people are actually looking forward to a game

Hype around a game is directly related to the marketing budget. If people are looking forward to the next edition in a franchise, it is inevitably because they’ve been bombarded with “NEW THING! NEW THING! NEW THING!” radio/TV/streaming ad reels for months prior.

All that aside, yeah our countries hate unions and hate workers and everyone in power hates you and wants you to die.

We’re going to replace all the working class schlubs with AI, haven’t you heard?

why do the right thing when you can buy a new shiny toy

It’s not like they’re plastering “We Busted A Union To Get This Game Out Six Months Late” on the packaging. The overwhelming majority of retail customers have no idea how the sausage is made. Those that are curious enough to ask typically aren’t the ones going in on the “Rape And Loot Simulator” franchise to begin with.

Gotta get off this hobby horse of blaming the anonymous gooner gamer at the bottom of the food chain for decisions made in a smoke-filled board room long beforehand.

Delaying the game another six months cost the company a full 3% on their market cap and god knows how much in long term costs.

Employers seem ready to slit their wrists if it’ll get blood on a union organizer.

You think the Brits would do that? Appoint a single family to a powerful position of authority and let them just loot the national treasury generation after generation? Cause I find that very idea offensive and suspect you’re just another Tankie Wumao Corbynite Bot.

Freckles AND a jawline? Unplayable.

The degree to which people will idolize God of War’s Kratos and shit all over Horizon’s Aloy is crazy, given how these are functionally the same character.

I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.

She didn’t look like the silhouette on a truck’s mudflaps. So she’s hideous by default. But then nobody seems to qualify as “hot enough” anymore. Sidney Sweeny isn’t hot enough. Taylor Swift isn’t hot enough. Ciri from the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Freya Allan from the TV Show of the Witcher isn’t hot enough. Fucking Jessica Rabbit isn’t hot enough.

Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.

Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.

Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box

That’s just social media in a nutshell. You’re either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.

“Russia risks new Lenin”

I mean, tell it to Jeffery Epstein. The man was pulling strings halfway around the world with his endless supply of blackmail and bribery.

yet its not illegal to not have kids

Gotta get back to you on this. Currently being pummeled with billy clubs for having an unsanctioned abortion.

the purpose of romantic and sexual relationships is to bring into being the next generation of workers to build socialism

It’s so funny how you’ve taken some of the Silicon Valley Techbro logic and just inserted “socialism” into the center of it to let us know its bad.

Love how this simple truth gets downvoted.

FFS, you’ve got American citizens being massed through open windows by masked, unidentified vigilantes, and you still have people who will die on the hill of “China Worse” because foreign countries full of non-white people are evil.

Sort of the unanswered question here. Why was the app removed?

“China hates gays” is just the default western-facing answer. But there’s no coverage of the actual regulatory decision other than that Apple claims to have responded to it. Hell, the article linked on Engadget is just a partial reprint of the original Wired article, which reveals the two apps are owned by the same parent company, which had fired the original development team and pivoted the app’s audience to India and Pakistan.

Folks on here who are fully familiar with the enshitification of American-centric apps seem flabbergasted at the notion that a foreign country with its own regulatory board might censor an app for any reason other than “Hates Gays”.

The trouble with appeasement is that you’re eventually pushed to the point where you won’t cave anymore.

I thought the trouble with appeasement was that you surrendered turf until you were backed out of a defensible position.

You have an enemy.

The Chinese economy is not the enemy of the Apple retail sector. And it never has been. They’ve been hand-in-glove for decades.

It’s sunk cost fallacy as international strategy and it’s terrible.

It’s a profit-maximizing strategy and its how every capitalist enterprise operates.

What is Tim Cook’s choice here?

I mean, what was the rationale for the regulation? Its not like enshitification of apps is some novel event unique to American-centric businesses. Did Blued/Finka become a cesspool of degenerate AI slop and scam ads like so many other popular social media platforms? Is there any legitimate reason why this company was targeted beyond “China hates gays”?

Did the Apple Executives get handed a serious list of problems with the app and choose to de-platform it rather than try and patch a sinking ship? Or is Cook just a cuck for Chinese Communism?

I don’t want corporations telling me what software I can and can’t run on my decides while surveilling me.

Cheers to that. But if you’re side-loading everything, you’re not really worried about what’s hosted on the Apple Store to begin with. Why is an executive decision to delist an app from a proprietary service a problem?

Part of the problem with “China Bad” articles is that they tend to report “Thing Happened” without diving into the “Here’s Why”. If you get past the Engadget article that’s just a four paragraph click-through/reprint of the Wired article and read the original piece, there’s at least a bit more meat on the bone.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-removes-gay-dating-apps-china-app-store/

In July, Blued abruptly stopped new user registration without giving an explanation, according to Chinese social media posts. For a month, Chinese users who wanted to get on the platform were paying as much as $20 for secondhand Blued accounts on ecommerce websites. But registration resumed in mid-August.

In 2020, BlueCity, the parent company of Blued, went public. It announced that the app had over 49 million registered users and over 6 million monthly active users. The same year, BlueCity said it was acquiring Finka, its main competitor in China, for about $33 million. The company delisted in 2022 and was acquired by Newborn Town, a Hong Kong–listed social media firm. Most of the longtime employees of Blued, including its founder Ma Baoli, left the company after the acquisition, says a former Blued employee who asked not to be named for privacy reasons.

In 2024, Blued rebranded its international version of the app to HeeSay, which became popular among users in India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, according to The Wall Street Journal. HeeSay remains available in app stores.

So the apps merged, then were traded, had the team gutted, and the app pivoted to serving an entirely new audience of users.

Why would this provoke a response from a Chinese regulator? Idk. Would be great to find out further details from the news outlet itself, rather than just getting another “China hates gay people” superficial response.

It doesn’t look like the Cyberspace Administration of China purged all gay dating apps from their behind-the-firewall app store. So it seems premature to conclude this is a new vast pogrom against gay dating. Was Blued/Finka filling up with scams to the point that a regulator stepped in? Was there some kind of personal beef between the new owners and the Chinese regulatory agency? Did a bribe not get paid? Is this actually the beginning of a vast pogrom against all dating apps?

No fucking clue. And nobody doing the reporting seems to be interested in following up and asking.

“If this password doesn’t work, I’m going to break your thumbs.”

“Uh…”

“Yeah, its not the real password. Lets break his thumbs and ask him again.”

your full disk encryption will pay off one day

They day you fuck up your password one too many times and lock yourself out of your own computer.

check the IP logs

Its all encrypted? This guy uses VPNs and Tor?

Presuming that Mossad can be topped with a subscription to ProtonVPN or a Tor browser is adorable. Hell, presuming nobody in the intelligence services is familiar with Linux is even more adorable. “We’ve got everyone at the NSA fooled because we’re Arch users”. Yeah, sure buddy. What do you think these professional computer nerds are doing in their own free time?

Where do you even think encrypted applications come from?

It’s been the bedrock of American business since at least the 1960s.

Our country is flush with very wealthy fascists, many of whom obtained the position thanks to their ancestors crawling across the ratlines and embedding themselves in the nascent tech sector.