As an American this is gross to me too
As an American this is gross to me too
Honestly I assume most people with an American flag in their yard are racist trump fans these days
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.
Steam is untouchable until Gaben dies. Then God help us all.
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
I dunno, this feels like the whole ‘infinite growth’ problem of capitalism. Sure that’s been true so far, but it can’t continually result in more jobs forever. At some point they’ll just automate too much and it’ll be a tipping point.
See this game documentary for more details: Cricket through the ages
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
See the trick is to work with computers, not people. People are what fuck everything up. Especially if it’s customers and not coworkers.
Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are.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.
Isn’t audible the monopoly on audiobooks? And I thought you can get podcasts from tons of places.
Honestly the last decade plus does feel like the lead up paragraph in a history textbook to some major paradigm shift. But it could still be years and years away. But it does feel inevitable.
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.
Every single small game I play has effectively the entirety of their support, community and forums run through discord. Instead of easy to search and discover forums, I have to use crappy infinite chat logs. It sucks.
And you can absolutely trust that tons of executives will definitely not understand this distinction and will use AI even in areas where it’s actively harmful.
Many of us would like this, but it’s dangerous or even illegal to get to some places by walking in large parts of America. And zoning laws make it really difficult to change.