greenskye

You’re specifically paying for an agreed upon amount of time with the product. The negotiated price reflects this limited access to the product.

‘Licensing’ something with no stated time frame that one side can arbitrarily choose to end at any time makes little sense and they know it. They were perfectly happy with leveraging the assumption that you owned a copy of the product up until it became inconvenient to them.

Maga efforts assisted by Democratic leaders that also focus on everything else but class issues as well.

I’d have gone with the idiot

I feel like a huge number of franchises were started back in the day, but everything now is just sequels and remasters of old games.

How many of the current biggest AAA titles got their start in the 2005-2015 era vs the number of new franchises in 2015-2025?

Creativity seems to be mostly dead and games all have to be mega hits or they’re considered a failure. There’s also a distinct lack of AA games (the successful of which often later became AAA titles).

AAA games are legitimately worse now than before, but the gulf isn’t as big as people are claiming.

This is why I think it’s funny people still believe ‘the Internet is forever’. Data disappears all the time. If you really start paying attention it’s scary how ephemeral the Internet truly is and how much is lost all the time.

Also in several games my ability to join friends in-game broke if I turned my profile completely private. As soon as I set it to friends only I could join them again.

They didn’t say AI produces low value art. They said AI doesn’t produce art at all.

I think there’s an argument about art being the emotions it invokes in the viewer rather than the creator. Humans can find art in natural phenomena, which also has no feelings or backstory involved.

I’m not really defending AI slop here, just disagreeing with your definition of art and the relation to the creator rather than the viewer.

Modern farming is extremely reliant on gps and ‘smart’ planters, fertilizers, etc. Using tech to precisely control exactly how much seed, chemicals, etc is used can result in significantly less costs. My understanding is that Deere has bought out basically every company that has a decent implementation of this technology and is an effective monopoly on modern farming equipment.

You can move away from them, but expect your business costs to significantly increase as a result.

Will this just become obsolete the next time they update usb c to support something new? A tester that goes out of date as quickly as the cables it’s testing feels pretty pointless to me

The recent trifold phone prototype by some Chinese company was the only version that interested me. It actually expanded to true tablet size and the proportions and thickness while folded matched the standard phone proportions. That actually felt useful and I could get rid of my tablet, so I wouldn’t mind the extra cost too much. The big issue obviously would be if it could have decent battery life, which I assume will be its critical flaw.

That’s the next executive’s problem. These executives will jump ship with their golden parachutes before any of that affects them.

90% of the games I play are now made by indie or medium sized studios/publishers. I’ve bought several AAA games in that time frame, but almost universally they’ve failed to hold my interest and I typically regret my purchase. I can’t remember the last AAA I bought that I would consider a ‘favorite’.

Also I’m growing more and more detached from what modern, AAA games even feel like. Opening up a game like fortnite or COD where they’ve shoved dozens of different game modes into an all in one program is confusing and overwhelming. It’s off putting to me and I feel like having a ‘get off my lawn’ moment.

There’s usually a hardware level power off function for when the device freezes and stuff. Can usually hold the power button for ~10 seconds will power off the device without needing to look at the screen

It was crazy taxi and no other game could use the mechanic. And telling you where to go is pretty darn important to a lot of games

Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.

WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.

I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.

I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.

Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.

I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.

It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.

Discord is great as chat program. It should’ve only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should’ve had very little value to any decent organization.