It’s worth noting that the Apple tax on iOS is exactly the same as the Valve tax on Steam: 30%
It’s a hell of a fee for processing a credit card payment plus a bit of file storage. No wonder neither company feels the need to actually make their own games.
It’s just in the US and it’s obviously because of tariffs. But nobody can say that aloud in public otherwise it will make Trump feel upset, and we can’t be having that, apparently. He can hear you. He can hear all of you. And it’s making him upset.
Not only that but there is a broad lack of understanding and empathy towards the elderly and people of all ages suffering from mental decline. It’s ableism, to put it plainly.
The article is a little vague on this, but it seems like this round of price hikes is just for the US and it’s due to tariffs.
The smaller third party companies market and advertise their Hall effect sticks as something special to differentiate their products from the big companies. There are probably overstated claims being made in much of this advertising, as there tends to be in all advertising.
Perhaps this is the great lie of Hall effect marketing. Everything breaks, especially if you let kids use it.
Really, the N64? The N64 stick was not in-practice long-lasting. I’ve never gone out of my way to get modern Hall effect stuff, but if they’re anything like that then I understand why they remain a niche thing for hobbyists who will baby them.
Is it as simple as planned obsolescence, or is there something else about the production or use of Hall effect sticks that causes every single console from Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Valve to not have them?
Just don’t forget that Steam is another corporate run platform and Valve nukes online accounts too.
Yes, it is certainly fair to take the reading that the point is to play the game by continually resisting the fascist options that are provided. However, I’m not sure if the “was it worth it” hollow victory screen at the very end forgives the many hours of fascist “hard times make strong men” scenarios that precede it. If anything, the “was it worth it” further underlines the “hardness” of those “hard choices” and therefore does not contest or critique the fascist frame. The fascist would proudly answer “yes” and the game would appear perfectly coherent to them.
It’s not that one needs to take a fascist reading of the game, but to borrow from Stuart Hall, the dominant reading of this game is clearly a fascist one. Yes, an antifascist reading is possible, but that reading is one built through a very careful process of negotiation with the text.
It’s a game that constantly gives you overwrought “tough choices” where the two options are either a) fascism or b) you are soft and naive and everyone will die.
Oh Nintendo already does make exploitative freemium games, but they (mostly) put that stuff on phones and not on Nintendo devices.
The original Game Boy weighs 220g (I’m not sure if that includes batteries or not), but the Switch Lite isn’t much more. It’s 275g with the battery included.
However, the original Switch is quite a bit heavier at 398g, the Switch 2 is 534g, and the Steam Deck is a whopping 640g. The new Xbox handheld looks like it will be quite a bit bigger than the Steam Deck and will probably be even worse to carry around. These devices simply aren’t suitable for kids, and some of them aren’t that easy to hold for adults either. This is a real shame and pushes kids further towards using phones that are filled with exploitative freemium games and social media slop.
Yeah, a mob with a guillotine has never achieved anything. Everyone knows that.
In a capitalist society we are constantly judging and being judged as having moral character based on our consumption. Pierre Bourdieu called this “distinction” and argued that the objects we buy and surround ourselves with represent “taste” that demonstrates and furthers class positioning in a capitalist society. Under capitalism, these objects carry great meaning and a person can communicate complex ideas and social information simply by how they hold a specific consumer good in their hand. Bourdieu argued that class struggle is also a “classification struggle”.
Doom is pretty retro for that setup. It could easily manage Half Life and Unreal, maybe even Quake 3.
Also the Washington Post actually pays its writers.
Considering YouTube live streams about games are usually filled with incels complaining about woke, I hope video game studios have a standard policy of ignoring them.
In addition to what others have said, neoliberalism more specifically has always been cruel, violent, and authoritarian since the beginning. Margaret Thatcher was not exactly a person who believed in peace, love, and togetherness.