Depends where you live, in most places they don't bother anymore, in the few that they do a VPN obviously gets around it but it's incredibly unlikely you'd be doing enough to ever be on the radar let alone get caught. That battle was lost long ago.
I believe it is less that they stopped caring, and more that most piracy these days is web streaming, which is much harder to detect than torrenting or similar. AFAIK most major American ISPs are still fairly strict about pirate torrents.
I imagine its a case of the providers not wanting to admit its costing them a fortune because suddenly all these low-medium usage accounts are now their highest use ones.
Not saying it's right. But it's also not exactly a secret that they are all taking VERY heavy losses even with pricey subscriptions.
Given he's moving to SF to work in their office I presume part of it is he'll be working in-house on their commercial replacement, and will continue to cover costs on the OSS version which he's free to work on. His recent posts make it clear they've got plans for their own stuff to replace it.
About as bad as a US based server then if we're being realistic. EU based (and not owned by Amazon/MS/Google/etc) seems like the only semi secure hosting option these days.
I imagine something like Reddit might make for better storage than this. It'd be pretty trivial to set up a few accounts with private subs too just store encrypted text based data. Not fast or anything but surely easier to work with.
Funny thing is theres probably some Apple employees reading this right now kidding themselves into thinking this is an end user problem. It's not - your keyboard is bloody awful now, you made it worse.
GTAII was really weird for me, it ran at 0.5x speed. Later realised it wasn't any sort of GPU limitation but was due to some quirk with how it was tied to CPU. I had an off-brand CPU (a Transmeta if I recall) running on an old Mc Donalds workstation ripped out of an old office when they upgraded. It 'ran' just very, very weirdly. It wasn't until I saw a friend playing it on their computer that I realised that it wasn't in fact supposed to work like that!
Agree on the observability. Every time I've seen that mentioned on the many, many discussions on Xitter theres one of the usual clickbait youtube 'bros' telling you to go watch their video on how to make your own ui for it. Really shouldn't need to for such a fundamentally basic and crucial part of it. It's a bit of a hot mess.
Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.
However, I’ve been subscribed to it since its inception because it is the best way to have games that my kid can play without shady ads or engagement practices.
I know that is not going to last, as my kid is now a pre-teen and likes other types of games (like Hollow Knight) that are not available on Apple Arcade.
But the current state of the gaming industry is terrible, especially on mobile. Indy companies producing games like Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, and Stray are good, and there is the extremely rare case of Larian. But other than that, the market is full of dark-UX patterns to promote app purchases. Mobile apps are a minefield of gacha games that should be forbidden for kids.
Just forget that mobile gaming exists? I think one of the cheapo Linux retro handhelds offer a better portable gaming experience than 99% of mobile games, ads or no.
I rather like the Anbernic RG35XXSP for the form factor. It is missing analog sticks, which does cut down on playable games a little but it's cute and tiny and is decently powerful for the price and has good community support. The rest of the RGYYXX line(where YY is the screen size) uses the same hardware but have different form factors so you can pick what you like best.
Sure, but in another time you'd have paid ~$2.99 for the ad-free version one-time, and carried on using it. They intentionally deleted that version of the game, screwing over everyone who did so, then quietly launched the same game again, removing the ad-free one time purchase option.
Taste is subjective. I get it. There are Triple A games on Arcade. Things like Civilization 7, for example. I don't know what the current standalone price is because we use Apple One Family, however, it used to cost $5/mo.
Apple one is a steal IMO. Apple TV, Fitness+, 2TB, Arcade, and other smaller perks like News+ make it an easy sell. Compared to something like Netflix? Netflix is $25/mo for their top tier streaming alone. Apple TV consistently has higher quality content. So does Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness...then you get 2TB of storage to back your crap up to.
Ask Google or Samsung what they are doing for the cost of an Apple One subscription.
Not a fanboy or anything. I'm basically critical of all tech companies, however, Apple is doing something that is working well for them.
Have you thought of getting your kid a nintendo console of some kind? A jailbroken 3DS seems like it'd be great for avoiding that kind of slop since the 3DSs app store died a few years ago
The App Store really ought to just be a better platform in the first place. Apple is the one that let it accumulate slop, and now they're profiting off it's reputation for gambleslop apps.
If you can figure out a good way for Apple to eliminate the revenue model used for the most profitable games on the platform without getting slapped by regulators, I'm sure they would love to hear it.
They don't have to eliminate it, that wasn't my complaint. They need a competitive ecosystem with real-world stakeholders (a-la Epic) and third-party community support like emulators.
iOS is so far behind in this regard that even uttering it in the same sentence as "gaming" almost exclusively implicates gachapon titles or microtransaction slop. Other platforms don't suffer as much.
Arcade is amazing for my kids, it’s the one thing that pushes the value of Apple One bundle high enough for me to pay it. I assume all games not in Arcade have gambling mechanics.
The lack of microtransaction/loot box/forced ads/etc driven gameplay is why I keep it. If I can get versions of newer games without all of that cruft, I’m happy. I’m also happy that the game developer gets paid for it.
Us east coasters here are having a chuckle (what else can we do? we can't get work done while Claude is down... I'll be damned if I have to type in code letter by letter ever again!).
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