Maybe there is eventually a way of making these filters look good by adding (many) additional parameters, but they’re still ignoring the much more important question: how are they going to get this to run on anything other than the compute server they’re currently using.
With Google, wasn’t the issue that they were on other devices, or were paying others to use their defaults or something? To be clear, I’m working from memory here, and am too tired to read a bunch of legal stuff to confirm one way or the other.
You can’t have a platform dictate everything about how it sells merchant wise without having an antitrust involved.
Didn’t the EU, who have some of the strictest rules in that regard, rule that walled garden ecosystems are allowed in their case against Apple?
Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.
If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn’t enjoy any of it.
In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I’ve spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.
Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I’ve easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it’d be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I’ve spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.
The AI might have encountered these symbols in training on some weird occult neo nazi forums or something
Unfortunately, the double koppa as a Nazi symbol is neither new or rare, esspecially relative to the fequency of other patterns of symbols. Seeing as LLMs just output common text, its unfortunately unsuprising that this would be among the results if limitted to symbols.
There’s no way this should’ve gotten past multiple people, it’s inexcusable
Thats the trick. Has GOG gone so far downhill that they publish unreviewed AI output, is it that the company hired a Nazi and put him in a global marketing role with zero oversight, or does the company have a more widespead Nazi problem?
None of the possibilities here are good, and the fact that the apology doesn’t even try to address any of these seems even worse.
intentional subtle wink
I’m not convinced it is, just because the other symbols are so random. Like, if it was a human, you’d think they’d at least use other runes, or would use something more standard like, ☉ or ☼, or would at least put in some effort to disguise it. I mean, if they actually wanted to make it subtle, they may even have actually used the sowilō symbol, given that that is what the SS runes originate from. Instead, its Koppa, undisguised, front and centre. An AI on the other hand, would just output random symbols with common patterns, such as this.
Then again, Nazis aren’t exactly known for being smart, so…
I’m struggling to figure out how they even ended up with it. So far as I can tell, 𖥞 is from a symbol from the Cameroon Bamum language, having nothing to do with the game. ꥟ is a character from Sumatran dialects, but it at least looks like a sun, so I could maybe see that. That said, the ϟ, nonetheless repeated, seems inexcusable. Its specifically Greek koppa, not the Old Norse ᛋ (the sowilō character they reference in their apology) and I see no reason to use it twice.
Honestly, the only way I can think of that this was included, was it being AI generated and unmonitored. Why else would they combine a random Bamum symbol, a Sumatran symbol, and what is pretty clearly an SS emblem?
Unfortunately, given the current economy, its not suprising. With how much prices have risen, the old pricing competed with and often beat out even used desktops.
Story based motivators mean almost nothing to me, esspecially when told through non-gameplay means. Having an “intro” cutscene is almost akin to a text crawl/card in a movie - technically it works, and it can be an efficient way to give extra context, but its also likely to disrupt pacing or disorient - basically makes me want to watch less, rather than more. In the same way, I can’t think of any games where story played a significant part in motivation to continue. If I want to keep playing, its because the game is good, not because it told me I should.
Edit: Maybe to help clairify, good plot can be a motivator, but the character’s motivation is not my motivation. Whats important is that the plot is good, not that the protagonist’s goal is just.
I mean, given that they previously said it was only running on multi-gpu systems, I can’t see one generation of advancement being enough to make this feasible on consumer hardware. At this point, I’m thinking that this is just a paper product meant to help inflate valuations without any intention to launch it.