Game publishers are not your friend.

“Gentleman’s NDA” is not a thing. It’s either a legally-binding NDA or it’s not. It’s within Valve’s right to ban him from the game but saying the game shouldn’t be covered at all is silly.

If every news outlet avoided a topic because the company wouldn’t outright confirm its existence, we would never have reporting based on leaks and rumors. That’s dumb and would make journalism worse for everyone.

If Valve wants to be shitty about it, that’s within their right (unless they want to sue, which would be difficult to defend in court without a written legal agreement). It is also true that other outlets are free to do handshake agreements to not cover the game. The Verge didn’t break any rules, and Valve already maintains a minimal relationship with the press, so not talking to The Verge probably wouldn’t change anything.

The rest of the industry uses embargo agreements with mutual consent if they have private information. This doesn’t change anything for other game companies, unless they also want to do private-but-not-private beta tests.

They did ask Valve:

Though Valve didn’t respond to my requests for comment

deleted by creator

Valve barely talks to press anyways, in a very similar fashion as Apple. At worst, maybe The Verge won’t get a Steam Deck 2 review unit ahead of time or something.

Yep, tech and game companies use invite-only systems to generate hype constantly. Bluesky is another recent example.

That’s not how this works. The Verge didn’t break an NDA or embargo because they didn’t get either of those things. Valve allows random people to invite other random people to play, with just a “pretty please don’t talk about this game” warning. There was already people talking about it online and leaked footage.

They didn’t get an NDA.

Stock price is largely about future earnings potential, not current quarter or past results. That’s why a company can have record-breaking earnings, but still eat shit in stock price for a while if it lowers predictions for next quarter.

The layoffs were announced at the same time as Intel’s Q2 financial results: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/actions-accelerate-our-progress.html

If you want to beat inflation, dump the money in a high-yield savings account, or a 401k, or a stock index, or any of the other options that have something resembling banking protection/regulation. There are so many better options than a speculative investment that you lose entirely with a social engineering attack or a SIM swap.

Bitcoin’s value is significantly more volatile than the US Dollar.

Okay, not the point.

Some of the “drawbacks” are the only way Firefox works as well as it does. If Mozilla didn’t have usage telemetry data, automated crash reports, etc, Firefox would be a much worse application. This is how modern software development works when you have millions of users across a dozen or more platforms.

Firefox is faster than Chromium in many benchmarks, depending on the OS: https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60

LibreWolf only exists because Mozilla does all the actual development and runs all the infrastructure. That’s like saying the US Virgin Islands should take over the rest of the United States.

I agree that advertising companies take too much off the top and a lack of competition has probably made that worse. That’s also an issue with a lot of publishers, many of them make buckets of money but still pay writers/editors/other staff poorly. That’s just normal capitalism stuff that won’t be fixed until there’s a major global economic shift.

In fact prior to the Internet there was no third party advertising middle man between say newspapers and the actual advertisers paying for ads.

Right, because there were very few newspapers, and all of them were well-known enough that finding advertisers was not difficult. Independent creators and smaller publishers don’t have the brand recognition or massive initial audience to make that happen. You can see this in action with a lot of YouTube channels; most of them only have access to YouTube’s own ad system and offers for in-video ads from shady companies and mobile games (Better Help, Raid Shadow Legends, Opera, etc).