Help, I tried to play a flush five at the casino and now I’m in some backroom with a big guy standing over me cracking his knuckles.

No need to lobby, EA are the ones making the decision

This is the case for both PEGI and ESRB, they are insider operated organizations developed to skirt regulations in the form of ‘self governance’.

Don’t need a bribe when EA is the one on the board doing the ratings.

As the game goes on, the poker hands also get increasingly unrealistic and different from real poker including things like five of a kind, and a pair being worth more than a royal flush.

If you tried to take the skills you learn from balatro to a poker table you would get kicked out basically immediately.

It absolutely will. The game has already been erroneously removed from storefronts in the past.

If an 18+ rating will drive sales, why do the operators of PEGI and ESRB bend the rules to ensure their games (EA sports games being a prime example) get as low of a rating as possible, even when they have actual gambling (slot machines paid for with real money)

I mean your own adamancy shows the damage since you seem to be under the impression that the game involves wagers/betting/gambling or other activities that could be perceived as dangerous.

Media literacy goes brrrrrr

This is all well and true, but it’s important to note that these organizations exist as a sidestep to regulation, they are formed by industry insiders as a promise to the regulators that they will be honest about how they rate games (or movies or music) so that the government doesn’t actually get involved and do it’s job.

It’s a form of regulatory capture that allows the industry itself to decide what is harmful to us.

It’s basically the definition of conflict of interest.

Balatro features no wagering or betting of any kind.

Then how do you reconcile that they aren’t, or what about games that feature real money gambling like sports games? (NBA games feature real gambling with micro transactions and casino games such as slot machines and pachinko machines). NBA 2k games have a pegi rating of 3 and up.

It’s not performative if the industry insider run ratings commission uses their power to give ratings that favor their games and hurt smaller independent studios.

‘old school’ vapes are basically completely repairable, vaping was born out of DIY and so the big goofy ahh vapes have pretty minimal waste, coils are generally small and replaceable, and many of those big boi vapes feature what’s called an RTA which has a deck that allows manual rebuilding of the coil. The only waste with those is a bit of cotton and an inch of stainless steel wire.

Hell, I used for years, a purely mechanical vape that had no electronics and was completely regulated by the resistance of the coil. It was a tube with a single 18650 and pressing the bottom just made the connection on the battery.

No e-waste from that device, the consumables were very minimal, probably the lifetime of the waste of the entire device, including batteries and the device itself, fit inside a sandwich bag, and that would be using it for 5ish years.

There are very low waste options out there, it’s just people generally don’t like using them because they require slightly more effort, I think there is a balance between hobby level repairability and ease of use somewhere

But most of them aren’t 18650 batteries, they are bespoke sizes to fit in the little disposable vapes.

Using chips is even a stretch honestly. There are some chip imagery here and there but otherwise ‘chips’ are just how points are called.

It’s not my comment.

It seems like they both imply deletion, but I can still see the comment

Normal people can’t reasonably spin up a mastodon server either.

Everyone here seems to vastly overestimate the general public’s technical knowledge and desire for this kind of thing.

You have technical knowledge hurdles, financial hurdles, ISP hurdles, government hurdles (in some countries), bandwidth hurdles, storage hurdles, and more.

Running a server even on a raspberry pi takes a decent amount of effort, and when your server is down, because regular people aren’t going to have HA and battery backups and multiple Internet connections, etc, your service goes down.

Most people, like 99.9999 percent of people don’t Want to deal with any of that, I mean hell, regular people don’t use ad blockers, know what linux is, what a raspberry pi is, what a server is, how any of this works, or care at all. So many people here or so drastically out of touch it’s wild.

Why do they need to enforce it though?

They are all over the place, they just don’t get promoted much and get buried in steam releases.

Yes people have to prove themselves, what the fuck are you talking about about? You can’t just engineer a skyscraper because you say you are really good at it. The FE exists for a reason.

This is like when Papa John would come shoot a commercial at one of his franchisee’s stores.