There’s a perceived unpopularity with these genres. However, some truly great games like Baldur’s Gate 3 are living proof that you can make a niche genre very popular. It’s just that almost no one tries, or doesn’t like the risk involved. That’s why you don’t see a lot of these genres anymore. Well, you DO see them, if you look close enough and include indie and A/AA titles, but a massive AAA title with big budget and advertising for those genres is pretty much non-existant (I’m not familiar of any other exception like BG3). I think big studios are unlikely to risk such things. Look for smaller game studios, they’re much more innovative and either keep “dead” genres alive or they try mixing genres in innovative ways.

Yes, it’s a dangerous combination of media/IT illiteracy/incompetence within the general public and profit-driven proprietary social media algorithms that only aim to keep people engaged for the longest time, no matter the content they are being served. And usually, the more extreme the content is, the higher the engagement, the more revenue to be made from serving ads to the users and selling their collected data. This currently leads to a rise of misinformation, anti-scientific thinking, and so on. Which just so happens to align with extreme right-wing ideologies.

AFAIK, browser choice is still limited (as usual with Apple) because every browser on iOS needs to use Apple’s WebKit engine. That means they only differ in UI.

Well this whole area is mostly based on deceit. Like if they claim they MAY do something they will absolutely do it all the time, if they claim they aren’t getting anything from it, it just means they aren’t getting anything directly, but indirectly instead, or from a different involved party. I also like the message at the top of the page: “Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data.”. Under some circumstances you have rights. Which is weirdly accurate. Because in most circumstances, they will just sh*t on data protection rights. Which is also evident by everything being opt-out, rather than opt-in. And then, most likely, even when you disable everything, data will still flow somewhere. Then again, it’s an industry-wide problem. Not specific to Jagex.

Remember that this is just one case in isolation. US-based data hoarders like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and so on are also regularly sued for various privacy law violations. And they all deserve it equally, TikTok included. I hope no one is left out. That said, unfortunately, the punishment is often a joke, which means these companies simply pay it out of their pocket change and then continue doing the exact same stuff. For example, France sued TikTok for something like 5 million $. Unless that number goes into the billions at least, I bet it’s still way more profitable for those companies to continue to absolutely sh*t on anything privacy related. So, in essence, nothing will change because of this. Not for US-based data privacy violators, not for Chinese-based. “Same shit, different country” has never been more fitting.

That doesn’t surprise me, and yes it was always because of anti-competitive practices, so I’m all for more neutrality, I’ll just add 2 shower thoughts:

1. Seeing that Brave is at the top of the browser list, I wonder how many selected Brave just because it’s at the top of the list and thought that this must be a good choice then, not because they actually like Brave.
2. It’s nice to have such a thing for browsers, but it would have to be expanded to other apps as well, e.g. mail client. Oh well, maybe in another 10 years or so.

I don’t think so. Android has been marketshare leader for a long time. Maybe iOS is massively popular in USA, but outside of USA it isn’t. Also, as long as marketshare has a sort of “critical mass” it’s fine. Look at OSX for example, it has around 20% marketshare and that number is still high enough that it can’t be ignored. So I think both are here to stay whether they have 20% or 80%.

Not really relevant. The majority of teens isn’t able to make an informed decision about which is better anyway, and in fact none of the 2 is recommended anyway unless you count in AOSP-based distributions (based off of the open source Android without Google apps), then Android wins of course. But when you compare iOS vs. proprietary Android, it’s like comparing 2 different forms of diseases.

So yeah while statistics are interesting it’s important not to interpret too much into some. Like, “majority of teens dislikes Jazz music”. Well, it doesn’t really matter whether they dislike it or not. Popularity doesn’t represent quality necessarily. Sometimes, but certainly not always.

In Germany the mobile landscape is more “diverse”, I’d say closer to 40%/60% iOS/Android from my own observations. And since we “care” “more” about privacy in schools or public institutions (we still care plenty little but I guess Germany is on average at least known for being a country that does more for data protection than others, so maybe that counts as something?), it’s also probably less iOS infested, although I do know that some schools and public institutions do use iOS devices. But I don’t think everyone does.