Out of the 133 countries where Helldivers 2 was previously locked out of, now there are only 7:

1. Belarus
2. Cuba
3. Iran
4. North Korea
5. Russian Federation
6. Syria
7. Viet Nam

https://steamdb.info/sub/906471/

Update: now there are 8… Japan was added to the list: https://steamdb.info/sub/137730/info/

However it looks like Japan has its own individual game package so players aren’t actually locked out over there.

Edit: formatting

Thanks! This will definitely help me to remember it from now on.

Me 6 months from now:

tar -EZVF

Then there’s also the download then upload into the comment approach:

There you go bringing class into it again.

I initially think this same thing every time I see someone mention MTG on here, glad I’m not the only one.

What do you mean by outdated? Most captchas are there to help them train their next ML model. Relevant xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/2228/

A fun Easter egg on Chromium browsers is that, when you get to 100 tabs, the number just turns into a smiley face.

What @delirious_owl@discuss.online seemed to be implying is that direct messages on Mastodon should be considered “public” rather than “private”.

I’m assuming that’s along the same lines of how Lemmy users generally think that their upvotes/downvotes are private when in reality, if you know how to look for them, you can see them.

Ah, I see. So it’s the same mistake that Lemmy users make when thinking that Upvotes/Downvotes aren’t public.

It sounds like DMs on Mastodon are public, but are commonly mistaken to be private then?

They’re called DMs not PMs

? Did you mean that the other way around? And if you did… forgive me, I don’t really use Mastodon. I was never much of a twitter fan. I don’t really like how all of my likes are public (although I guess I have had to get used to that with Lemmy).

Hmmm it was even able to pull in private DMs.

Maybe private DMs on Mastadon aren’t as private as everyone thinks… that, or the open nature of Activity Pub is leaking them somehow?

Edit - From the article:

Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.

From what @delirious_owl@discuss.online mentioned below, it sounds like this shouldn’t be very shocking at all.

Not just the U.S.
Avalanche Studios has their headquarters in Sweden and they’re closing their studio in Canada (per this article). Additionally, Phoenix Labs (Dauntless & Fae Farm) is a Canadian game developer and they just let go of a significant number of developers and cancelled all future projects (about 3 weeks ago): https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/dauntless-developer-phoenix-labs-lays-off-employees-and-cancels-in-development-projects-says-its-the-last-resort-to-ensure-phoenix-labs-can-survive/

While Microsoft was the one shutting down multiple Game Developers last month, those studios are also based all over:
Tango Gameworks - Japan
Alpha Dog Games - Canada
Arkane Studios - (Headquarters in France, but shutting down their Studio in the U.S.)
Roundhouse Studios - U.S.

Edit: formatting

How many game studios is that within a 2 month period?!

Well… good thing I’ve been buying what I can through GOG… but this is terrible news, especially with the way Microsoft has been shutting down gaming studios recently.

Edit: meh, this just sounds like clickbait:

• The leak comes from an unknown and unreliable source in the gaming industry.
• Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard faced regulatory challenges, making the merger with Valve unlikely.

Can you provide some context for this? Which petition is this about?

@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works proposed this theory the other day, and I think it makes a lot of sense. A lot of journalists are feeling threatened by the onslaught of LLMs so I would expect to see a lot more news attempting to shine a negative light on LLMs in any way possible.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/11586805

There’s a place for AI in NPCs but developers will have to know how to implement it correctly or it will be a disaster.

LLMs can be trained on specific characters and backstories, or even “types” of characters. If they are trained correctly they will stay in character as well as be reactive in more ways than any scripted character could ever do. But if the Devs are lazy and just hook it up to ChatGPT with a simple prompt telling it to “pretend” to be some character, then it’s going to be terrible like you say.

Now, this won’t work very well for games where you’re trying to tell a story like Baldur’s Gate… instead this is better for more open world games where the player is interacting with random characters that don’t need to follow specific scripts.

Even then it won’t be everything. Just because an LLM can say something “in-character” doesn’t mean it will line up with its in-game actions. So additional work will need to be made to help tie actions to the proper kind of responses.

If a studio is able to do it right, this has game changing potential… but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of rushed work done before anyone pulls it off well.

That makes sense, but I haven’t seen any official announcement from Steam saying that they did this. Only speculation from random people. Any documentation I can find just seems to point to this being a decision that’s made by the company releasing the game (or in this case Sony as the publisher).

Besides, only a few hours ago 3 new countries were added to the restricted list: https://steamdb.info/sub/137730/history/?changeid=23492083

I doubt that Steam is still trying to block additional countries given that Sony has already announced that the PSN account requirement is being withdrawn.

Steam doesn’t control the region locks.

The publisher (Sony) is the one that makes changes to their store page which affects where it can be sold.

Most of their Devs quit because they didn’t want to work on it: https://www.pcgamer.com/report-most-of-arkane-austins-prey-veterans-quit-during-redfalls-development-and-the-ones-that-stayed-hoped-microsoft-would-cancel-it/