Easy, replace all price tags with qr codes that you scan with your phone. Then they can make the price whatever they want for whomever they want individually. More realistically they will use an categorization AI to put people into rulesets which set their prices.

Here is a great video to illustrate and educate: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/acpd3UXQdmw

And an article to back it up: https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/03/05/walmart-rolls-out-digital-pricing-could-the-ai-fue/

This IS potentially new as some of the plans involve using facial tracking from security cameras to identify customers and analyze them for their net worth so they can set prices to specific customers, rather than setting prices to specific situations. Also, anything that makes price gouging easier and easier to cover up is bad.

The point on this is the cars are broadcasting the numbers. Imagine your license plate including a loud speaker that shouted it’s number while the car was running. Tracking via plate requires line of sight. Tracking it in an automated way requires a good high speed camera, text analysis computer vision to log the vehicles, and storage for all of the images. In contrast, this signal is a repeating unencrypted broadcast. I could build a Raspberry Nano device that I can sit next to an intersection and capture the numbers of every vehicle that drives by. It is also just presumably storing the number and time, so years of tracking data could be managed with a gig or two of storage.

This is absolutely a threat, and I am surprised it is not actively exploited by companies like Walmart to track every vehicle which drives by their stores and enters their parking lots. Hell, Amazon has enough vehicles out driving around that they could pretty effectively generate profiles for every vehicle in a town just by equipping their trucks with scanners and compiling the data into a behavior analysis system. Every car which drives past is read and stored. It is truly worrying.

The ONLY way this is even remotely OK is if the OS is set to 18+ all other age verification laws are satisfied and I don’t have to provide even more intrusive information to random companies.

And in other breaking news: the sky is blue, tree pretty, and fire hot.

In other news: fire is hot, water makes things wet, and things that taste good make us happy.

Can confirm, both true and stupid.

I kinda hope they also weight reviews based in hours in the game. If ten people with 1000 hours I’m a fame recommend and 1000 people with <10 hours don’t recommend, I really hope the score is better than 50%.

I don’t seem to have this problem as much. That said, I didn’t on Reddit either. Maybe it is because my feeds are mostly science, weird maps, and things discovered on lemmy.nsfw.

On 2) Godot has entered the chat.

Judging by the descriptions given by another user these “between track” drives are A. Part of the race and removing actual time on the actual tracks, and B. Not optional. Those things together make for some seriously bad game design.

Agree, but let’s not dilute the meaning of “gaslighting”. That word has a VERY specific definition and it had been getting used in inappropriate contexts so much that that very specific and necessary definition is being lost. It refers to a specific abusive behavior pattern which needs a good and concrete word to communicate it. My teen stepdaughter had it in her head that us educating her on the world was “gaslighting”, which is dangerous because she had the “gaslighting bad” reaction to things that were not gaslighting, and it is not limited to her. There is a concerted effort on the part of some political groups to break and weaponize the definitions of things like gaslighting and manipulation, we need to work to make sure it is not successful.

Also, under US law, ignorance is not a defense in both civil and criminal court. It does not matter if you did not know it was illegal, it does not matter if you did not know it was happening, if you provide an avenue and forum for illegal activity you are culpable at minimum. The corporate shield will prevent any criminal charges against individuals, unfortunately, but the civil liability is pretty evident. It occurred on their platform which means that they did not take sufficient steps to prevent or discourage the practice in the first place. It should not have been a thing that was present to report or react to in the first place. It falls into the same vein as doing background checks and personality evaluations on prospective teachers and daycare workers. Doing 0 checks to validate that these people are not a danger and then claiming ignorance when they touch children in the broom closet is a nonstarter too.

At what point in the purchase cycle is it known that they won’t? Because the right reserved in a EULA is not a guarantee of occurrence, so how does one make a decision when or when not to purchase?

Also, when single player games are being forced to be always online and are being affected, there is a real problem. If there is no valid tangible benefit to the player for a game to be online, and require the online component to play the game, it should be illegal.

I know I could find examples, but I am exhausted after coding all day on one thorny problem, so I am just going to make educated guesses from what I know of US history. I would bet that the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore received National Landmark status before the general 50 year mark. I would hazard that the presidential monuments on DC did as well.

That said, this was an exercise in examples of things that need to be protected as part of history. Works of art have a much lower bar than national landmarks for this. Games that are transformative or innovative in a way that we still feel today, or games that are massive parts of the cultural zeitgeist for a period definitely deserve preservation. Rogue, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII, Super Mario Brothers, Zork, etc. The reason this is such a big deal is that it might be hard to measure in a moment what is or is not going to have that long reaching impact. Imagine you are an art historian in 30 years and you are doing a paper on the growth and history of game mechanics. How are you going to research that. If you were doing one on painting and how techniques grow over time, you go look at the paintings, study them. The game paper will have no source material to study to draw new conclusions or find previously unnoticed connections if 70+% of the source media disappears in the next 10 years.

In this case, it is a prohibition on sunsetting a game without providing the means for purchasers to continue playing without your support. They are taking an action in their sunsetting decision, this is a prohibition on one choice made in that process.

But people are forced by circumstances to agree. I have to use Slack for my job. I cannot keep my job if I do not agree, thus, I am forced to agree.

This is what I mean by the current definitions are no longer sufficient to cover the modern world.

The general minimum for a National Landmark is 50 years. This would make any game released prior to 1975 eligible. That is a good chunk of games. That said, protecting works of art are usually much shorter terms. Works of art can be justified to be protected almost immediately depending on the artist and work.

And by what mechanism would it have affected sales of the sequel? Historically, and demonstrably, greater access to a game increases the sales of sequels. Why do you think developers put games in a series on sale when a new game in a series is coming out? I would definitely argue that having released the server hosting code for The Crew to allow people to host private servers would have potentially added to The Crew 2 sales. Also, if they release the server code, but not the game code, they could continue the sales of the game on storefronts at a reduced price having it marked that it will no longer receive updates and still made even more money from those sales. I would definitely prefer if they just release the whole game, but either would have worked.

I don’t really see it as an entirely separate topic. It is still an abuse of rights. In this case, it is an abuse of ownership. If I make a purchase of a good, I should own that good. If the company later decides that they no longer want to support the services which support that purchase, they should be required to provide the opportunity that all purchased goods remain valid and operational. If we take a different good as a stand in, cars, a manufacturer may eventually decide to stop supporting a vehicle, but they do have to sell the component rights to aftermarket manufacturers (or at least make good faith attempts) when they drop support so people who own those vehicles have the chance to maintain and use them. I see this as no different than that. Their dropping of support means that products purchased are removed from use or function without the owner’s consent.

And I know you are going to say “well the EULA says you don’t own it and you agreed to it” which is precicely the problem we are arguing. Purchase should mean ownership and forcing people to agree to whatever you want is wrong. Legislation is required because no company will protect the rights of customers, that is the duty of legal systems.