“Why hasn’t anyone designed a building like this before?”

“Oh.”

You make a decent point, but the disconnect between people paying for content and the money going to the people who contributed effort to it is getting wider and wider.

Popular shows that people subscribed for get axed after 1 season or moved to another service. All the work people did for Warner Brothers’ Batgirl gets thrown in the trash so that WB can get a tax write-off, before any movie watcher can even give a cent to them in support.

The point is big studios make so much year after year that pirating their stuff doesn’t make a dent in whether the people they hire get paid accordingly.

Many scene groups actually purchased the games and cracked them, I’ve read NFOs that say “buy the game, we did too”.

People recording in movie theatres have to either sneak into the theatre or buy a ticket themselves.

Someone scanning a book to post online had to have bought it or borrowed it.

Yes some games are cracks of illegitimate obtained leaked copies or other unscrupulous methods.

I have played pirated games in the past but my Steam library has thousands of dollars worth of games I bought, many of which I wouldn’t have if I weren’t interested in these type of games to begin had pirating games not been possible.

Sure, the opportunity cost from piracy’s “lost sales” to the publisher/licensor is non-zero. But how many sales that would have happened varies greatly on the perceived value vs. price of the product, and how available it is. If it’s not in stores anymore and can only be bought from scalpers on eBay, the publisher cough Nintendo cough doesn’t see that money anyway vs. pirating it.

Some countries have a blank media fee on writable casettes, discs and hard drives that are paid to music and movie studios for this purpose.

Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.

An open source Brood War engine seems to exist but development appears to have stalled.

For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.

In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.

I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.

That’s a neat fact!

Good games give me the same feeling as reading a good fictional novel: I get transported into the universe, following the character or whatever action is unfolding.

More generally, games give the player a goal to achieve, whether that’s winning over others, cooperating with others, completing a campaign, collecting a bunch of goodies (or all the goodies), relaxing and enjoying scenery, crafting min-maxed playthroughs, or trying over and over again to beat a level.

Being focused on this goal can help keep your mind off of whatever is troubling you in the present.

I don’t know how likely it is (seems unlikely as it was coordinated until Monday), but if they can maintain strikes through to Christmas, then it would have a major effect. People ordering a week before will not get it in time.

エアーステーション

Airstation

I wonder if it will be anything like the Rogers outage in Canada. A bad software maintenance update made their infrastructure malfunction and so many people were offline from a few days to a week.

It’s in the article but to paraphrase it:

When a large company takes an open protocol, embraces it using adding users to the network through heir platform, then extends it using proprietary means, they have full control over how the protocol runs in the network.

When the open standards are forced to make changes to be functional with the dominant proprietary app that is poorly (and sometimes incorrectly) documented, open source groups are constantly on the backfoot in order to maintain compatibility, and that makes it harder to compete on their own right.

A second example given is LibreOffice, whose documents are made to fit the XML standard by Microsoft, but there are quirks in their documented standard that if you follow it too closely it isn’t formatted quite the same as the document produced in Microsoft Office, so they were pressured to effectively copy MS and deviate from the standards MS claims to follow.