I’m sure those competitors will successfully sue them for <1% of their yearly profit in damages, plus they’ll suffer a single employee’s salary amount in fines.
I haven’t played every COD by any means, but my understanding is that you stopped on a good note. Every recent COD I’ve tried feels like an absolute mess - mostly because of the aggressive cash shops that bog down the menus, and immersion-breaking skins/tracers etc. which I personally don’t enjoy seeing at all, like a gorilla and the clown from Saw. There are always bugs and crashes that literally never get fixed. Regardless of all that, they generally feel soulless and sloppy. There aren’t many FPS offerings these days, and Activision clearly knows they don’t need to be competitive. They just push a new one out the door every year, knowing fans love to hate the games and buy them religiously.
I did enjoy MW 2019 for a while, but MW2 did not hit the spot. Vanguard was extremely disappointing. Before those, my last COD was BO2. I’ve been on the fence lately about buying BO3 (2015) for a good zombies experience every time I see it on sale. But I know I would be playing solo because of the veteran stage those zombies players are in, and I have a feeling I’d get screeched at if I don’t know every meta strategy, so I end up passing on it every time.
Personally I’d say skip the Sledgehammer games and be skeptical and cautious about IW games, but give Treyarch’s next BO game a try if it doesn’t turn out to be an obvious bomb.
They’re almost all wildly successful and popular though, so there must be many fans who disagree - YMMV.
Others explained already. I’ll add that you can see communities’ stats across all instances, including total subscribers, at https://lemmyverse.net/communities
Or straight-up contracts. But I think the next step will be more slow-dripping content.
Netflix just pulled an obvious one by splitting the Witcher season 3 to the release half at the end of June and the other at the end of July. They claim it was for “an effective cliffhanger” but it’s clear they just wanted to squeeze one extra payment out of its viewers who aren’t interested in their other content. Paramount meanwhile stretches all of their Star Trek series out across the entire year.
I imagine platforms will start slow-releasing more of their most popular originals. I wouldn’t put it past them to flood social media with spoilers to punish anyone who’s waiting. I also wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing one episode per month someday.
A third party app can just scrape catalogues, and then direct you to the platform’s website through an integrated browser to manage each account. They can push notifications when a subscription is about to be renewed just by remembering when you subscribed, and send reminders to cancel and subscribe to the next service in your queue.
The streaming companies won’t hide their catalogues because that’s how many people find what they want to watch through simple web searches, e.g. “Where to stream Barry” or “when does the new season of x come out?” The app could pull metadata from other sites for graphics and info like many already do.
It wouldn’t be as convenient as flipping a switch which would require proper API and probably login info, but seeing everything and managing it from one place would still help a lot.
I think a bigger danger would be platforms countering by requiring phone calls to cancel, or contracts, or slow-dripping content over months to keep you subscribed (some already do the latter.) IOW continuing to become more like cable.
At this point, the best way to go (besides sailing) is to subscribe to one or two services at a time, cancelling others month-to-month based on what you want to watch.
We need an app that lets you search for content across all platforms and easily cancel and start subscriptions - queueing them up and helping you easily limit the amount you’re paying monthly.
But with these prices, it’s worth doing that manually.
Hondas have 3 views, at least on my 2020 Civic and wife’s 2023 HRV.
“Wide” is for checking for vehicles, pedestrians, etc. when your view is obstructed on the sides (it’s probably more like 178, but I can see at least 200 ft down the sidewalk in both directions when backing out of my driveway, including beyond my neighbor’s overgrown bushes.) The picture is skewed on the sides though.
“Regular” is undistorted for maneuvering and seeing directly behind you. This is like the default mode you’d expect to see.
“Top-down” shows about 3-4 ft of the pavement below/behind the car for backing up close to walls, parking barriers, other parked cars, etc.
You change them with touchscreen buttons. All of them have guidelines and distance markers that move with the steering wheel.
At this rate, toothpaste will soon be sold in tiny single-use tubes.