the package or store page would still be a massive improvement over the status quo.

Looking though the related patents, fart filters certainly seem to be a hot topic among inventors.
Here is a patent for a literal butt-plug fart filter.
This one is from last year.

I never spent a single cent at their store and probably never will, but since Epic is so keen on burning money I am happy to help them with that.

You can just buy them for one year and keep using the perpetual fallback license. Also, they can fuck right off with their planet incinerating automatic plagiarism chat bots.

Most of their IDEs you can use for free for non-commercial purposes and even if you need to buy them; when you compare software development to any other profession our tools are incredibly cheap. You can get all the Jetbrains IDEs for less than 300€. Compare that to a HDL simulator or a 3D CAD application like Autodesk. These easily cost several thousand euros each year.

Imagine how successful their store could have been if they had put all that money into improving the launcher and not antagonizing large parts of their customer base instead.

New ones probably use something newer. The 20 year old elevator in a hospital will only be upgraded if something breaks.

We are far away from the release of the Raspberry Pi if that screen is running an early version of Windows CE. Putting a PC in the elevator to drive the screen was probably the most cost effective solution.

Yes? That is not that unusual and it is mentioned in the third sentence of the article.

As I rode up to the 14th floor, my eyes were drawn to a screen built into the side of the lift.

It’s probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.

Diablo 2 came out in the year 2000 it has ladder seasons.

Garmin is currently in the process of enshittifing their products as well.

We use OpenProject at my job and its pretty good. You can use Nextcloud as a document repository and integrate it with OpenProject.

Coq cowardly renamed their project because of this.

Its Lunduke, a self-proclaimed a-political tech journalist. You can pretty much disregard anything that spews from his mouth.

Its not so bad, there is Jellyfin, the various arr applications ( Radarr, Sonarr…), ShareX, Duplicati, and a lot of libs. It might not be as active as C , Python or Rust but I think saying that there is no real FOSS movement is a bit unfair.

I think even a relaunch with only the first campaign at the start could revitalize the community. I’d wager there are plenty of people who would want to relive the glory days of Guild Wars 1.