Well, this takes place in the Half Life/Portal universe where the world basically ended in the early 2000s, so it makes sense.
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The war is largely in a stalemate at the moment. Odds are, if this continues for years longer, Russia will eventually win just by virtue of having more people to send to die for the country, but if it comes to that, Russia will suffer far moreso than they already are, both due to increased strikes within Russia and just loosing the majority of their working population.
Discord for games with friends, and for a couple niche pieces of software too small for forums.
Lemmy for broad-appeal topics like world news and less niche tech.
And Im not sure if it still counts when I just lurk now, but Reddit for everything else, since none of it moved over to lemmy. Gaming subreddits, more niche tech, history and accedemic topics, local and lifestyle stuff, ect.
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I think its probably just down to the balance of accessiblity to start but devotion required to keep playing, in combination with the very intense monitization that gets put into production and marketing. For comparison:
Something like CS is far more accessible, but has a much larger portion of casual players and has Valve’s laissez-faire development/marketing. Valorant is is like CS but even more casual. Dota breeds far more devoted players, but the game is so complex it can’t grow, and again, has neither the high production value nor the marketing because Valve. There are games like Fortnite that can compete in scale, but the nature of the game and the focus on fun content over competitve integrity mean that the tournaments are more marketing events than measures of skill.