https://mainleaf.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-market-a-video-game/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-0

As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.

there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.

Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.

That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.

Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.

Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.

$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.

What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.

Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.

Copilot is free.

Free.

Free with ads.

Freemium with ads.

Free trial with tiered subscription service.

New subscription tiers with reduced ads. Premium package for boosts to service.

Please enter your credit card number and watch the ad to unlock device.

Sites periodically get taken down or rendered less than useful. Especially for live streaming.

Yandex was invaluable when I was looking for Olympics streams, for instance. Also really depends on which communities are hosting to which torrent sites. I found nyaa.si off Yandex, because I couldn’t find the anime I was looking for on 1337x.to.

Russian Yandex

Exceptionally good at finding torrent sites and other piracy outlets, because they aren’t working hand-in-glove with American broadcasters to censor and shadowban these links. Google, Bing, DDG, and the other American mainline search sites all focus on feeding end-users into a discrete set of Web2 mega-site sponsors. Yandex uses the older web crawlers and indexing tools, so it gives more honest (abet fuzzier and less reliable) results. And since nobody really gives a shit about Yandex, the efforts to game its algorithm have been comparatively minimal.

Yandex also has the benefit of being relatively English-friendly, while other popular non-English search sites like Baidu, Qwant, and Naver don’t cater too quite so freely.

In a delightful change of pace, the Nazis are putting themselves in the oven.

Also a bot that will ignore the explanation and reject the request

One of the appeals of Bluesky (for now) is the Followimg feed that presents comments exclusively from people I follow, in chronological order.

Crazy that Facebook can’t deliver this anymore

Getting really nervous when my office computer sign-on keeps prompting me to enter my credit card information.

Networking Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

ARE WE LEARNING HOW “SOCIAL MEDIA” WORKS YET HUMANITY?

Apparently not, because people keep feeling surprised and offended when the Networking Effect happens.

Seriously. How many more fucking times do we need to go around this goddamn merry go round until we just start calling each other on the phone and meeting face to face again

Idk, when are we going to get low-cost public transit and VoIP that’s not like talking over two tin cans connected with string?

I can’t believe the guy who originally administered the creation of Twitter would do all the exact same things that originally made him billions of dollars selling the company to Elon Musk.

There’s no way he’s just speed-running what he did last time in hopes of another $44B buyout.

Glorifying a system can never be the answer.

Systems and institutions are what we rely on to provide a secure future for ourselves and our loved ones. You don’t need to glorify them, but you do need to value them on their merits.

Keeping a critical eye on the status quo is the only way to develop a better future in any system.

There is a huge difference between being critical and being cynical, particularly when it comes to domestic reporting of “enemy” nation-states. What we have in the US rhetoric directed towards China (and Iran and Cuba and North Korea and now increasingly Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico and Lula in Brazil) is best described by the historical scholar Michael Parenti describing the US attitude towards the USSR.

The anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Criticism of these foreign - often significantly more stable, free, and prosperous - nations is nonfalsifiable orthodoxy. They are always simultaneously engaged in crushing authoritarianism and riddled with legions of angry insurgents. It somehow manifests all the worst aspects of capitalism because its state orthodoxy is socialist.

Until you actually fucking go there and talk to people and realize this isn’t a nation of Machiavellian lies and Potemkin villages. It’s just a place where a larger number of people have found a better way to live, absent an American telling them how to do it.

Talk to people that live within the system is all I can tell you.

You mean the relatives we were visiting?

China isn’t perfect either.

I’ll never understand the absolute terror Americans have for “imperfect China”

none of this discussion is about nuclear power or thorium and just about people wanting to feel morally correct about something and snarling back and forth at each other

I’m posed to snarl because I’ve seen this so many times before, as a justification to invade and destroy advanced industrial states that don’t bend the knee to the US State Department.

The reason you get thorium reactors out of China and Mars landers out of India comes down to two words “Peace Dividend”.

Our species is so cooked.

There’s a brighter future on the horizon. But you don’t get there by taking Marco Rubio at face value.

The UN inspection committee could not find evidence to support your claims.

Why are you asserting the existence of a genocide in Xinjiang while endorsing the engineered famine across the border in Afghanistan?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/13/michelle-bachelets-failed-xinjiang-trip-has-tainted-her-whole-legacy/

The Western response to UN officials investigating Xinjiang and failing to find confirmation of the salacious rumors is to call the UN a failure.

The same criticisms hurled at UN investigators attempting to confirm these accusations today are mirrored by IAEA efforts to find nuclear weapons in Iraq. You’ve got Christian nationalists pushing far-right warmongering and fear mongering, in an attempt to curb China’s growing economic clout in the region. And it has culminated in the Trump presidency, and the full collapse of the US as a credible source of intelligence.

Sometimes a country will inflate the appearance of problems in an enemy nation in order to stoke resentment at home and justify military action abroad.

In Iraq, we made up a bunch of lies about soldiers murdering babies in incubators. After Vietnam, we had Cold Warriors repeating the POW/MIA lies that suggested they were holding hundreds of American hostages for decades, in order to justify continued sanctions and embargos. The slanders against Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Iran have been relentless, all while the US conducted insidious guerrilla wars that have raped, mutilated, and killed countless civilians.

At some point “Both Sides Are Bad” doesn’t cut it. You have to address your own nation’s sins - the lies, the sabotage, the assassinations and us sponsored genocides - before a rational listener can take criticism of your political rivals seriously.