CEOs of companies that are adjacent to technology desperately want to ensure that their company isn’t seen as “outdated”, almost more than they want to actually not be outdated.

So when a technology comes that everyone in tech leadership is saying is the bestest, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re totally with it, whatever the cool kids are talking about.

Hype train goes chugga chugga.

As the hype train slows, they still need to be onboard, but they set expectations based on what their people are actually telling them.

So this is the CEO yelling to do something, and then the news slowly percolating back from the tech people that they can, but only a handful of projects can do so in a way that makes sense, has impact, and doesn’t disrupt a timeline or budget in a way that requires shareholder disclosure.

I just learned about some of the additional context from another comment, so it definitely might not be part of this branch in the narrative. Having spent at least a little time and energy developing the weapon, they’re not gonna just waste it, and having filled out the budget paperwork for a charity donation, it’s was also going to happen one way or another.

It’s not bad or anything, it’s just how you tell a story involving unpredictable interactions, “being a business that has a budget and employee salaries”, and also the PR 101 lesson of “never withhold charity”.

My bet, given how you budget for this type of PR stuff, is that it was basically the players picking the story that got told while they got a new weapon and a charity donation happened. Like if the players hadn’t chosen to do so, there would have been some contrivance for someone certainly has to save the children. Since they saved them, now the children will get together and give you this thank you gift, or something.

Illusion of choice, but not in a bad way.

They know what they’re trying to do, which is to bait people into spending money on their platform so they can have revenue numbers to show developers to get them to release on their platform to get people to want to spend money with them without bait.

Taking the bait but not getting caught in the trap isn’t quite pulling one over on them, but it’s also not what they were hoping for, so it’s not not taking advantage.

A death certificate is very much not a court order. A death certificate is often available to anyone who wants to demonstrate that someone is dead.

It’d be like using mailing address as proof of identity. Someone’s mailing address is in some ways less public than their death certificate.

A probate court validating a will isn’t a court order is the thing.

For both companies, they agreed to provide you access to the titles in exchange for money. You can’t generally will a service to someone else. It’s why things like bank accounts get crazy weird with estates (weird for anyone other than a banker or lawyer). We’ve had a very long time to work out how we handle it. The money in the account is an asset owned by the estate. It’s a “thing” that you can will. The account itself is owned by the estate, but it can’t be willed because it’s an agreement between the bank and the deceased.
When the estate is being handled, only the person managing it can access the bank account, and then they move the money to the accounts of the person who gets the money, even if it’s at the same bank.

Games in your game library aren’t assets like money is. They’re non-transferable licenses. A physical disk is an asset.

We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog

Their user agreement is particularly approachable, and includes nice explanations next to the sections.

This is whole thing is really a case of valve being very explicit about a significant drawback of digital assets to avoid confusion (their support has clearly had to address this situation before 😔). Gog is answering a press question being asked in response to the explicit reply from valve, so of course they’re going to avoid saying “our policy is the same”.

If it were routinely transferable via normal estate transfer, they wouldn’t need to specify the need for a court order, or that the installers are drm free so they couldn’t revoke access. If it went to an estate, the account would transfer automatically with the estate like every other tangible good.

https://respawnfirst.com/what-happens-to-your-gog-account-if-you-die-gog-confirms-policy/

Their full statement is really just that they’ll comply with a court order specifically relating to the library, less a general estate settlement.

In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account… we’ll do our best to make it happen.

This is really just a more casual phrasing of valves policy.

Steam accounts and games are non-transferable. Steam support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. Your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.

It’s not like valve is going to ignore a court order either.

Yup. It’s why they’re unlikely to get conversions, but they might get people to do both.

Consoles compete with PC gaming, but they’re not substitutes. The best they can hope for is people who are relatively indifferent to the advantages a PC has being persuaded by the console advantages, or people who are okay with just having both picking a PS5 over an Xbox or Nintendo.

For the latter, I think they’d be better served looking for a way to do “but it in one, play it in both” type deals, since that makes the ambivalent people more likely to default to PlayStation, since they still get PC, and the “both” people are more likely to buy sooner, since waiting doesn’t get them anything.

I feel like the better thing to compete on is “plug it in and it works”, “easier to play on your couch and TV with a controller than a PC” and various comparisons to the other consoles.

Other than setup and ease of couch gaming, PC has them beat hands down. And it’s only very slightly easier in those dimensions too.

Are those … Eye-pricots?

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Some models are getting better, but it’s still a point of difficulty. There are a lot of valid ways for fingers to be, so “finger like” areas have a lot of valid ways to be drawn. You need a fair bit of context to be able to say “wait, this is far too many, and the angles are all over the place”. They also seem to do less well when more detail needs to be given to other areas.

Some images from a model that tried to do better at hands, and a prompt that pushes it to focus in the hands:

Yeah, when I read the bit on silicon I was confused for a moment. It’s extracted from sand, it’s not terribly difficult to find.

“story”, “intended balance”, “hard”, “no reloading hard”, “custom because you like hard except for that one bit of bullshit”

To me that’s the perfect balance of settings.

And you’re a moron.

Or, you know, I don’t think that literally everything I can justify with numerology is Nazism, and so I don’t think I’m defending neonazis because someone used 14 letters in a game title.

Your argument is unassailable, because in your mind anyone who finds in unconvincing is a literal Nazi.

Think to yourself what someone would have to discover for you to decide they weren’t Nazis.
I know what I would need to see to think that I was wrong: statements, affiliations, something beyond numerology, refusal to make changes in the face of an unfortunate coincidence, or almost anything.

What would make you say “shit, I was wrong and listening to numerology”?

So, out the door any media playing with steamboat Willie being public domain is suspect because of rat adjacent symbolism?

Counting characters seems like basically numerology, if you want to get to a specific number it’s not hard. If you count the space it’s 14 characters, but you could just as easily not count the space. What if it had been "infestation: 88”? Not Nazi because of the colon, or do we skip the space now?

Using the conclusion of your argument as evidence to make further leaps is also not super sound reasoning.

It’s an asset flip game capitalizing on steamboat Willie and the “make a now public domain children’s character scary” money grab. It’s exactly what happened with Winnie the Pooh.

It’s a horror game with a mouse as the scary creature. The only cultural touchstones we have for mice are either cute, infestation or disease. Exterminators are who you call when you have a mouse problem, and people wearing gas masks are one of the most prolific assets you can buy models for in asset shops.

Dogwostles exist, but it’s important to actually look at context.