danlk1ng

@Gamakazil - ahhh, Gamakazil. Your comment was short lived, but it was particularly funny in light of the fact that there are plenty of perfectly polite replies from various different points of view in this, the very bottom end of the comments section - and most of them seem to have been deigned acceptable by our overlords. But not yours, for you made one fateful mistake, for you had to discuss the "M" word. Never discuss the "M" word

and if you're going to discuss the "M" word you should do what I did, and report your own comment for violating the rules. For some reason the comment I did that on is still standing. I like to think I'm finally breaking through to the "M" word's sense of humour, but in all honesty it probably just wasn't worth the effort

@Arnna do you think the average voter gives a damn about peer reviewed science? I'm not saying that the peer reviewed scientists are wrong. I'm also not saying that the "genuine concerns" I referred to are even valid - more that they're sincerely held. I even left it a bit of an open question whether Rowling herself genuinely holds these views - the fact is, a lot of people do. People who don't necessarily even know what peer review is, let alone know why peer reviewed scientists would know better than someone like JK Rowling. You (not just you personally, the whole "angry trans allies community") need to find a better way of engaging with these people in particular than just shouting their opinions down because frankly, the kind of manner in which you've just responded is exactly what I'm talking about. It's not going to win any friends, and it's certainly not going to win any votes for trans causes

@Arnna in all honesty I find it hard to accept that JKR's words themselves have that much of an impact "in a vaccuum" as it were. At the end of the day all she really did was put words to genuine concerns that she had from a place of fear due to her own experiences - and even if you don't believe that, she put words to genuine concerns that a lot of ordinary (as in, there's a hell of a lot of them) people share. IMO the much more damaging things for the Trans community were/are:

-the massive effort to make perfectly clear that JK Rowling's opinions will not be tolerated at all costs
-the actual right wing, who, given the previous point, snapped Rowling up as their new poster child and example of how "the left eat themselves"

Lots of perfectly nice, reasonable people were already concerned about the kind of things JK Rowling has expressed before she expressed them - but because of the fallout from Rowling expressing stuff that they were already thinking, their perception of the trans community changed from "people we want to try and help but we believe there might be safety issues to consider" to "people who don't care about my opinion and will go out of their way to silence people who express it" (I mean, some people did already think that anyway, don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the JKR stuff is the sole cause of this particular narrative). And like I say, part of the blame for that is on the right wing media anyway, as this is exactly the kind of opinion that they want to propogate when it comes to the left/the trans community. Also worth pointing out that "the trans community" isn't in itself to blame for the backlash against JKR, since this is a different group of people to "trans-allied twitter warriors".

I mean you can kind of see it in this very comments section. PushSquare readers aren't necessarily representative of the world as a whole but, look for any comment here that vaguely expresses support for JKR or Hogwarts Legacy (in the early comments anyway, back when there was lots of traffic to this article as it was fairly new) there are tons of likes on those comments - far more likes than there had been commenters at that point, in some cases maybe more likes than all the unique commenters in this whole thread, because (I think) a lot of people are afraid to express their opinion, but aren't afraid to back it up anonymously. And this is my concern for the trans community - if people feel like they're being silenced (regardless of whether it's true. I do realise that JKR is not truly "silenced" - this is more about the narrative around what's going on), they're only going to get resentful, and one thing you can't take away from them is their voting power..

so I've worked out that if 73% of the people who bought a console with particular games in mind bought it for COD, and 69% of them bought it for PS exclusives, that means that a minimum of 57% of people who bought a PS4/PS5 for COD also bought it for PS exclusive games. That's if the whole 27% who didn't say "COD" did say "PS exclusives", which they might not have done.

In summary, COD is absolutely a juggernaut but it's really not the only reason these people buy a Playstation, as is being implied here

Those percentages don't even add up.
To summarise the stats mentioned here, what we're looking at is:

88% of players buy a playstation for a particular game
73% out of 88% of users (so 64% o players) said that Call of Duty was the game they bought Playstation for

69% of players bought Playstation for platform exclusives (if we're talking about 69% of 88%, then that's 61%)

45% of players bought a playstation for GTAV (if we're talking about 45% of 88%, that's 40%)

So either, the statements above are accounting for 178% of playstation players (64% + 69% + 45%)

Or, they account for 165% of playstation players (64% + 61% + 40%)

Or, people got to choose multiple options in the poll, in which case saying "64% (73% of 88%) of players only bought a playstation to play Call of Duty" is a bunch of rubbish, because the vast majority of them must have also picked other games on the list for these stats to even begin to make sense.

edit: OK, to be fair in the article it does say: 88 per cent of users buy PlayStation due to the availability of one or more games

my misunderstanding is down to PushSquare using the term "that game", which heavily implies that it was the only game the player was interested in when they bought the console, which simply doesn't seem to be true:

"And of that 88%, a whopping 73% said Call of Duty was that game."

@BlaBlaBla in fairness to them, they've allowed more discussion on the subject than it would initially have appeared that they were going to, for example there's a slew of posts expressing the exact sentiment you've expresed here, as well as others not in line with PushSquare's stance on the topic - but then there are also a bunch of comments deleted due to being "off-topic". The threshold for getting a comment deleted isn't exactly clear

@Gamer_Guy I mean, I could quite easily get it for that by buying it on a turkish storefront for Steam as well - I deliberately only compared legitimate means of buying the game for UK consumers, rather than advocate a practice that only pushes up the prices for poorer countries

That sale price for for TLOU part 1 though - still £10 more expensive than I can easily find a pre-order for the PC version (as in, without resorting to cheap PSN credit shenanigans)

FYI (everyone, no one in particular) according to SteamDB this is already the game with the 23rd highest all-time peak concurrent players.

The sentence is a bit convoluted so to simplify in case it's unclear - if you were to rank all games on Steam by the largest number of players that have been playing them at the same time, across their lifetime, Hogwarts Legacy is already #23 on that list (with 323,839 players). Which doesn't sound massively impressive - #23 is hardly a gold medal or anything, but it does mean that it's already beaten Skyrim (#27- 287,411 players) and Destiny 2 (#26 - 292,513 players), to name just a couple in the same region of the chart. Obviously this is only on Steam - but in summary, I don't think the devs have anything to worry about in terms of sales

@Stocksy I mean maybe you're not "subverting the English language to suit a narrative." but you're certainly choosing a particular way of interpreting the English language, which conveniently fits your narrative

The idea that the pronoun "they" can only apply to either groups of people, or non-binary people is incorrect, as has been demonstrated already. Anyone who claims that these are the rules of English language either doesn't know what they're talking about, or is wilfully lying - either way they're doing so in service of their own narrative.

It's worth pointing out that I've stuck up for JKR on this very thread. We're probably not all that different in our overall outlook and our views on this game and the issues around it - it's just that I've bothered to actually find out the ways that you can use the "they" pronoun in English, and have been able to for a long time

@Savage_Joe 5 stars for effort with that argument, but all it really shows is you can Google something to support your case without really understanding what's in front of you. The definition of "it" that you're referring to is

Used to IDENTIFY a person, e.g. "it's me"

On the other hand, a pronoun like "he" has a very similar but distinct definition:

Used to REFER TO a man, boy, or male animal previously mentioned or easily identified, e.g. "everyone liked my father—he was the perfect gentleman"

The pronoun "they" has a very similar meaning:

Used to REFER TO a person of unspecified gender.
"ask a friend if they could help" (this is a perfect example of using this pronoun outside of trans stuff - because you're referring to some potential individual but you haven't a clue what the gender of the person who turns up might be)

The fact is, you've picked an extremely specific use case to make your point that "it" is a gender neutral pronoun, but nobody is actually talking about the "identify" pronoun (much as there's much talk of identifying as things when pronouns come up), all of the pronouns that any fuss is being made over are "refer to" pronouns. To use "it" as one of these, you can't just say "it's me", you need to say something like:

"It's looking at me"
"It's wearing those clothes again"

You wouldn't last 5 minutes in society if you want around referring to people as "it", whereas if you referred to people as "they" you might get some funny looks but at least people wouldn't get the impression you were referring to them as an object/animal/monster

@Savage_Joe "it" is the correct pronoun for an object, not a person. And a person referred to as "they" isn't necessarily genderless, the pronoun is simply sitting on the the fence with regards the gender of the person/s being referred to

@Jaz007 obviously I know that wasn't what you meant, but what you meant was incorrect. "They" is not necessarily plural (details in my reply that you're replying to). And if it isn't necessarily plural, it certainly isn't "strictly" plural

@Stocksy the appeal to the rules of English language is absolutely not correct. There's nothing stopping you referring to a single person as "they", in fact there are situations in which it's polite to do so (see my previous comment for actual examples). Anyone parroting the idea that "they" is a plural pronoun and nothing more is just fishing for a reason to be offended, rather than having an actual grasp of the English language.

That said, personally I'd prefer it if the game did use male/female and he/she - I don't really see the need to remove gender entirely. But at the same time, it's the dev's right to do so and there's very little that someone not going out of their way to try to be offended should really be offended by, since all the game is doing is using neutral (not even specifically "non-binary") language

I mean that seems fair. Gaming subscription services haven't had a massive impact on the way big companies operate.

Now microtransactions, on the other hand...

@Jaz007 that's not at all what happens when "you get strict about English" - getting strict about English usually involves going around, correcting perfectly understandable posts on the internet because of their slightly less than immaculate grammar.

As for "they" - it is a term for a group of people, but it's equally usable as a term for referring to someone if you're not sure what their gender is. You don't even need to involve trans people in this one - you might be referring to someone with a first name that you're unfamiliar with, and you've never met them, you've only ever seen their name written down in print but know nothing else about them (this sounds like a convoluted situation but as someone who liaises fairly often with a helpdesk based in India, this happens to me all the time). Notice that even that sentence I just wrote, doesn't look the slightest bit weird because of the context, despite the fact that I purely used "they" to refer to some hypothetical individual, not a group.

On the other hand, if you do know someone's gender or have good reason to assume it, it can come across a little more odd in that context. I'll admit that the example from @tedinthepaint isn't the best, IMO - but it's not because "they" isn't a term that people can use to refer to a single person - it's just that it's rare to refer to someone as both "a son" (or another word with a clear gender assigned to it) and also as "they" - it's more commonly used to refer to someone where the gender is uncertain, for whatever reason (maybe you're writing an FAQ for future use and have no way of predicting the gender of the person you're referring to - e.g. "how do I reset my child's password? - you can reset their password by doing X..."). But just because it's a bit jarring to refer to "my son" as "they" doesn't mean it's incorrect.

In the case of the game though, I imagine they stuck with "they" pronouns simply because it was simpler than recording two or three sets of variations of all the dialogue, and because it's not incorrect for the reasons stated already

@DazzaUK1985 @stassinari @Shigurui Indivisible has been part of the Game Catalogue for PS Plus Extra/Premium for a while now, so if you're on one of those tiers, that's all you're seeing. You could have just as easily added it to your library yesterday

The problem with live service games is that they're much more of a zero sum game than single player games, in terms of attracting a player base.

We all know the feeling of having a massive backlog of games to complete - and that poses no issue for developers at all. They've already made their money on the single player games that we've bought, they can maybe get us to buy some expansions (unless we bought a fancy GOTY bundle)

Live service games can't get away with that. They can't sit in people's libraries waiting for them to get around to them - and they can't afford for you to spend too much time in the latest bit of single player brilliance while their multiplayer servers are left to fester. I mean, some of them can, e.g. Fortnite age a few others with a very dedicated fan base - but even if you assume that there's a good chunk of gamers who only play live service games, to the exclusion of everything else - any new live service game that wants to thrive, has to do so at the expense of another, because they need people actually playing and spending money on them, they can't afford to just fester in everyone's backlogs

@Westernwolf4 perhaps because, at the start at least, that's not remotely what she said at all. Sure you can find lots of stuff online that paints her as saying exactly that, but never simply by letting her use her own words.

Which is kind of funny, in that there are plenty of people out there who have no qualms at all about saying something like that.

Maybe JKR got more extreme over time, but in all honesty I don't know what you expect to happen when you decide you no longer want anything to do with someone that was practically an icon for progressives for about a decade. That she just would just comply because you said so, and not talk to the people who disagree with you, who didn't make her persona non Grata?

@tgt you have to consider where such dangerous sterotypes come from though - and no, I'm not saying that they necessarily have basis in fact. But they do have a basis in fear - and the trouble with ideas that have a basis in fear is that it's a bad idea to simply say "you can't say that" or "you're a horrible person for thinking/arguing that" - people don't generally like having their fears spoken down to. I'm all for informing people better, but the collective effort towards JKR has been less of an effort to inform her, more of an effort to make perfectly clear that both she and her views will not be tolerated. It's been awful to watch, hence why her detractors haven't exactly done much to persuade people who weren't already concerned for trans rights

@StrickenBiged a sensible person appears!

perosonally I have nothing against trans rights. "What JKR said" isn't as interesting to me as the effect of this whole hate campaign over some fairly reasonable ideas on her part.

It's not as though I think JKR was necessarily 100% right at any point, more that she was far from the point of wanting to deny anybody their human rights. As something of a darling of progressives for a decade, she might have even adjusted her message/view in line with reasonable concerns brought about in a reasonable way. But she wasn't given reasonable concerns in a reasonable way, she was subjected to a tirade of abuse and made persona non grata by the people who'd loved her most outspokenly for years. Is it any wonder that she ended up expressing stuff that said people disagreed with even more?

@MrMeeeseeeks given the type of comment that seems to be getting lots of likes in this comment thread (the ones that are left, anyway), I think there's a pretty good reason ("good" in terms of the kind of outcome they're trying to achieve) why they'd never even consider that

@NomNom consoles still in scalpers' hands likely aren't represented in these numbers at all, since it's specifically talking about active users. If a console is gathering dust in a scalper's inventory, it doesn't have an active user by definition.

I mean, this doesn't seem that unusual. PS4 owners can still play the vast majority of games on PS5 so there's less of a need for them to upgrade, on the other hand PS5 buyers get a system that can play both PS4 and PS5 games, so it's instantly better value for money than the previous 2 generations (I personally had a PS3 but skipped PS4 - not on principle, just never got around to buying one, but when it was clear that PS5 had backwards compatibility of a sort, that was the decision made for me). I'd say this was more unsurprising than fascinating

@Deoxyr1bose I mean, critics certainly had a lot to say about it

@Perturbator depends on the game IMO. I don't remotely regret buying Elden Ring at launch and having the sense of communal experience as we all discovered the game together (and to be clear, I very, very rarely buy games at less than a 50% discount, let alone at launch). I can't imagine the Dying Light 2 launch experience being quite the same though

@themightyant so far I've bought TW3 3 times - once on switch (I didn't have a PS4/Xbox or a remotely capable PC at the time, so it was my only option), which I then sold later for about £30 (crazy!) to buy it for PS4 as soon as I had a PS5 pre-ordered (it was about £10 for GOTY at that point), and then I've since bought it on GOG now that I have a decent PC. I keep being tempted to buy it on Steam too, just so it can live with the vast majority of my PC games

@nessisonett I've got it downloaded on PC, keep meaning to give it a go - it was Humble Choice's main game a few months back, which was a particularly good month (side note: January was the first month I've skipped for a while. Much as Doom Eternal was a good inclusion, it just wasn't worth having to buy the DLC on top of it for basically the same price as the Deluxe Edition, which already includes the DLC - I ended up just skipping Humble Choice and buying the Deluxe version on it's own - and I get it, Humble Choice isn't all about the big games, but I have indie games coming out of my ears at this point, from all the month's I've been subscribed)

@LN78 I'm currently watching through Vikings (partly because I'm also playing through AC Valhalla and they compliment each other quite nicely, especially as I had no idea who Ragnar Lothbrok was a few months ago, so now I understand the references) and yeah, I find it quite funny when people travel between Northumbria and Wessex like it's nothing more than a few hours' journey when they're opposite ends of the country! I get it though, travel time is condensed because otherwise it'd be a bit dull - and to be fair, in American terms, Wessex was practically on Northumbria's doorstep

@ApostateMage if you wanted to make it particualrly ridiculous, you could say it's 10 miles west of liverpool

Come on guys, I mean it's the post-apocalypse. No one really knows what "a mile" is any more , or "West" for that matter

I do plan on getting one at some point but certainly not at launch. I'm not even specifically waiting for a price reduction, just can't justify one right now. I've only just splashed out and got an actual 4K TV - no more being limited to 1080p for me! And that was around 2/3 the cost of one of these.

Anyway, my point is, cost of living crisis being what it is, many people are probably in the same boat (or worse)

What a bizarre argument "Sony are a great company and they're doing great and their franchises are all doing great"

If anything, this argument seems to suggest that Sony would do a much better job of taking over Activision Blizzard

@ItsBritneyB_tch my working theory (when he mentioned the wine being poisoned) was actually that the wine wasn't poisoned at all, and that he was just saying that to eliminate any guilt on Frank's part, for convincing Bill to help him die. I was kinda disappointed when Joel and Ellie turned up and Bill wasn't sat there, sipping a coffee or something for us all to go "wha-he's not dead?"

@SolaceCreed yours would have made more sense last August at least. Back then we could have all predicted that it would be coming to PC, but they hadn't announced the price for the PC version or anything

Aaaaaand well done to PushSquare for bringing an old article back from the dead and giving it a fresh title and time stamp, so I think I'm responding to someone who commented only minutes ago, only to realise the comment is several months old

slow clap

@andykara2003 but they're releasing it for PC straight at £50. On the other hand, they released it on PS5 for £70, just a few months ago. All other discussion about the remake aside (was it necessary etc), I can understand why this would annoy some fans. Naughty Dog are a Sony first party studio - in what way does it make sense to pay £70 for a game made by a Sony studio, on Sony's own platform right now, when I can pre-order that exact same game on a third party platform for PC that takes a cut of each sale, for £50?

A lot of the complaints about the price were specifically about the £70 price tag, not people expecting to get the game for half price

@BoldAndBrash

It's not "cheap" to not want to subscribe to an ever growing number of subscription services at the same time, it's just good sense.

I mean these platforms' main selling point is it's basically "all you can eat TV", but you wouldn't go to 5 all you can eat restaurants in a row for lunch, it'd just be a complete waste of money. Same principle here - your time is inherently limited, the more streaming services you're subscribed to, the less you're using each particular one, on average

@grapetrap I mean in fairness, that clicker definitely got him good. TV Joel has some serious noob luck going on

@djape no, I'm just getting old. And I don't like it!

Only reason I tagged you is the answer to your question is "millions of pre-teens with poor taste in games" (I mean, that's debatable but it's my opinion and I'm sticking to it..)

@Toypop it's releasing on PC in march, and funnily enough you can get a £40 ish pre order fairly easily, as it's only priced at £50 and you can get a steam key from a third party seller (e.g. Green Man, Humble etc) for cheaper

Kind of a kick in the teeth for PlayStation fans though, giving it to users on a completely different platform who never got TLOU and r Remastered, for cheaper

@djape I was playing DOOM on my PC recently and my 12 year old son walked in. He knows Doom guy as "Doom Slayer, from fortnite"

I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment, personally I'd pick pretty much any single player game over Fortnite, but the answer to "who gives a f", is frankly "a whooooole lot of 12 year olds"

@Type_Trubbish FEDRA soldiers which you then have to kill lots of, don't you? (Can't remember if you actually have to or if I was just particularly killy in my playthrough)

Grizzly Everyman Joel working his way through a bunch of soldiers makes for decent gameplay, but less than believable TV

@MFTWrecks when she showed them exactly where her bite was, my mind shot straight back to episode 1, to the FEDRA poster on the wall in the room with the infected kid (pretty much exactly 36 minutes in - I don't have a photographic memory at all, I've just had a look for it in episode 1).

TIME TO FULL INFECTION
IF INFECTED WOUND IS ON:
NECK, FACE, HEAD:
5 - 15 minutes

Yeah, if that poster was anything to go on, she was on borrowed time as it was

Did anyone else chuckle at the part where the building collapsed a little bit and blocked Joel, Ellie and Tess from going back the way they came? I mean it wasn't massively funny in itself, I just don't think there are many times on TV where the protagonists are forced to progress through an area because their entrance has been blocked - seems like more of a video game thing to me (I'm probably completely wrong on that)

@Loftimus except humans are already immune, normally that is. As in, in the world of TLOU something about cordyceps has changed, so that it can infect humans. It stands to reason therefore, that if humans (or a single human) could also change in just the right way, cordyceps could no longer infect them. The experts wouldn't be much in the way of experts if they didn't recognise adaptation as a thing - just because they didn't say "oh and every one in a billion, someone might be born different in just the right ways, to be immune" doesn't mean they didn't consider it a possibility at all. Ultimately "immunity" isn't the same thing as "a vaccine/cure".

Ellie isn't necessarily Immune because of some property she was born with - maybe the experts did miss something, my point is that "stuff the experts didn't explicitly say so therefore they must have missed it" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in your interpretation of the show so far.

@trev666 I suspect the spores are gone just because well, they just wouldn't be as nicely localised or as visibly obvious in real life. You walk through an open door and see a cloud of spores, so put your gas mask on? Yeah, chances are you've already breathed some in.

In a video game at least you can just put it down to it being a video game - whereas I can imagine it looking more ridiculous on a TV show. Obviously both are fictional, it just seems to me that there's stuff you can get away with in games that don't always translate well to TV - in this case they may have been better off just getting rid of the spores

@Loftimus curious as to which part you thought was me "moving the goalposts". If you're talking about the part where I pointed out that facts in the game don't necessarily carry over into the show, I'd have thought that that was patently obvious from the start