Taokan

The most complex object in the universe ... according to the brain.

Judging by the stock price decline that didn't start last week, but rather has been ongoing for ~~months~~years, you're spot on. This is exactly what the market was expecting.

DEI has at least some roots in holding a positive connotation, a lot of companies that value an image/brand of diversity will have a DEI department/team. It's not just an acronym they made up, though it's definitely been co-opted by reactionaries as a way to describe someone they feel only got the job/promotion/attention because of a compulsion to raise up minority voices (a "DEI" hire is their way of saying the person wasn't qualified for the job, but got it because they were black/a woman".

My initial take on the rant was to simply ignore it, but now I'm wondering if there's maybe something to the idea that specifically in the shooter genre, the market is different enough that I don't really know the space. Like BG3 was about as DEI a game as you could get, and no one's arguing that game's success. But I do know a couple conservatives that were specifically kind of turned off by games like cyberpunk and BG3. Apparently they couldn't handle tasteful sidedick. Maybe for a shooter to be successful it's got to coddle what the gun enthusiast crowd is demanding? I don't know. Despite their popularity, I just don't play that many shooters.

In many states, if you have a gun anywhere in possession while committing a drug crime, even selling weed, it adds years of mandatory sentence onto the charges, often way more than the drug crime itself. I would be extremely weary of anyone mentioning anything about a gun and drugs together in a communication the cops can pin on you ... because while they may be the nicest dealer you ever met, they are not the smartest.

(side note, I might have fudged the data a little and just made up that I checked with anyone else)

It's ok, I checked myself by asking the person in my life most likely to agree with me. We've agreed the association with red vs blue politics in the US is your responsibility for making an analogy that could be easily construed that way, not ours for fitting what you said into the context of current cultural norms. Therefore in conclusion: everyone thinks you messed up with that analogy.

It's fair to continue to consider them in competition with other store fronts. Don't be fooled into thinking it will always be a great way to get cheap games, though. That brand, is EXACTLY what IGN paid for when they bought them: for the faith they built up in people like yourself, that they are and will always continue to be a trusted company. And part of the amortization of that purchase, is converting that belief into money, by enshittifying it. By taking advantage that they can make less valuable offers, raise prices, and fail to keep up with competitors innovations, on the backs of people remembering the good experiences they had with the company based on its original ownership.

Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn't buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.

Maybe not in some countries. It's certainly a way that term gets used in the US. See also, reduction in force (RIF), downsize, reorg, shifting priorities, etc. The way labor laws are written, companies are encouraged to do this, because it circumvents protections against firing someone on leave, pregnant, or in a minority. When an individual is let go, there's risk of litigation or claims that it's because of some protected status: and correct or not, we're a very litigious country with a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. So more and more, companies have normalized layoffs even when they're doing very well, because its a way to "clean out" the company of less productive employees with much less risk of getting sued: and they can always rehire or shift exceptional employees they want to keep.

I always assumed there was some tradition to cutting your hair short before going to war, because long hair would present numerous liabilities - more maintenance, potential visibility issues, potential to foil cover/disguise, and potential vulnerability in hand to hand combat. And there is a lot of military tradition to a short haircut, though I'm not sure how much is based on the above reasoning. But I'm not a historian so maybe this is just a bad interpretation of Mulan or a random teacher passing on low quality education.

Yep - we get it. But some of us don't enjoy the effects that microtransactions have on the game experience, and would prefer not to play those kinds of games. A filter whereby we could just hide those games, and browse ones that we would enjoy, that are more targeted for us, would both save us time and increase the likelihood of us finding a game we want to buy, improving the shopping experience and putting more money into game developers' and Steam's pockets. Similar to how the google play store offers a "premium/paid apps" section, because while much of the market prefers free to play and doesn't mind ads or microtransactions, they know some of us loath it and would rather pay up front for an experience that doesn't go there, and they make more money when they help shoppers shop.

This has been a universal problem with any MMO game that tries to have some kind of a resource grind/time sink. Even if you can manage to stop players from botting it, you can't stop players from third world countries selling their time to players in first world countries. The game economy quickly becomes a reflection of real world capitalism that most of its players were trying to escape.