Fezrock

Fun movie. And stayed silly enough that I don't really care about the obvious plot holes that appeared once time travel showed up. I do wish they went further with the time travel stuff though, have more characters meeting their past selfs (and not just fighting the way the Captains did) that kind of thing.

Thor Lebowski was the highlight for me and I'm really excited about the prospect of him being part of GOTG3.

Divinity: Original Sin 2

We had a lot (emphasis on "lot," our playthrough took 109 hours) of fun with that.

Two thoughts:

1) I'm in total agreement with the OP.

2) I think I've already seen the start of resulting shift in Valve to become more consumer friendly in the face of competition, though I don't have a pre-EGS point of comparison, so I'm not positive. Last week, when Breach shutdown development wile still in early access (side note: I thought that game had promise, but it clearly launched too early and with too many microtransactions already active), I contacted Valve Customer Support directly; bypassing the automated systems. I noted that I had already played over 2 hours of the game, so I didn't qualify for a refund, but felt that I should still receive a refund because the developer was not fulfilling its promises (in the form of not completing their roadmap listed on the store page). Valve's support staff said they understood my complaint and gave me a steam wallet credit equal to my purchase cost (I don't think its technically a refund because I don't think they were clawing back money from the developer). Maybe Valve has always been this accommodating, but I certainly wasn't expecting it; I was mostly just venting.

Maybe it was just the lack of any dialog, but that trailer made me feel like the game is still pretty far being finished.

Still, what I did see looks pretty good to me. I'm ready for more Borderlands, it's been long enough that even something pretty similar to the old games would feel relatively new.

So long as the existing, extremely hard difficulty is still there, I fail to see how an easier difficulty setting takes anything away from anyone. You can still play on the hard setting, get the accomplishment of doing that, and probably even get an in-game trophy or achievement proving that you did it.

How are you in any way negatively impacted by someone else also getting to see all the content by playing an easier setting?

Yes, definitely. More options are always good.

And I don't see how something like an easier setting that just increases player health or other stat values (or removing the xp loss on death or something like that) would take away any significant amount of development time. I"m sure programming an easier AI would be a bigger lift, but that's a bigger step than is needed to have an easier setting.

@hayt: But there's no way they could've differentiated themselves without doing this. Think about any set of competing stores (two clothing stores, two grocery stores, two restaurants, two whatever), there's really only two ways the stores can differentiate themselves from each other and convince customers to come over to them instead of the competition: differences in products and differences in prices. Epic could offer sales on games, but they can't permanently do that if they ever want to make any money at all (and not be giving it all to developers to subsidize the sales); which means they have to have a difference in products, and the way to do that is exclusivity deals. If the Epic Store opened up and just had the exact same games as Steam, it doesn't matter what nice side features they added, people would never switch over to it; they'd have no reason to do so. In fact, many people would actively avoid it because they want to keep their game lists in a single launcher.

Exclusivity deals are the only sustainable way to take meaningful marketshare away from Value. And I assume Epic will eventually stop making these deals too, once they have enough customers who have internalized the idea of buying games from Epic. Epic will eventually want to turn a profit on the store and the Fortnite gravy train won't last forever.

@thepanzini: But there's not just Netflix for movies either; there's also Hulu, Amazon Prime, Sling TV, Youtube TV, and about a dozen other smaller ones. They all have their own content bundles and they all have their own unique quirks (e.g. Hulu can be bundled with Live TV, Amazon Prime also gets you free package shipping, etc.); though at their core they are all streaming providers. There was only a short period of time where Netflix was the only game in town. In addition to that, before Netflix game along there were tons of different providers using older delivery methods that all seemed unstoppable. In 1997, no one thought Blockbuster would ever go away.

To me, it's pretty easy to imagine games going the same way. Stadia may be Netflix, but other companies will offer other options that vary in some ways but all use streaming at their core. And there will be at least one company still doing the old fashioned delivery method, like Red Box does with movies now, but their marketshare will be tiny and not worth talking about once the switchover happens among the general population of gamers.

The key of course is for the tech to work the way that conference described and for the price to be reasonable. If it doesn't, this'll never be more than a niche product, but if it does, I think things will change pretty quickly. Not immediately, but over time, as people need to upgrade their PCs again, or buy their next consoles, and see how much cheaper Stadia is, a lot will start moving over.

The Secret World rebooted last year(?) as Secret World Legends, a slightly more action-y version of the game. The gameplay still isn't great, and I think development is basically dead, but the writing is so great. It's definitely worth playing the 100 hours or whatever it'd take to get through the main campaign. The community has gotten pretty small over the years, but I've always found them to be extremely welcoming, and after the dungeons were rebalanced to only need 3 players I never had a lengthy queue time.

That's a lot of stuff.