I think you forgot the biggest three in my opinion:

1) They promise gains. Either that they’re “foolproof” or “impossible to lose” OR gains substantially above 7% return on investment consistently. If gains above the standard stock market average gains existed, institutional investors would use them and then that would…

Yup! basically-- #16 is the only one you need to know.  If I had a method that was routinely earning 1000% gains on my investment, I would be either doing that, or pursuing my hobbies.  Some of them will claim “oh I want to share this so other people can have what I have!” but if that’s the case why do they want 1600…

one thing that really bugs me is that the grief stages were never meant for OTHER people. They were derived from study of terminal patients coming to grips with their OWN death. Some of the stages are way way more pronounced in the context of coming to grips with your own coming death and are fairly rare when someone…

That’s fair, but I think the full picture of why they enjoy such positive PR and fan goodwill requires looking at GOG and their general demeanor not just their games. They enjoy a widespread positive perception among the gamer community, and they don’t just love them for their games, they love them for a lot of…

I’m with you. I don’t want “bigger” but more vacuous. The problem with many open world games is if you have X number of actual map designers and Y number of writers and each of them can do C number of things, your entire world is only going to have X*C map setpeices and Y*C bits of story writing.

that said, it seems like hype worked for them.  The actual sales numbers were stellar, the number of refunds was actually very low, and it seems to have been a financial success for them. 

Oblivion was HUGE, it routinely tops “best games of all time” lists to this day, and is widely regarded as having the best “true expansion” of all time— and one of the last before the DLC model became dominant. Oh and they also were arguably the first major game to use the DLC model too, love it or hate it, that…

On top of their games you have their storefront which has done absolutely incredible things for games preservation and “fair play” in retro and classic gaming— they’ve worked with old developers, some now fully defunct, to not only untangle some thorny copyrights and license issues, but done their best to ensure…

It’s always gone through cycles. It seems that a big commercially-available engine hits the sweet spot of owners that license it reasonably and being technologically dominant, it gets a major competitor or two, they truck along for a while as the dominant market paradigm. But then eventually they start showing their…

I think you make a good point. I know a few vegans that actually keep rather quiet about it because they don’t want to be lumped in with THOSE vegans.

Taken in isolation, perhaps, a great example is the supposed “gen-Z tattoo” which is actually rather close to a rune used by supremacists. BUT that is if you take them in isolation.  Most of these people don’t have a SINGLE tattoo-- and that tells a story too when you take them all as a grouping and they have common…

especially pernicious when combined with the glue on my state’s tags, which not only come on the flimsiest backing paper known to man and require a razor to carefully peel up, but the adhesive itself is only a step beyond that of a post-it note.

I’ve taken to covering the entire sticker area with strong clear packing…

Pictures are fine and I take them especially of areas that I see damage but I also take a good video running around the car, and the interior.

It might pick up details you missed and it captures continuously so if they claim damage in some place you never recall inspecting in detail you can just skip to that point in…

yes, but the developers gave away lots of products for free. Especially for indy developers (and I do know several, whose games are on steam) that can be a huge hit. Valve can also get upset if you give away too many keys and restrict your developer account, not that this would happen for like Back 4 Blood or Kerbal,…

I bought both. The itch.io bundle is mostly indy shovelware, one-page or small tabletop RPG books, games made to make more of a political point than to be an enjoyable, playable game, and stuff that would have been well at home on a flash game site circa 2010... but for 10 bucks it’s WELL worth the price for the few…

I mean, you can call anything any name you want.  it’s good marketing, for exactly the reason you say, but just because they use that name doesn’t mean that has anything to do with their actual practice-- consider that some of the most oppressive regimes on earth call themselves “democratic republics” and are, in…

I find the effect fascinating, it’s so prevalent there’s even a loanword for it-- “galapagos technology”-- for technology that evolved in a widely divergent way from the rest of the world, or would not survive outside Japan because it’s so ill-adapted to the way everyone else works.

I don’t see how that’s relevant?  The game doesn’t access the save and config files that often, after all.  Not only that, forcing a game to quit can end up bypassing the cleanup and resource release process as well.

I had this argument with a developer the other day. Kill -9 (it’s an IBM proprietary AIX Unix box) is NOT a safe command for use in a production environment, it should never be used as a substitute for taking more care with your program to avoid it consuming excessive resources, failing to gracefully terminate when…

I agree entirely. If you’re going to write a news article, exaggerating for effect is not okay. The actual law is horrible enough, but when you print an easily-disproven lie, you just make it easier for any opponent to go “see, they don’t know what they’re talking about!”