At some point in my lifetime, the mindset switched from "I'm investing because I want to see long-term, steady growth and get regular dividends" to "I want to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible and damn the consequences to others".
The short-sightedness and greed is destroying so much.
It feels like ageism is more pronounced at startups and tech companies - at least, that is my perception based on real world and online discussions.
I'm 50, work at a large, established manufacturing/distribution company and haven't experienced any ageism that I know of. I also work with a lot of engineers from external vendors and don't see a lot of people much younger than me (except as junior roles at contractors).
I was planning to start using YTTV when sports start up again. We were using Hulu Live before and, while it wasn't terrible, I wanted to give YTTV a try.
This price hike kills that option. I will go back to Hulu or, more likely, just add TV to my monthly Fios package.
Yeah, as of early 2019[0]. I didn't even mean to imply that there was in-game gambling in Fortnite, but you noting it prompted me to look it up (I don't play/follow Fortnite at all, I dismissed the genre basically as a whole when I saw PUBG start to rise).
Gaming's funding model is SUPER broken. I don't know where or when it went so far off the rails, but at some point people shifted from making massive bets on passion projects to doing a little more marketing/advertising/manipulation to make projects more likely to succeed to full on profit-maximization with little regard for the effects. Ethics hasn't kept up, parenting handbooks haven't, and regulation never stood a chance of keeping up.
Whether it's some of us or all of us to blame, the problem is the same. I'm not hopeful enough to count on some sort of moralistic shift in how things are done across the whole human race or even at the country level but something should probably be done about this. For the same reason people generally agree we shouldn't allow children to do some things before a certain age (where they are likely to have developed enough both physically and mentally to process the ramifications and make a choice), we should probably be preventing manipulation of kids at this level. Look at how Juul swept through high schools (and their marketing campaigns, etc). Things are kind of fucked.
Fortnite doesn't have lootboxes. The Save The World mode did but they recently removed them so you always know what you are buying if you decide to spend money.
I'd say it's not pay-to-win either because most of the skins people buy in the shop are more flashy and easier to spot than the dreaded default skins.
I think this is less about Fortnite and more about people finding another way others are different and using it as a lever to make themselves feel better about their own insecurities.
> I think this is less about Fortnite ... make themselves feel better about their own insecurities.
Sure, I got that, I'm just saying that I felt okay letting kids play Fortnite because it didn't have the hallmarks of the well-publicized dangers from other free to play games. But regardless of whether the problem comes from people and culture surrounding the game or the designer of the game, I think I'll restrict my kids' access to it if it starts to look like a hazard.
Just because you don't use or need those features doesn't mean that everyone feels the same.
Many people use any enjoy the features that steam provides. For example, I enjoy the ability to go to someone's profile and be able to instantly join their game. I enjoy the ability to organize events through events in steam groups. Many people I know use the Steam Workshop to share their fan-made content or the Marketplace to sell their items.
It's not just those features in the client though. Steam also has a number of integrations that developers can make in their games, such as achievements, integrating their multiplayer with steam (allowing for the aforementioned joining via profile), cloud saves, controller support, etc.
Right now Epic is missing many of these features and more. With that being said, what reason do I have to use Epic over Steam besides the fact that Epic has a few exclusives?
Other than the fact that stadiums are known to cost cities a lot of money without returns and NYC gets to avoid those costs and benefit from the branding.
