Those were both side games. Like how Fallout New Vegas isn’t Fallout 4.

I know commenters will probably be outraged by this sale, but to me this is just the status quo of the modern art scene. The high end art scene hasn’t been about appreciating the art itself since Andy Warhol (at least). The scene is just a bunch of people with too much money all pretending to be intellectuals to each other and buying garbage to prove how deep and meaningful it is. There’s probably also an element of money funny business as well, but I’m not versed enough to say the exact mechanisms, just that I feel in my bones that when people are trading around multi-million dollar paintings among other people in the scene that I am suspicious. There is as much personal expression and meaning in the AI creation as there is in most other pieces being pumped out.

I have exactly as much respect for the AI art generator as I do for the rest of the human high end artists churning out junk for rich people.

One time I got an “in between” job at a local business. The first day I showed up and the place made me sign a 17 page front and back NDA.

I’ve signed actual, legitimate NDAs. They are like 3 pages, max. Some people are just preposterous.

why aren’t we able to just make it more to our liking?

You are, but you have to figure out how to get it all to work together yourself. That means physically, electrically, and in software. All the things you listed are problems that need to be overcome. If you have the ability, you can do this, but you yourself have to do it or find someone who specializes in such particular work. Most people have neither the skills, time, or patience to do this.

Keep in mind Freelancer was released after Microsoft acquired Roberts’ company, kicked him out of a leadership role, and drastically slashed the scope.

Star Citizen is what happens when there is nobody above Roberts to say no, and now after years plenty of people under him with an interest in keeping the development churning.

People are buying the dream. There is personal investment now- this isn’t a game, this is their game. Supporters tend to talk like this is a community project, not a transaction between a customer and a studio.

Whenever the studio finally folds, I guarantee there will be whales lamenting that if they’d only spent a little more they’d have kept the game afloat.

I need this magnum thread tape for my monster pipe.

I’m only but one person.

It is called the Takings Clause by the Supreme Court, Cornell Law, and pretty much anyone else who talks about it. Expect the word “take” in a discussion about it.

The clause itself uses the word “take”. Taking with compensation is still taking.

It is called the Takings Clause by

They talked about just compensation, but the change and precedent provided by the Kelo case was in the lowering of the standard for taking. The case also set the precedent that the government could take private land not just for public use, but to transfer that land to another private party. Thus the focus on that. Compensation or not, the land was taken against the owner’s will for the purpose of enriching a corporation.

Wikipedia isn’t the end all, but in this case I think it provides a working definition.

Enshittification (alternately, crapification and platform decay) is a pattern in which online products and services decline in quality. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

There’s a danger in any game where it might be largely designed and marketed to be one thing, and then has lengthy mandatory sections where it becomes another.

Poorly made stealth sections are a prime example. Game designers want to change things up, but if the game isn’t made to do stealth, it can easily turn into an annoying mess. There are a few (not a ton, but a few) games where the mandatory stealth sections are well liked, but they were made to carefully take advantage of the game’s strengths and knew when to end.

Hold up, “enshitification” is just turning into a buzzword now.

Enshitification has from the beginning described a service or product which is first released one way, and then over time is made worse for the users in ways designed to squeeze more profit out of them.

Without some serious mental gymnastics, forced stealth sections tend to just be bad design choices. Not every bad thing is the same kind of bad thing.

Indeed.

The Prosecutors: Legal Briefs, episode 117.

The show is hosted by two prosecutors, so in various episodes on criminal cases their opinions skew heavily pro-prosecutor, but when laying out facts like going through a SCOTUS case they tend to be more fact based and less opinion based, I have found.

Its an educated wish.

“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.

Season passes, microtransactions, and DLCs. Additionally creating brand recognition among the masses along with flashy trailers. These are all reasons that AAA behemoths are still banked on to make huge net profits.

Sometimes these massive games fail and lose money in spectacular ways, but it happens a lot less than us enlightened good taste gamers would like to imagine. Money gets shoveled into creatively safe massive games because they usually make a huge profit. I love say, Wasteland 2, but that game probably has made less money in its entire life than the newest Fifa game made in a week.

cannot be set higher than an amount that is reasonably likely to ensure the defendant’s presence at the trial

That is a sentence that you can really roll over in your head. It does not necessarily also mean an amount within the resources of the defendant. I watch a lot of hearings, and something I’ve seen at least a few times is a set of allegations and past facts (usually something like multiple failures to appear in the past, and/or fleeing from police) in a situation where the actual charge being bailed on has a statutory requirement that bail be offered. The judge doesn’t want to let the person out on bail, so therefore sets the bail at $1 million or something which is functionally the same thing as not giving them bail.

Usually this triggers a motion for a hearing about the bail amount by the defense lawyer to argue down the amount, but if the court date on the charge is earlier than court date for the motion, it becomes a moot issue.