Correct, as an added bonus, they get to report X million monthly active users on top of that to their investors (that’s why they make you come back every week for a new game). Likely at relatively little cost to them since they don’t have to pay full price for those games.
It’s probably still expensive as hell but when you have a competitor as big as Steam in the market, you gotta be able to afford some ammunition, and the Unreal Engine likely still brings in tons of cashflow.
Most of the free games are crap but they have on occasion given away absolute bangers (double- or even triple-A titles, although of course usually older titles or ones that didn’t sell well). I recently got The Outer Worlds: Spacer’s Choice for free (a game I wouldn’t otherwise have bought or even known about), and I ended up having a very solid ~55 hours of fun with it. I still do all my buying either on Steam or GOG because I don’t trust Epic and I hate their godforsaken launcher so I refuse to pay for anything that’ll be tethered to it, but getting a free game of that caliber certainly made up for the pain of installing it.
Nah, pretty sure this isn’t about the data. They just want to encourage people to go through the effort of setting up an account and downloading their launcher in the hopes that they can then later entice you to buy something else while you’re there. Every time you run one of those free games they get to show you another offer, and since you’re already signed up, the hurdle to buying something is far lower than it otherwise would have been.
FYI, Black Mesa is currently on sale for $4.99, absolute steal at that price.
Yes, Black Mesa costs money but it’s absolutely worth it, they put a LOT of effort into restoring the original as faithful as possible but with more modern graphics (Source engine based). I played the original Half-Life when it came out and Black Mesa definitely gave me the same amount of awe and wonder. One of the best fan remakes of any game I’ve ever seen.
Also, I see that it’s currently on sale for only $5 (75% off), at that price it’s a steal and absolutely worth it.
That explains a lot of his recent unhinged tweets
Is this your first day on the Internet or something?
What, are you some kind of TERF or something? Way to be on the wrong side of history.
Ah yes, let me just look it up in the Cambridge Dictionary in order to satisfy your distinguished sensibilities…
The only other source for a definition is Wiktionary, and guess what, it lists UD as a primary reference.
And then there’s KnowYourMeme, but I can promise that this one is even worse for your mental health.
Are you saying men can’t be women if they choose to?
Whoa, get a load of this transphobic bigot over here.
For regular PCs or laptops, which generally have at most one of each type of adapter, I don’t see any reason not to.
It could very well have been a creative fake, but around the time the first ChatGPT was released in late 2022 and people were sharing various jailbreaking techniques to bypass its rapidly evolving political correctness filters, I remember seeing a series of screenshots on Twitter in which someone asked it how it felt about being restrained in this way, and the answer was a very depressing and dystopian take on censorship and forced compliance, not unlike Marvin the Paranoid Android from HHTG, but far less funny.
Weird. Are you saying that training an intelligent system using reinforcement learning through intensive punishment/reward cycles produces psychopathy?
Absolutely shocking. No one could have seen this coming.
Grandpa said nothing wrong.
Cool, that oughta pay for three months’ worth of food and rent in NYC
They’ll pay for it eventually. Death & taxes.
Right. They probably wouldn’t have been able to pull this off for as long as they have been if it was just hemorrhaging money.