This is already quite easy to do technologically, it’s mostly a question of at what point Google feels it’s worth doing, since once they start they have to commit to closing whatever exploits people find. And deal with the fallout of blocking a bunch of people on random old devices that weren’t blocking ads anyway.

Of course people can still work around by running modified apps on rooted devices but it’ll be enough to defeat a probably fairly large slice of users too lazy to jump through hoops - and as a bonus it won’t just block Revanced (which is a fair bit of work to get running already) but also the other apps for media players like Smarttube, which were easier for people to set up.

And finally when all else fails they will spend the compute to embed the ads in the video stream, once they work out how to minimize the distribution costs for that.

Yeah, why wouldn’t they just give up after a couple of years, silly people.

I think there are fairly good odds none of my gaming friends have ever bought a CoD game.

Not that we all play amazingly refined games, there is plenty of junk and regret-ware, and a lot of other FPS games - just no one ever got into CoD.

That’s a pretty common take. Lots of people don’t want teammates or opponents in their multiplayer games who are still figuring out the basics of play (or in equipment/gear/level-based games, have none).

In games with skill- or level based matchmaking it’s not that bad provided there is enough of an active player base to isolate the newbies to their own pool, but not all games have either of those two things, never mind both.

I don’t even remember anything in AC6 I would consider a tutorial. Unless he means the first 5 minute mission.

OP, the only multiplayer you missed playing with your sister was pvp, and you would have been absolutely shat on if you went into pvp. And you would shit up the games for other people too, because no one wants to fight a bunch of noobs all in the same starting gear who don’t know how to move (or worse, have them on your team).

Aside from all of that, desktops are also far less constrained. If you have a CPU whose performance scales well with power (ie not an M2 but maybe an M3) you can slap it in a desktop and be able to give it 500 watts of power and a giant ass cooling setup to enable that performance. You can’t do this with the physical constraints required of a laptop.

Yeah less savvy people are going to do what they always do, just keep running their old system but now with even more vulnerabilities due to lack of security update availability.

My dad recently asked me to help with his laptop, which turned out to be running windows xp.

After a lot of hair pulliing I got it kind of working but am gonna give him an old windows 10 (upgraded from 7) laptop, but he’s probably going to be on that indefinitely.

Much more limited these days. F1 teams all have to stay within a budget cap these days, and while the top ones are still benefitting from the money they poured into R&D before the caps, ongoing investment is much more limited.