Microsoft works in mysterious ways. Another oddity is how the Microsoft Store version of The Evil Within is a more-updated, more-featured version of the game than every other version including on console, and I don’t think they’ve ever acknowledged it. It only released when they bought Bethesda, so maybe it’s a similar story here where they’re just putting out some unreleased work.

Or maybe not idk I’m not omniscient

Valve.

Not new management, but they definitely changed direction. From Portal 2 to Half-Life Alyx was a dark age of live service titles and hardware. Fortunately, it seems like they’re finally getting back to their old selves?

Alyx was supposedly their re-entry into releasing games (hopeful that HLX is good), the Steam Deck caused them to go back and fix several of their titles (plus do the huge Half-Life update we just got), and while they’re not exactly making their games as open as they used to, they’re letting the community handle things like TF2 events and L4D2 patches.

So, I dunno, cautiously optimistic for their future. At least as long as Gabe is running the company.

Volition hasn’t made a good game in a decade and IdolNinja left us a while back, so there’s no real loss here.

What worries me is what they’re gonna do with the Saints Row and Red Faction IPs without them.

The funny thing about this is the assumption that land ownership matters in the event of the apocalypse. Having your fancy bunker location public is probably the wrong thing to do.

I’ve explicitly been using my beehaw.org account pretty much exclusively because of the constant DDOS attacks on lemmy.world.

Kinda funny how their plan to seemingly kill Lemmy is just helping it stay decentralized by pushing people to other instances.

Like Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service problem.

The last two things I pirated were No One Lives Forever, a game that’s completely delisted on all storefronts, and Ratchet & Clank, because Sony can’t figure out how to add the PS2 versions of games to the PS5 and I refuse to stream it (data cap) or lug around my PS3.

Both I would’ve purchased legally had they not made it a pain in the ass.