Game of Thrones was the most popular series in the world, despite having multiple characters and parallel story arcs. People underestimate other people.

But they did shut down the dota 2 gambling. I dont know why cs is different.

Valve cracked down on dota gambling many years ago and since then, i dont think it is a thing anymore. However, normal gambling(for dota games or conventional sports) is the primary sponsor of most dota tournaments/teams.

Yes but even with 25% VAT, it should have been 875 USD. And in other countries, it is 800€ (830 USD). Amazon.de sells it for 800€(sold by Amazon) and even delivers it to Sweden(for 15€). Amazon.se doesnt have the ps5 pro for some reason.

I think Sony was willing to take a small loss in Eurozone, so that it can have a nice round price(800€).

Meanwhile in Sweden, it is 944 USD.

Swish is very popular in Sweden and has no fees(for individuals)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

Noone uses cash in Sweden, except for maybe drug dealers and super old people(and the occasional tourist). Most businesses dont even accept cash anymore.

It isnt just the convenience of not having to carry cash, it is also much safer. Much lower risk of getting robbed, for both individuals and businesses.

Either is fine but i strongly recommend going for amd, especially an x3d one, like 7800x3d(if you care about gaming).

You dont need to sell your stocks to access that wealth. You can use that as collateral to take loans or exchange stocks.

Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

An ai can help a lot of non tech savvy people. Imagine every time they want to do something, they could just ask the ai on how to do it, instead of asking you or having to go through a billion SEO garbage google results.

Because not many europeans primarily identify as “european first”. This is slowly changing but for the most part, people identify by whatever european nation they inhabit. But i bet most chinese identify as “chinese first” instead of whatever region/city they are from.

In fact, China likes to brag about how “advanced” they are, that they solved this “issue” centuries ago, while the EU is currently trying to “copy them”.

TLDR : If you ask a chinese tourist “where are you from?”, they will answer “China”. If you ask a european the same, noone will say “Europe/EU”.

Cyrillic is literally greek+glagolitic and it was partly a diplomatic creation of the Eastern Roman Empire(aka Byzantine Empire), in order to bring the slavs culturally closer to them.

Russians have nothing to do with it, other than them claiming they are the continuation of Eastern Roman Empire, something which is kinda laughable but whatever dont let your dreams be dreams.

1. Lego horizon Adventures looks neat, hopefully it has more depth than other lego games but i dont expect much. At least it looks pretty. Atm it isnt on steam, but it is announced that it will be.

2. I am very hyped for Space Marine 2. This might be the best warhammer 40k game ever.

3. I am optimistic for Star Wars Outlaws by the division devs(i liked division 1 and 2). But it isnt even on steam, so it will fail.

4. Civilization 7 is definitely one of the most anticipated games ever.

5. And hopefully Battle Aces will revive the rts genre.

Intel was ahead of AMD ever since core 2 duo, in 2006. Amd was behind for almost 10 years and it wasnt until ryzen and especially zen 2 that AMD pulled ahead. And then with zen 3 and zen 4, AMD wiped the floor with intel.

7800x3d is the best cpu ever made for gaming and it succeeded the 5800x3d which was already a legendary cpu. Intel has been getting wrecked so hard that they are literally using tsmc to manufacture their cpus, an obvious admission that their manufacturing is behind the competition(amd is fabless and is also using tsmc).

Intel has the ability to come back on top, at least as far as x86 cpus are concerned. The question is whether x86 is even relevant anymore, considering the insane efficiency gains shown by apple’s m series and even qualcomm’s upcoming snapdragon x series.

Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.

Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.

It is free. But they can gather data, get you into their ecosystem, hopefully making it more likely you buy a playstation or other playstation published games. Eventually maybe they want to have cross progress between pc and playstation or have playstation achievements on pc, maybe their own steam like client.

Ultimately these countries are probably responsible for less than 5% of their total sales. Most of them are either tiny or poor or both. It does have countries like Egypt, Albania, Serbia, Morocco and Algeria but most of the banned countries are irrelevant in terms of sales.