As a casual who didn't start playing shooter games until late, if it wasn't for SBMM I wouldn't be playing them at all.
The real evil is engagement based matchmaking. I don't want to beat players even newer than me every time I haven't won in 20 games, and I certainly don't want to be steamrolled by players who have been playing their whole lives when the same happens to them.
Steam continues to be the best platform for your game. In an industry that almost prides itself on not listening to customers, Valve really is a miracle.
Ah yes, Europe never had to deal with such far right-wingers. We'd like borrow the term you guys came up with to describe them in case we ever face such violent fascists. What was it again?
Oh right, Nazis.
Had the day off work to attend my sister's graduation in this heat, only to hear the lads in the (lovely air conditioned) office essentially had a day off due to this. Can't believe my luck today 😢
Don't forget about moving their possessions. I don't know if houses in America come fully furnished, but there's no way you could sell all your furniture for enough to buy it all back in a new state.
Also people surely have things that they would not want to sell, for personal or practical reasons, right? To pretend the only thing people need to move is themselves feels a little heartless.
And we've not even talked about people with families yet...
I can get the transfers between friends part, but why between platforms? That makes zero sense from a business standpoint.
The only way that would work is to have game companies manufacture and distribute an external storage medium themselves, because platforms sure as hell won't say "Oh you bought a license on another store? Sure, you can use our CDN for free!". And now we've almost reinvented game CDs.
We may joke about valve not making games, but they do have a large amount of people working on various titles.
They also do a lot of R&D for hardware, like the Steam Deck and VR headsets.
Don't let any TF2 fan hear you call Deadlock its successor. It appears to be Overwatch gameplay mixed with Moba style map layouts.
But yeah HL:A was indeed amazing.
Side note: Valve isn't doing the thing Unity tried to do. Unity tried to charge you every time someone installs the game. And you're not even hosting the game's data on Unity's servers.
Steam takes money when you purchase, then will let you download it for free, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Completely different.
Back on topic: It would be really interesting to see the actual server and bandwidth costs for hosting and distributing all those games. There's no way it's super low, or any of the competition surely would have caught up by now.
I'm in an identical situation as you (also from the UK funnily enough), except I did keep in contact with her, albeit at arm's length at first. She's explained to me over the years that it was internalised hatred, made worse by her family's very outspoken views about anyone not straight and white.
When she finally had a chance to get away and start thinking things through herself, she began to accept herself and others. She's a lovely person to be around now, and pretty vocal in trying to help other people learn about and understand trans healthcare and mental support. But most importantly, she's happy.
There has been several game "mechanics" that have been patented in the past. Two examples I know off the top of my head are "overhead arrows that point in the direction of the destination" and "minigames during loading screens".
That said, these were applied for specifically as patents in the US, and every other game made does not go through this process (especially since I doubt that this would worm in this day and age... I hope, wtf is going on across the pond) especially for entire game concepts, and OP is definitely in the clear.
I used to really love this game. It has so much potential to be more than a battle royale, but it took like 4 years to get a permanent non BR gamemode. Battle passes only work if your players don't get burnt out... And don't get me started on collection events 2: electric boogaloo, this time with more gambling!