Accurate name there mate.

If they use ai to make their game, it becomes soulless ai slop like the rest of it. The people copying their game aren’t making anything good or even worth playing, and the intent isn’t for it to be good. They’re just making slop to siphon sales away from the original game, while cashing in on someone else’s idea. And in the meantime it clogs up the marketplaces and pushes legitimate games down in the listings so it’s harder to get seen, while also making your game look like part of the slop. Not to mention it’s just straight up ip theft at that point.

I’ve seen the exact same thing play out on every market place. Ai has just made it possible to do it faster, and with games. I made a sticker design and listed it on redbubble. It was pretty popular, sold quite a bit. The instant it started getting rankings, people/bots screen shot the design and uploaded it again themselves. Pushed my listing all the way down by gaming the SEO and the sales dried up.

Same thing on Etsy. Made handmade jewellery. People stole the designs, made cheap imitations in China and sold them for a fraction of the cost, cheaper than I could produce them for because I was using real gold/silver. But in the meantime my legitimate listing was pushing all the way down.

I can’t use Epic because of their age verification and poor customer service, so this checks out.

Can’t browse the store because games are blocked without age verification. Tried to verify my age and the service they use kept returning an error. Reached out to support and got a chat bot that tried to tell me I needed to clear my browser cache for it to work. Obviously made no difference because it’s the third party website that’s broken. Had to argue with it for five minutes until I started swearing at it for it to connect me to a human. The human emailed me and it was incomprehensible broken English, they clearly didn’t understand what I was trying to say to them so I just gave up and said “guess I’m never using epic again.”

Despite being over 30 and having multiple 18+ games btw

Every time I hear about a pixel release it’s something being downgraded from the previous versions lol

It’s been quite a few years so I don’t remember specific models, but there was a period where Australian releases weren’t shipping with Snapdragon, while global releases were. I recall being quite annoyed at the pixel at the time. Samsung was bad for it too. Probably still is but I’ve had the same phone for ~7 years now so I’ve not been keeping up with releases.

I stopped buying Google hardware after I got the pixel 2. It was an amazing phone, had an incredible camera. Really wanted to upgrade when the 4 was coming out so I started following the release news and noticed that they were putting previous generation processors in the 4 - like, previous to what was already in the 2. The camera was worse, the storage was smaller etc. killed my hype for it.

Then before the 5 was released, my 2 stopped charging and it was out of warranty so they wanted more money to repair than it would cost me to buy a phone from another manufacturer. Bought something else and never looked back.

I also had a Google Home at the time and it was one of the most frustrating tech experiences I’ve ever encountered.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they brick the tablets now that they don’t care about the product anymore.