Not-E3 continues this week with the Steam Next Fest! Patrick and Cado checked out a bunch of different demos on stream, so they go over what they played and what their impressions are. Then, special Dragon's Dogma Correspondent Austin Walker joins to talk about the announcement of Dragon's Dogma II, and go over a bit of the ten-year road to this new game. After the break, Ren checks in with Dread Delusion, a Morrowind and King's Field-inspired open world RPG with a striking visual style, and Rob's checking in with the alternate-history Steelrising to explore the question "What if Louis XIV had an army of automatons to protect him during the French Revolution?
The algorithm gods gave me, at the start of the podcast, two VPN adverts in a row. The first was some guy reading it completely straight, and the second was Patrick’s, and the contrast between them is absolutely sending me right now.
the VPN ads are everywhere and I don’t get it, did something change to make a bunch of new companies launch the past year, or something about the marketing environment change?
it bothers me because the ads are very close to misinformation if I understand the details correctly. what is the threat model that necessitates a VPN exactly? the ads are focused on privacy usually, but aren’t VPNs protecting you against the kind of threat most consumers aren’t at risk for: traffic snooping and non-HTTPS connections? they’re not protecting you against the Meta Pixel probably violating HIPPA and they’re not protecting you against breaches like Equifax, which to my non security expert brain are the primary privacy issues most consumers are threatened by
it must make the Motherboard team seethe to have to record these for Cyber:
I guess VPN companies are too cowardly to advertise that they’re great for bypassing things like Steam’s region lock to buy Japanese video games using digital gift cards in yen, something I’ve definitely never done and would absolutely never suggest anyone do
You basically need a VPN for one of two things. The first being getting around blackout restrictions for streaming content, like getting Indian NBA streams so you can watch your home market team for a fraction of the cost. The other is ducking copyright strikes for torrenting media.
Of course, those are applications that no company is going to advertise lest they get sued. So you get ad reads that talk about “security” nonsense.
Most of my VPN usage is from when I need to “be in Japan” in order to watch live sumo on Abema.
More broadly, I wonder if the war in Ukraine has driven an uptick in VPN users - specifically because non-Russian websites have limited Russian access, as well as the Russian gov restricting access. But whether that makes sense for explaining this rash of ads is less clear to me.
Yeah, outside of torrents and blackouts I really don’t see the need for a VPN. To be honest, I find it openly insulting that an ad can claim to restore my privacy on devices like my fire stick in which I need to be actively logged into an account to use. Oh yeah, Bezos is real stumped about who is watching the prime account tied to my email for 20 years. A true head scratcher.
I played Pokemon Conquest like a decade ago while I was on a Final Fantasy Tactics-like kick, and I gotta say, that game was super boring to me. Sorry. Because it had to be a Pokemon game as well as strategy, it felt like every map was more or less trivial. It was less like a war strategy simulator and more like solving the terrain puzzles of the map.
Al Pacino would also team up with a Chimchar, btw.