Yes. The United States Board on Geographic Names is the group within the Department of the Interior which handles these matters. They are a part of the executive branch. I suspect that you can follow a chain of delegated authorities through that board, up the civil service hierarchy, landing on the desk of the President.

This is an example of the system not accounting for, or being ambivalent about, the election of someone to that office with a fascist ideology.

I’m speculating, and certainly not a business expert, so heaping handfuls of salt comes with this statement: I think part of the problem that led to this is that each game was published by a different entity. Square published 2016, then put the devs up for sale the following year, citing underperformance. IO buys itself out and becomes independent, but needs capital to get Hitman 2 across the finish line. Enter a publishing deal with Warner Bros. That game proves successful enough that Hitman 3 is able to be self-published.

Considering IO’s concept of this World of Assassination trilogy was always that it would have certain online-only or live servicey features, and I assume that publishers often provide the necessary infrastructure for these things, I wonder if the rotating chair of publishers is to blame for making this process so much more obtuse than it needs to be.

Cause it doesn’t matter if they are still profitable. If you aren’t MORE profitable than your last outing, then you aren’t growing, and if your business isn’t growing, it’s dying.

However, I wonder if the premise is flawed here. In 1999, you could probably get a somewhat accurate idea of a game’s profitablity by comparing dev cost vs units sold. However, with live service being the AAA fascination du jour, and Call of Duty in particular having a whole game mode siloed off into the free to play space, I question if “units sold” is indicative of financial success anymore.

Remakes are not inherently devoid of creativity. And, frankly, Capcom seems to have a pretty decent track record when it comes to revisiting their IP, at least as far as the Resident Evil series. Case in point, the remake of RE1 from way back in the GameCube days is, arguably, the definitive way to experience that story. It retained the core features of the OG game, but expanded upon them, and remixed certain aspects to keep the experience fresh, even for a diehard fan of the OG. I would like to have seen the face of someone who played the hell out of RE1 watching a dispatched zombie resuscitate as a Crimson Head for the first time.

More recently, the RE 2 and 3 remakes offer a wildly different experience from their original blueprints, what with the change in perspective and what not. However, rather than overhauling everything about those games into RE4 style action games, as the perspective would imply, they maintain an emphasis on inventory management, puzzles, and evading danger rather than confronting it. This keeps the remakes feeling like the games that they are based upon, but offers a different gameplay experience, one that is less of an ask for modern players to adapt to.

So, idk man. Call me a simpleton lining up to suckle at corporate teats if you like, but I’m pretty fucking excited over the idea of a Dino Crisis remake.

Complaining that Borderlands 3 has a juvenile tone, while praising the first two games great stories, feels disingenuous. Or, at the very least, it reads as excessively nostalgic.

Offline play? It’s SOLITAIRE. Offline play should be the ONLY play, by default.

Feeling like I took crazy pills this morning…

That’s a little reductive. The Division is a primarily PVE looter shooter with MMO trappings. Rainbow 6 is a competitive hero shooter with emphasis on quick kills and gadgets. Ghost Recon is an open world action game with emphasis on stealth.

Don’t get me wrong, “Ubisoft game” could be its own genre at this point, considering the amount of mechanical overlap in some areas, but most of those products do offer generally distinct gameplay experiences. Though, it does seem like Rainbow 6 and xDefiant would be positioned as rivals in market share, upon reflection.

They link their source in the article, and the source has a FAQ which has their methodology explained in the first question. You are capable of looking at market, you just need to, y’know…look.

In short, they are among the 867 partners on your favorite website who want to install cookies on your browser for analytics. OS info is included in what it reports back home.

Whether it’s and advantage or not depends on your perspective. If you want the fediverse to supplant Big Tech, then no, having a culture which is not welcoming of outsiders is not an advantantage.

However, if you happen to be a part of Lemmy’s “in-group”, you probably don’t want a bunch of “normies” flooding in and cluttering up your feed with what you consider to be low effort shitposts, or starting drama in the comments. In that sense, maintaining a barrier to entry is an advantage because, in this mindset, if they can’t be bothered to wrap their head around a slightly more complex signup than usual, than they weren’t going to be good members of this community.

Perhaps some will disagree with my interpretation of the two popes (I meant poles, but I’m keeping the typo) of users here. To be clear, I’m not ascribing a value judgment to either position. I think both have valid points, and, frankly, I’m not sure where I come down on it.

I suppose I cling to the old adage that a bad game is bad forever, while a delayed game may some day be good. It’s less true today than when Miyamoto said it (No Man’s Sky being the commonly cited example of a game which was able to turn its radioactive launch into a fairly positive experience), but I still believe it’s more accurate than not. I’m picking on a straw man here, but I wonder how many of those “gamers” bemoaning Halo’s long absence also look down their noses at the yearly release mill of sports games. Far as I’m concerned, new games in a franchise should come when the creators feel they have something new to showcase. A new mechanic, new engine, a new plot, whatever. Obviously, the games industry at large is perfectly happy to ok boomer me, and I’m perfectly happy to keep mining through my backlog of games which manage to be fun without live updates.

This article, or corpo propaganda depending on your cynicism, asserts as fact that “gamers” are clamoring at the gates, screaming about the length of time between installments in franchises. That rings hollow to me. If anything, it seems like franchise fatigue is a much more common ailment. However, Lemmy is the entirety of my social media presence, so I am sure I’m not tuned in to the wider landscape.

Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn’t quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let’s Play on YouTube that discusses the game’s development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I’d like Let’s Plays to be. Worth checking out if you’ve the time.

Are you running any mods, or rolling vanilla?

Yes, I believe the figure they cited was that Google earns 73% of their revenue through ads. I imagine what they would have to do is bust up the ad services in addition to the various departments of Google. Each new entity formed gets to keep revenue from ads shown on their platform maybe? E.g. YouTube gets spun off into its own thing separate from Google proper. They get to keep ad revenue from what is shown on their platform, but they don’t get to touch any revenue from sponsored search listings, or from banner ads on other websites, etc.

That’s an approach that makes surface level sense to me, but I am neither a lawyer nor a business bro nor a tech bro. So, I don’t actually have the faintest idea if my idea bears any resemblance to reality.

I’m speculating, but perhaps the thought would be that separating Google Search from the rest of the company would deprive them of the alternative revenue streams they used to maintain their market position? If I remember the ruling against them correctly, one of the key pieces of evidence cited by the judge was that Google spent like 30 billion dollars a year to have 3rd parties use their engine by default.

Huge caveat on this one, as I don’t actually remember much of the movie, but the residual impression I have of 2019’s Triple Threat was that it was a good time. Pretty stellar cast, too. Tony Jaa, Iko Uwais, Scott Adkins, and Michael Jai White are the most notable, though I’m sure the other players present have mountains of stunt / fight experience to their names.

Hmm, so, last month I began to have issues with my Chromecast for the first time. I have an old 3rd gen Chromecast attached to my bedroom television (not a smart tv) for the purpose of casting obnoxiously long video essays to fall asleep to. After like a decade of essentially hassle free operation, it suddenly stopped being able to maintain a connection to my phone. I cast a video, and after approximately 10 minutes, the cast disconnects and I get a message on my phone saying “this video cannot be played in the background”. I’ve tried ever troubleshooting technique I can think of.

I know I shouldn’t attribute to malice what can be explained by other causes, but boy, seeing this news today sure makes me think about things like planned obsolescence.

You’re making the same points as the article (and the devs), hence OP stating that what he posted is not the “clickbait journalism” that you appeared to accuse it of being originally.

If you were saying the other articles referred to in the headline are clickbait journalism, then I’m pretty sure we’re all on the same page. Your phrasing was just a little ambiguous at first.

Check it out for yourself, if you like. 22 minute gameplay demo. I think it looks neat, but I am not involved enough with the game to samee how these things interact with one another.

Oh my goodness. Thank you for pointing out the different VA. I knew something felt off, moreso than the new character models.

Also, I can’t help but feel like the updated Frank wandered out of the basement tier of fighters from a Street Fighter title. I feel like he should be chubbier and ruddier. I can’t speak for the direction they took the character in later installments but he always felt like kind of a goober schmuck whose “instincts” finally paid off. I like that characterization, especially in light of the game’s satire of clueless Americans.

I’ll keep an eye on this one. I never did get that achievement for killing the 53,000 zombies in a playthrough…