You should see the Xbox section in most Japanese games and electronics stores. Even in the big ones in Akihabara, you’re lucky if the Xbox One games cover more than couple of shelves these days. The pre-owned hardware is so cheap at times that they’re practically giving it away compared with western prices too.

That does happen but competition can now be quite fierce for those among expats since that ‘secret’ was made public knowledge a while ago.

I’ve owned it on the PC since day 1 and have never modded it. Part of the reason for that though is only visual enhancement mods tend to interest me and the game can push even a high end PC to its limits out of the box without adding ReShade into the equation.

I think Take Two have proven time and time again that they really couldn’t give a fuck. The power of that franchise and the Rockstar brand alone means that they can refuse to participate in E3 and Gamescom, occasionally make anti-consumerist decisions and delay their games as much as they need to and millions of…

“After discussions with Take-Two, Take-Two has agreed that it generally will not take legal action against third-party projects involving Rockstar’s PC games that are single-player, non-commercial, and respect the intellectual property (IP) rights of third parties.”

One of the best and worst ones from my memory was the ‘Dastardly’ achievement from Red Dead Redemption. Whilst slightly funny and easy to get, what you had to do to get it went totally against the John Marsden character that Rockstar seemed to want to build in that game.

Just yesterday an easy platinum trophy ‘game’ was pulled from PSN. The real mystery there was how managed to get through Sony’s 3rd party QA and pass the notorious requirements checklist test.

EA are now embracing free season passes on a lot of their big franchises. They’re also not into HD remasters, platform exclusive content or staggered releases.

Your childish hyperbole makes all gamers look bad. Show some perspective.

What do you mean “companies who pull shit like this”? Most of this sort of nonsense comes from Activision’s direction.

Some will. I doubt that all do though.

Fine, accept shit customer service and sub-standard network QoS on a service that millions of people around the world pay for if that’s really want.

You don’t need to dedicate bandwidth to it. That’s the thing these days. Companies like AWS, Azure, Rackspace etc will literally just offer you additional bandwidth and failover as and when you need it and you only pay for what you use.

If you wanted to look professional, retain a consistent level of service and look better than your growing list of competitors, yes.

They don’t though. Others have developed processes to deal with this stuff e.g. Amazon still works on Black Friday. Valve presumably just don’t want to pay the price for implementing those processes.

Indeed. It’s well and truly smashed now but I didn’t notice anything particularly special on offer when I was able to view the pages.

They use caching services I think so the pages sometimes take a while to update.

Except most of the purchases don’t work when Steam is severely fucked like it is right now so arguably this actually costs Valve money.

It is, it’s just an initial thing. It will be fine in an hour or so but that’s not really the point.

It doesn’t, you’re right but it still leads to a shit user experience and for a company who now own what is arguably the world’s biggest gaming platform, that’s a bit weak.