Clothing (or other things, clothing was just an example) does get you excluded from a group. The only reason a bully would want to "include" the bullied person in their group is so they can bully them more.

I agree that they could open up iMessage to competitors with relative ease and that this would be a good move. Not because it would seriously stop bullying, but because it would make it a little bit easier to find a common messenger to use (we don't really have that problem in my home country, as most people use WhatsApp, which is multi platform).

What I'd hate is if Apple removed all indicators that what I'm sending or what I already sent is an SMS/RCS message instead of an iMessage. It shows me what features work for that particular conversation, and if I'm roaming in a region where sending SMS is not free, I want to know when I'm about to send one.

I doubt the bullying would be any different if it was a beautiful red (or whatever is considered a pretty chat bubble) instead.

And even if it was a blue bubble, the bullies would find another reason to bully someone.

I get the peer pressure part and sure Apple might be exploiting that in America, but in the past it was clothing brands or whatever it is now. Making the bubbles the same color (or even bringing iMessage over to Android completely) would get rid of a single symptom, not of the root cause.

Funny how many people wanted RCS on iOS in order to be compatible with Android, while large parts of Google's implementation of RCS in Android is proprietary as well.

I do, and I couldn't care less. I think a visual indicator that tells me "hey, this is an iMessage" or "hey, this is an SMS/RCS message" is a very good thing to have.

Well most of these AAA ports aren't exactly new and people interested in AAA gaming likely already have something like a PC, gaming console or Steam Deck, which are all better suited to these types of games, because they have more power than a mobile device and/or built-in controllers.

Like, what is the setup for playing at home? Mirror an iPad to an Apple TV via AirPlay to play on your TV with a Bluetooth controller?

And on the go, you either need a bluetooth controller and a way to hold your iPhone while holding the controller, or get one of these clip-on controllers.

Then there's pricing, with the games often being a lot cheaper at least on Steam.

Most rhythm games have different difficulties. Last time I checked Guitar Hero had 3 or 4 difficulties for every single song, osu! has a shitton of maps with many songs being available in multiple difficulties, and Beat Saber has what, like 5 difficulty levels?

I wouldn't really see myself enjoying rhythm games if I was deaf (as the music is a big part of it), but if you can make the game more accessible to someone who still enjoys the gameplay, then honestly, why not?

I'm not particularly interested in the game so I can't say whether the game is actually difficult (from what I saw it's still very much about learning attack patterns of bosses and spamming the roll button or something), but my god do big parts of the Souls community get salty if someone wants to have the option to reduce the difficulty in a single player game.

To me it's a completely legit complaint and request to have a difficulty setting.

This number is likely very inflated though and doesn't match what people actually spent on unplayed games.

It couldn't have accounted for key sales or bundle purchases. I have at least a hundred unplayed games that were included in some random Humble Bundle I bought just because of one game that was in that bundle. If you were to divide bundle pricing by amount of unplayed games, it'd be like 1 or 2 bucks per game.

Porting games to a different architecture is normally quite a bit more involved than just recompiling them, especially when architecture-agnostic code wasn't a design goal of the original game code. No, Valve couldn't release all their games natively running on ARM tomorrow, the process would take more time.

But even if Valve were to recompile all their games for ARM, many other studios wouldn't just because a few gaming handhelds would benefit from it. The market share of these devices wouldn't be big enough to justify the cost. Very few of the games that run on Steam Deck are actually native Linux versions, studios just rarely bother porting their games over.

I'm not saying ARM chips can't be faster or otherwise better (more efficient) at running games, but it just doesn't make sense to release an ARM-based handheld intended for "PC" gaming in the current landscape of games.

Apple can comparatively easily force an architecture transition because they control fhe software and hardware. If Apple decides to only sell RISC-V based Macs tomorrow and abandon ARM, developers for the platform would have to release RISC-V builds of their software because at some point nobody could run their software natively anymore because current Macs would be replaced by RISC-V Macs as time passed by. Valve does not control the full hard- and software stack of the PC market so they'd have a very hard time to try and force such a move. If Valve released an ARM-based gaming handheld, other manufacturers would still continue offering x86-based handhelds with newer and newer CPUs (new x86 hardware is still being developed for the foreseeable future) and instead of Valve forcing developers to port their games to native ARM, they'd probably lose market share to these other handhelds as people would naturally buy the device that runs current games best right now.

In a "perfect world" where all games would natively support ARM right now an ARM-based handheld for PC gaming could obviously work. That simply isn't the world we live in right now though. Sure we could ramble on about "if this and that", it's just not the reality.

I wouldn't be so sure. I feel like many people would not buy another MacBook if it were to feel a lot slower after just a few years.

This feels like short term gains vs. long term reputation.

Yeah, it's also not "just" if it's one of what feels like hundreds of steps now to make the OS somewhat usable.

Not sure why you'd want an ARM-based handheld to play PC games at this point in time. Pretty much all PC games are available in x86 only, and any efficiency gains these fancy new ARM chips supposedly have will be lost when translating x86 to ARM.