“Why hasn’t anyone designed a building like this before?”

“Oh.”

You make a decent point, but the disconnect between people paying for content and the money going to the people who contributed effort to it is getting wider and wider.

Popular shows that people subscribed for get axed after 1 season or moved to another service. All the work people did for Warner Brothers’ Batgirl gets thrown in the trash so that WB can get a tax write-off, before any movie watcher can even give a cent to them in support.

The point is big studios make so much year after year that pirating their stuff doesn’t make a dent in whether the people they hire get paid accordingly.

Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.

People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.

Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.

Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.

I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.

Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.

Some countries have a blank media fee on writable casettes, discs and hard drives that are paid to music and movie studios for this purpose.

Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.

An open source Brood War engine seems to exist but development appears to have stalled.

For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.

In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.

I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.

There’s hardly a better time to do it, than off the back of the massive contract wins the unions fought for and successfully attained.

That’s a neat fact!

Good games give me the same feeling as reading a good fictional novel: I get transported into the universe, following the character or whatever action is unfolding.

More generally, games give the player a goal to achieve, whether that’s winning over others, cooperating with others, completing a campaign, collecting a bunch of goodies (or all the goodies), relaxing and enjoying scenery, crafting min-maxed playthroughs, or trying over and over again to beat a level.

Being focused on this goal can help keep your mind off of whatever is troubling you in the present.

I don’t know how likely it is (seems unlikely as it was coordinated until Monday), but if they can maintain strikes through to Christmas, then it would have a major effect. People ordering a week before will not get it in time.

エアーステーション

Airstation

Best the Ontario conservative government could do was to open up protected Greenbelt land so his developer buddies could make a quick buck without actually developing anything. Sorry.

As far as I understand the US political process, the President is allowed to do virtually anything so long as it doesn’t step on the states’ toes, but Congress has to pass funding and anything done by Executive Order can be done but can’t stick beyond his or her tenure.

Over and over it seems that Trump and his lawyers’ strategy is just to continuously add to the list of crimes so that clerks and the judge have to keep on writing them down until Trump dies of old age or hamberder liver (or heaven forbid he pardons himself)

Spicy take but I like it.

We have the tools even without nukes to raze land to the ground. Using a nuke might have the added bonus of “solve” climate change by making it a permanent nuclear winter.

A goddamn big ol’ lie that is. The U.S. would not be afraid to push the envelope against most other countries. The U.S. military is capable enough to singlehandedly wipe out all of Israel and Palestine more than 10 times over in conventional warfare if it were so desired. Not that this is desirable, and it would cost many lives of the innocent and young, but I’m just speaking that this power and capability can’t really be hidden by pretending you can’t do anything about it.

If there was any value as a world of nations we could get out of such exorbitant expenses, it would be to establish peace and stop the fighting on both sides, by various means and escalating degrees of force if they really were compelled to. And even if we leave threatening or flexing military might out of the question, the U.S. has so many strings they can attach to how they support Israel with funding and arms, is it not obvious to this administration?

Where the heck is the notion that the U.S. government’s hands are tied coming from?

Yeah. You got this!

Counting on you San Francisco! Protect your and your fellow residents privacy!

I wonder if it will be anything like the Rogers outage in Canada. A bad software maintenance update made their infrastructure malfunction and so many people were offline from a few days to a week.

It’s OK, your screen must have been upside down when you were looking at the Steam page… :)