And I’m sure they understand that exposure also leads to more sales.

Why not both?

Because DRM misfires for a small percentage of paying customers.

Those paying customers, ironically, usually get help from the pirate community to get their game working.

Then they go back to paying for everything, because they still trust game studios more than pirates. Wait no, this last bit usually doesn’t happen.

Overall DRM prevents zero percentage of all privacy, while hassling a small percentage of paying customers.

Don’t make me point to the sign with people standing on boxes in front of a fence.

This should be very easily solved with matchmaking lobby settings.

Anyway, most accessibility settings are either something every competitive player should be using anyway (reasonable color contrast settings, HUD tweaks for clarity) or things that only people who need them despately would ever use (remapping all buttons to be able to play using only a stick in the players mouth, because they have no hands).

This seems to me like a total non-issue. And in the very few cases it is, the ranked lobbies can just diable that setting.

The backlash was probably because for you and I a harmed pvp experience is a “could happen” while for a bunch of gamers the lack of accessibility is a daily undeniable part of their reality. For some people, games are a critical sanity-saving retreat from the rest of their life. Let’s let them have their tweaks outside of ranked play.

Accessibility feature enabled: “You can just kill this escort quest NPC and go enjoy the rest of the game.”

I hope so. As someone who will use the accessibility features, I don’t mind separate badges at alll. I don’t need the same badge as a speed-runner. I just want to play the game.

Nah. Oracle is trying to pivot from “people noticed we hate humans” into “Like Microsoft, we embrace open source now”. I’m glad to see it, but also very skeptical that it represents a long term change.

Edit: Oracle’s stance on basic accessibility seemed really bad, to me, for a long time. I don’t actually think they hate humans…probably.

Except Oracle didn’t create either of those, Sun Microsystems did. Oracle bought Sun, and then made both products worse.

I’ve found diving deep into retrogames is great for my similar situation.

Games from the 80s, 90s and even some from the 00s are often designed to be played in much shorter play sessions.

Great points.

To add for OP: I’ve found that I can scratch the “play and progress with friends” itch with games like Torchlight II, which doesn’t have the same kind of addiction triggers.

With only 2 developers, CI/CD can be your best friend. Automate the daylights out of testing your code.

Remember to tag your regression tests in some way - any test that is preventing a production bug that actually happened needs to be marked as a ‘regression’ and treated as high priority to keep passing.

Treat all others tests as more art than science. Keep the reliable ones, toss out the brittle ones.

Look for a network traffic recording/replay library for your toolchain. Reusing integration tests as unit tests is a huge time savings.

If you have live data access, build yourself a few charts that represent a typical day. Knowing what “normal” looks like in your database can be priceless on a weird day.

As a current Switch owner deciding what to pick up next time I spring for a new system, the lack of anything portable from Microsoft and Sony is kinda wild to me.