To make sure they get blocked by the most amount of people.

It applies to most business.

1. You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
2. You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
3. You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.

Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

There’s a couple of ways to block it.

1. Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.

2. If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.

3. If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.

There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.

Lying about collecting that data, because they do (and I block it). Not lying, but backtracking on everything else.

Just gota get it up. Might be harder than it looks, though.

A TV will do, for a child. He doesn’t NEED anything fancy. Will it be a great experience? Absolutely not. Others here have already gone over the issues. That being said, if cash flow is an issue (relatable), it’ll be fine. Console gamers have been doing it for literal decades. I also used to do it, back when I was a kid, when we had an old 480i TV. Your kid should be grateful that he can play his games. People can spend too much time worrying about not getting the best experience (especially when giving advice to others), when it’s often not needed.

RIP Volition. From Decent, Red Faction, Summoner, and Saints Row, they made some really good stuff. Even if the modern Volition is nowhere near the team it might have been, it’s sad to see a studio being closed.

Check out Heroic Game Launcher. It works with GoG, handles GoG Galaxy Cloud Save support, and works with Proton (similar to Steam). A very good client.