The issue here is that I, as a gamer, want to know if developers espouse opinions that I strongly disagree with, because I don’t want to give them my money. So if a developer was (for example) in the Epstein Files, I would want to know that before buying their game. Reviews are an effective way to communicate that information, and I’d be rather upset to see them go.

You can’t reasonably allow reviews outlining some developer behavior and disallow others - that’s straight up censorship. As much as I disagree with the 'I will downvote games by someone who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death" stance, I think it’s their right to take that stance. I’m not really sure how you reconcile those two things without just banning them both.

What Steam could do is have a separate review category (from ‘normal’ ones and ‘off-topic’ ones) to categorize character profiles of the developers, and let people opt in or opt out of having those included in the aggregate score. Alternately, they could categorize reviews by the reason (e.g. “Performance / crashes”, “Unfun”, “Too hard”, “Too Woke”, “Developer is a horrible person”), and let people choose which categories they care about.

One could note that, since this man was arrested and so far none of the folks named in the Epstein files have been, they consider speaking for a few seconds past the allotted time to be a worse crime than sexually abusing children for decades.

It’s wrecked.

I don’t even see how that’d be possible. Prices consumers paid were higher, but it wasn’t (in most cases) directly paying the tariffs - it’s just that the importer’s costs were higher because of the imports, so they raised their prices, too. Figuring out exactly what the reimbursement should be to each individual consumer would be functionally impossible even if they did mandate it.

Those reimbursements go to the importers, whereas the cost burden was on consumers, so really this has been a (successful) avenue for siphoning money from the poors to the rich.

I don’t know, I think it sounds lovely. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Maine residents are, as a whole, very nice people. Certainly a lot friendlier as a population than many other states I’ve spent time in. Calling them hateful and racist based purely on (by your own admission) their voting records is like saying the majority of US residents are MAGA because Trump got elected.

Source: Previously lived there for 26 years.

Notably, Americans are not the only culture that does this.

There’s a Thai dish called ‘American Fried Rice’ for instance.

American fried rice is a Thai fried rice dish with “American” side ingredients like fried chicken, ham, sausages, raisins, and ketchup.[1] Other ingredients like pineapples and croutons are optional.

At least in any part of America I’ve been to, this is certainly not something you can get here.

The newer monster hunter games try to explain it away as functionally conservation efforts, telling you that the ones you’re killing are throwing off the local ecosystem, but it falls pretty flat when they also pit captured ‘research specimens’ against you in the arena they built explicitly for that purpose…

The word ‘terrorist’ has lost all meaning at this point.

This seems to be a trend as if you only take into account reviews with 2+ hours of play time, Highguard’s opinions are “mixed” rather than “overwhelmingly negative”.

People who enjoy a game are more likely to have more playtime, therefore the higher the playtime in the ‘window’ of reviews that you look at, the more likely they are to skew high. This is exactly what you’d expect to see on any game, barring situations like the developers making changes that ruin a game that previously was good.

So after 2 hours of not having a good time, the game was deemed bad and negative reviews were written.

Two hours is the window for a refund, so I absolutely make a call within 2 hours. If a game - especially a new / expensive game - hasn’t engaged me within that time, I refund it and move on. I don’t have enough hours in the day to play games I don’t enjoy hoping that they’ll get good eventually. Why should anyone feel the need to do that, whether they’re giving the game the benefit of the doubt or not? It’s the MMO argument. “The game gets really good around the 100 hour mark!” I don’t care. I’m not sticking around for it. There are plenty of other games to play that are fun within the first 2 hours. If a developer expects people to slog through an unenjoyable 2+ hours to get to “the good parts”, they probably deserve the negative reviews.

Based on general STEM literacy among furries, probably a statistically significant higher percentage than in the general population.