Patents are (at their core) a good thing. It protects little Jimmy Inventor from putting hours and his blood, sweat and tears into coming up with a novel invention, only for some big corpo to see it, steal the idea and bully Jimmy out of the market.

Jimmy has legal recourse to sue the big corpo if he has a patent, whereas without one he has nothing.

Just because the system’s been gamed (especially in the US) doesn’t mean it’s impossible to reform, and is currently still better than nothing.

Too bad, you get a battlepass instead!

Arkham Knight is decent except for the batmobile sections - as others have already mentioned.

I’d still argue it’s better than Origins though. From memory, memorising all the different toolbelt skills isn’t really necessary - you can definitely get through the game by just abusing jumps, cloak and counters - some special enemies might need a specific ability to make vulnerable, but the game normally warns you the first time you fight them, so I don’t think it ever feels too overwhelming - it just feels like a lot if you run through it very quickly.

This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

Have to disagree with you on echoes - I loved the game, but IMO it was much easier than Prime 1 - the most difficult boss was the probably the boost guardian midway through rather than any of the endgame bosses. The ammo system made the standard power beam too centralising which was boring, and the dark world damage just served to slow the player down, since the light fields regenerated your health.

No one’s suggested it yet, so I’ll say Fire Emblem: Three Houses - lots of gameplay hours, especially if you want to go through each of the four storylines, albeit can be a bit repetitive getting to that point.

Here’s another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.

Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.

Bobby Kotick is likely on the way out at least (probably via golden parachute).

Yeah I do understand the reasoning and honestly can’t fault them for it - they are a for-profit company after all.

Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good example of them throwing their weight around (which is admittedly rare).

Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam’s ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.

Devs aren’t going to drop Steam as a store, so they’re stuck.

That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.

I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.

People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

Can confirm that the first doesn’t work on Alexandrite, but the second works as expected.

I think you’re right and it’s frontend-specific - I’m using Alexandrite and it shows perfectly, but I just checked the default Lemmy UI and it doesn’t handle it properly either.

Tbh it sounds more and more like it’s a kbin interaction problem rather than anything you’re doing…

Not sure if there’s any way for you to resolve it other than getting a Beehaw mod to update it for you.

If you look at the source between your post and the OP of this chain, you can see that they haven’t got any special link formatting, but the links will all work correctly for any lemmy user no matter their instance - not sure if kbin handles it correctly.

e.g. [!destroy\_my\_game](https://programming.dev/c/destroy_my_game) vs !destroy_my_game@programming.dev

I suspect it’s just a convenience thing, since a number of your links point to kbin.cafe search results.

I think Lemmy uses ! for instances because @ is used for users - e.g. I expect that @floppy@reabbitea.rs will automatically link to your profile on your instance (and link to your profile on any other viewer’s instance - e.g. for me it should link to an aussie.zone URL).

It’s probably a design decision to differentiate communities from users.

Since you’re posting to a lemmy instance (beehaw), you should probably use the lemmy style - i.e. !community@instance - I don’t think there’s any need to create an explicit link since I think most UIs will format it for you.

Overwatch(2) - !overwatch2@lemmy.ml

Pretty sure it’s a triple whammy - Steamworks, always online, and denuvo to top it off.