Ironically doesn't this star wars analogy work the other way. Israel citizens are attacked. A small relatively small amount of civilians die. Then Israel goes commits genocide.
How is Lemmy so anti corporate, but bends over backwards to defend steam as an immaculate corporation. I love steam, and 90% of my game purchases or from their store. 5% are from stores that let me redeem steam keys.
I think their market position should have some scrutiny.
But you could say it pushed the limits. It required the Ram Expansion Pak. I think only 3 or 4 N64 games required that. It was packed with weird game modes like counter op. The far sight gun as a weird experiment to see through walls. It really pushed the limits and tried to do a lot. TimeSplitters was a great spiritual successor to the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark series that continued the tradition.
I don't think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn't get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB's for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it's not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.
Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.
Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn't always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren't easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it's basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don't own it all, but that's fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.
Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don't think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.
But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.
Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn't have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.
Takeaways from the AP investigation into the Palestinian families being decimated in Gaza ( apnews.com )
$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players ( www.gamesradar.com )
Perfect Dark - Gameplay Reveal - Xbox Games Showcase 2024 ( www.youtube.com )
IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell ( aftermath.site )
Welp, this didn't take long....
Comcast Unveils Peacock, Netflix, Apple TV+ Streaming Bundle ( www.hollywoodreporter.com )
Cable is dead. Long live the cable bundle. Curious to see the pricing and if the bundle only includes ad tiered options.
[Ahoy] What genre is DOOM? ( www.youtube.com )