Yeah, Squenix are probably leaving the big-budget game space entirely because they could no longer afford to be in it. This is the problem of AAA development and why we’re seeing this consolidation - a single game with soft sales can mean a publisher isn’t just weakly profitable but even deeply in the red. Given dev…

they are collectable from the estate...

No one says “I spent 100 hours watching this TV show and now I’m done with it, how can I sell that?”

“I’m saving time/energy/frustration from having to do this myself.”

“I’ve spent 236 hours watching ‘Friends,’ wouldn’t it be great to monetize that?”

The industry didn’t all base their decisions on that one presentation, though - they largely independently came to that conclusion based on internal data (that they didn’t share). The dynamics of game sales have changed somewhat since then (particularly for indies), but the benefit of making demos for games with…

“I disagree I think they are win win.”

“I mean that is just not true.”

Heck, it’s all an especially sad lack of progress given that I recollect in the original, 1997 Fallout demo you could ally yourself with two enemy factions at the same time and play them off against each other Yojimbo style.

It may be a bit much calling them the “Oscars of video games.” The Oscars might be a self-congratulatory wankfest for the movie industry, but they primarily function as advertising and have themselves been marketed enough that people outside the industry care about them for some reason. The DICE awards, on the other…

I do find the (deliberate) misunderstanding of the quantum observer effect to be somewhat annoying (and it’s a bit of a cliche, now). Although to some degree all the SCP stuff amounts to, “this makes no sense, rationally, which is why it’s scary.”

The trope is based on the ancient Greek “emission theory” of vision (they actually did believe the eye worked by actively emitting rays) and a naive (mis)understanding of the quantum observer effect.  (The two of which are probably not entirely unrelated.)

It’s because, fundamentally, police “unions” aren’t about advocating for better working conditions and wages, but preventing accountability and transparency when they kill or abuse someone (corrections officer “unions” are similarly distinct entities). Police unions fundamentally exist to keep their members from…

Though they’re right, to some degree - who you are can have a much bigger impact on whether the police decide to shoot you than what you’re actually doing. Which is why the police shooting an absolutely staggering number of people, compared to any developed nation, has not been the burning political issue that it…

but why not conjugate it as “they is”

A convincing argument has been made that “police unions” are not actually even labor unions. They fundamentally don’t serve the same purpose.

“I wish every “comply or die” person gets the chance to experience being suddenly confronted with heavily armed people yelling at them when they least expect it.”

“Rubber” bullets tend to be metal bullets with a rubber outer core - the point is to shoot them at the ground so they bounce up into (e.g. the legs of) crowds of people with reduced force in order to dissuade them from being where they are. They aren’t meant to incapacitate. Only in that situation are they “less…

Is there a world where copyright only protects things while the original creator is alive?

Decades? More like centuries. The singular “they” was being used by Shakespeare, and it pre-dates him. It’s basically as old as Modern English, i.e. English.