I’m surprised this didn’t start happening sooner. Unlike in other industries where patents and copyright can protect the smaller guy, there’s nothing to protect smaller devs from larger studios that have the resources to troll for novel game mechanics and steal them wholesale.

You assume Redshell was using cookies, they were not.

I made it about networking because guess what: That is where the complexity and costs are, plus that’s what you’ve been rattling on about this whole time. Insofar as talking about publisher relationships, etc. you’re just moving the goalposts.

I do have some insight because I’ve written cloud scale applications that process hundreds of thousands of requests per second and have years of experience developing on top of Amazon Web Services.

You’re confusing bandwidth scaling with complexity. Scaling bandwidth is easy, especially since Discord is built on Google Cloud.

You do realize that Discord’s infrastructure is more complicated than Steam’s right?

Odds of Discord going for a digital distribution market to take on Steam? Valve has a distinct lack of customer service so Discord could probably nail them on that alone.

All the RedShell software is, is a convenience library so that developers don’t have to re-implement the same function over and over if they want to send a fingerprint to RedShell. In otherwords, it’s likely only called when you make a transaction or some other thing that the game developers were advertising and want…

They need to advertise because game costs are subsidized by microtransactions. If games kept up with inflation and development costs they would be at least $30-$40 more expensive. However, gamers won’t accept higher game prices so here we are.

Glancing at this page it is loading tracking from: Doubleclick, Chartbeat, Criteo, QuantServe, and SkimResources. There’s also two Facebook pixels being loaded. They are all doing the exact same thing that RedShell does, this includes fingerprinting (which is what everyone’s angry at RedShell for), which gets around…

It’s not actually a third party program. It’s a convenience library that hooks into the game code so that developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to send a fingerprint to RedShell. As I mentioned elsewhere, the games removing this library will just move to manually writing the code to send the…

It’s not spyware, all of the information RedShell is getting is accessible via JavaScript, meaning every single website you visit gets it too. Including Kotaku.

The irony of people being outraged at this and visiting Kotaku is real. Guess what? Kotaku’s ad networks, etc. do this *exact* same thing.

Meiji likely has body dysmorphia. While plastic surgery can be part of treating it, it needs to be done under the supervision of a therapist and with one’s mind in a healthy place. I think it’s fairly clear her thoughts were not in a healthy place before undertaking the surgery. Unfortunately the odds of her seeing a…

On the social axis, yes it is the furthest left it has been in awhile. On the economic policy axis, we’re the furthest right we’ve been in a long time. This is where Obama and Clinton were more Republican than they were Democrat.

I wonder if this is a classic left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing thing? Seems like the press conference was driven by Square-Enix international. Whereas Square-Enix Japan is doing its own thing and wants to keep their announcements to TGS or tonight at the Sony presser.

It’s less that and more the Democrat party is two separate parties:

Basically to moderate all of this, Valve would actually have to hire people. Except, as we’ve seen with their anemic customer support over the years, Valve does not want to invest in this side of their business.

Beyond all the reasons you’ve mentioned, Overwatch as a game has changed. Gold/Platinum/Diamond these days are less about your mechanical skills and positioning and more about how much you can herd the rest of your team mates. It is really unfortunate that Blizzard has decided to not focus on fixing toxicity and…

Agreed, but what I mean about the Phoenix is that the recurring threat part comes with no downside. In the past something like this would require six mana or would be far weaker.