It’s going to be a tiny minority of people doing that, but there probably ought to be a basic check to see if you got the achievement for completing the game before letting you refund it. Maybe not for YouTube rageslop like this, but for the smaller “experience” games, like Unpacking or something.

Realistically a lot of people are treating the refund system as a demo. I know on PS+ there’s the option on a lot of games to play it for two hours before having to buy it. I guess the PC is a bit too open to allow for that. Could offer that by playing it in the nebulous “cloud” I suppose.

I think David Lynch is like cryptic crossword clues.

If you get it, it’s genius. If you don’t, it’s nonsense.

I don’t get it, but others do and that’s fine.

Your computer? That you own? In your house?

The title even refers to your phone screen.

It’s just a new generation of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, written by a comedian. It’s not supposed to be amazingly deep.

Aren’t they using low accuracy FP units that aren’t suited for gaming anyway?

Time for the four stage strategy:

Stage 1: Nothing’s going to happen.

Stage 2: Something may be going to happen but we should do nothing about it.

Stage 3: Maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.

Stage 4: Maybe there was something we could’ve done, but it’s too late now.

I reckon we’re about at stage 3 on this one. Still, at least us Europeans won’t have to put up with any more heatwaves.

Did you know his father invented the question mark?

It really is just Ali Express with better delivery times these days.

I cancelled Prime and just buy a lot less shit I don’t need.

Realistically GamePass is not sustainable in it’s current form.

Hardware is too expensive in general for mass adoption, the streaming numbers they wanted never really materialised (they wanted 70 million subs and they’ve only got 30 million), and they cannibalised the one thing the games industry needs which is game sales from people willing to drop £60+ on a game multiple times a year.

That and they’re just not making much that people want. Their big tentpole release for the whole generation was fucking Starfield, which nobody even talks about. They have no idea what they’re doing. I don’t know why they even got into gaming. Their only successful generation was the Xbox 360, and that was mostly from Sony dropping a bollock rather than MS doing something right.

Since they won, we should rename that bit of water the Gulf of Belgium.

* gives all their games away *

“Why aren’t you meeting sales targets?”

Gamepass as a day one model is unsustainable.

Games remaining full price forever is unsustainable.

Bad take. They’ll give you an install disc and then make you enter an account locked code to access it anyway.

Demand digital rights instead, before a big player goes bust. Because at some point that will happen, and you’ll lose more than a handful of discs.

I weigh food. Because if I don’t, I get enormous.

I think for dried pasta it’s like 75g each, assuming some meaty sauce with it.

I agree, and buy physical games too, but I don’t think the law can mandate a disc drive.

It could mandate that digital goods remain ours forever, and that companies provide a way to keep them forever.

We’ve been lucky that the main players in this are still going. Valve, Sony, MS and Nintendo have deep pockets. But we’ve seen companies go bust before, and they’ll go again. Sega were the top dog until they weren’t. Before now we’ve always had the physical option. Now we won’t. This is the tipping point and laws must be made to protect us before we lose everything.

But who is left? Nintendo?

And that’s only because Nintendo tend to lag about 5 years behind everyone else. They’re not sticking with physical out of their belief in physical games, that’s for sure. Half their stuff is already a key and a download.

Realistically, it wouldn’t really matter about discs at all if we had real digital rights. The rights to transfer games from one account to another, or even between stores. The rights to copy games to other devices, and copy them back again, or even from an online source if the original disappears for whatever reason.

Physical games could take the form of a keycard with a license on it, similar to a credit card chip. Scan it on my machine to attach to my account. Scan it on another to attach to someone else’s account and remove from mine. Run offline by leaving the card in the machine.

I advise you not to do this. To try and replicate ChatGPT in your head will overload your brain. Relax and let the machine do the heavy lifting.

My favourite part of the Backrooms movie is where he says “It’s backroomin’ time”.

It’s always fun going through Facebook marketplace and seeing consoles for sale with their “game collection” which is just 10 boxes with the yearly iterations of FIFA and CoD.

Especially digital stuff. What are they going to do, run out of bytes?

I’m not sure why we’re surprised.

This entire gen has had spotty coverage of physical games at the best of times. Even on the biggest titles.

Just off the top of my head BG3 wasn’t even available on disc, and Indiana Jones was only in some overpriced collector’s edition.

I guess the odd way GTA6 is putting a code in a box is grabbing the headlines, rather than it just not being available on a disc.