pory

This looks like every other over the shoulder mass effect clone ever made. Why does "shooting the thing" have to be the primary verb for every space-era game again?

No point in watching the ad parade when 80% of the games are hat stores or GAAS slop and 90% of the remainder are remakes and remasters. The games worth your time and money are ones you'll hear about when they're released.

If any workers in the games industry have the power to disrupt, it's the GTA6 guys. This game is industry-warpingly big, other multimillion dollar projects are being delayed or rushed just to "not have to compete" with GTA6 and GTA6 isn't even launching on all platforms. Threatening to cause another delay if demands aren't met could actually work if they stick to their guns.

People want to be in on the ground floor of the new hype thing. Then they leave. That's what New World proved, its colossal dropoff in active players and revenue wasn't entirely because Amazon killed some golden goose. Anyone trying to say "people want new MMOs" is probably coping about that surely the new MMO they want to not fail is going to survive.

New Thing Hype works for a couple years to be sure. And then you run into the content wall and learn that by playing a more established MMO like FF or WOW or ESO or GW2 you get decades of "new content" all at once.

Prowlarr isn't an alternative to torrenting, is the main thing. It's an indexer manager for the other arrs, which means it just does torrenting (or usenet) for you. You still want to be on high quality private trackers if using Prowlarr, it just means not needing to interface with 10 sites' search bars to look for something.

Yeah that's kind of the point with dark patterns. That's not a term I made up either. Warframe isn't as rife with them as other games but the "forever GAAS" platform is nearly always leveraging patterns like this in some way.

Dark patterns are dark patterns, even if "the community" is more or less happy. Just means that it's working. Being owned by Tencent actually does give them the freedom to "just be profitable" instead of squeezing each player for more and more revenue YOY, but the game still uses every retention mechanic in the book and leverages fake value by putting the MTX currency on "really good sales! Look how good the limited time deal is!!!" to keep people shelling out.

Tencent is diversified enough that they'll probably never feel the need to tighten the screws on the Warframe studio directly.

Both chicken and egg situations say the same thing: live service GAAS is unsustainable at best and garbage at worst

Waterfox. All FF features, no telemetry or AI, no "opt out".

It is not "Krafton free". Unknown Worlds is completely owned by Krafton, Krafton isn't just "the publisher". There was a complicated lawsuit that led to internal reorganization, and some napkin math that suggests there's some number of lifetime sales that, if they don't ever sell more than that number or significantly less than that number, the project will lose Krafton money because they'd be legally required to pay out the "bonus" that the drama was about in the first place (but not make enough profit to actually afford paying that bonus without dipping into profit from other games). But it's still a Krafton game developed by Krafton employees.

Honestly even the absolute best case for this game is still "the more you care about it, the better it is for you to wait until it's out of Early Access". Early access for an "exploration first" game means your exploration is going to find a bunch of "come back later" walls, placeholders, and bugs. That's the point of Early Access after all. I'd have enjoyed Subnautica a lot less if I'd played it during Early Access and was waiting on a patch to let me explore the Aurora.

Can you even buy this without a Steam account though? It's the Steam Controller, sold through Steam, designed to work on Steam. A third party driver to convert it to Xinput will probably drop within a week of its ship date (just like it did for the first Steam Controller), but if you're against having a Steam account I'd wonder why you want a Steam Controller in the first place. There's plenty of non-Steam controllers after all.