For me, its the long term viability of older games vs new ones. I can play older games on their original console or pc and they don’t have always onoine functions that break the game when the server shuts down. Hell, I am having a great time re-playing nfsu2 on my og xbox. I don’t find it any less fun than most wanted or some of the newer ones when I only have 30 minutes to play.
Survivorship of older games is a really good indicator that they’ll continue to be available in the future. Like you said, too many modern games are online only and turn to expensive nothingness when the servers are shut down.
Single data point: my young, working, well off gaming part of my family is just out of energy. It’s easier to watch a YouTube video instead of TV or gaming, before then falling asleep to wake up for work. Seems like much of their circle is similar.
As for myself, I’m going through a, uh, icky phase of life and am not really motivated to play unless it’s coop.
…Maybe others are struggling similarly?
Also, the games we do look at tend to be from indie to mid-size studios, with BG3 and KCD2 being the only recent exceptions.
This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit. It’s kind of awesome.
I get paid less than I could be, but I don’t care about that since it means I don’t need to work 70 hours a week and spend the rest of my time sleeping.
This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit.
Neither do they! They aren’t workaholics, they’re home bodies that work the least they can!
It’s just that the workplaces are shit. One went back to mandated RTO for no reason even though much of the work is overseas at odd hours. The company’s literally trying to make employees miserable so they quit without severence. The other is work-from-home, but with enough pointless meetings and complete workplace dysfunction to eat energy.
All I can say is: unionize. My position is union (and has been for a very long time so its ingrained into the culture there), and it’s difficult to even comprehend the number of ways it has improved working conditions. Literally invaluable. I couldn’t work there more than 35 hours a week if I wanted to.
BG3 is still from a mid-size studio, Larian is not AAA, they are AA. They are just really fucking good at what they do and are able to pump out AAA quality cause they focus on their strengths, which is making CRPGs, instead of trying to chase trends.
I’m just done with Capitalism in general. I got 1000 games, 200 of which are GOG offline installers. Those are burned onto M-Disc storage for the apocalypse. Cancelled all TV streaming, no buying games or books even. Nothing but food and bills now as I wait for it all to collapse.
Hard drives are affected by bit rot even when not in use. A disk check every six months would help, but is not a guarantee against data corruption or loss. M-DISCs are physically etched, and should last around a lifetime to a thousand years, depending on who you believe. The catch would be being able to read it in the distant future (in other words, if you’re using M-DISC as a backup solution, you should also have a backup disc drive).
M-discs don’t rot, theoretically they’re one of the best consumer long term storage mediums. I think the practical issue with them on a super long timescale is keeping a functional reader if blurays fall out of fashion.
M-Discs are just like Blu-ray storage. However, they are not re-writable, instead being physically engraved with a laser. They are marketed as lasting 1000 years. Get yourself a nice Bluray-writer and you’re all set.
Hey, having access to entertainment is actually pretty damn important. What you gonna do to pass the time?
Though honestly, wasting the limited power someone would have after the grid fails on gaming isn’t the brightest of ideas.
Not to mention, after the collapse, free time will basically be a rare luxury. Your entire time would be taken up by surviving and maintaining your ability to continue to survive, especially if you aren’t preconfiguring a community support network for when shit hits the fan and just going the “lone prepper” route.
Ugh first millennials aren’t buying homes fast enough now it’s this darn gen Z and not buying video games and 12 different streaming platforms. Such spoiled generations
Don’t forget all the online requirements with accounts even if you want to play single player, and constant server issues on launch that seem to happen with every game now because none of them allow community servers anymore.
The death of community servers is why I stopped playing multiplayer.
The gaming landscape was just so much better back when communities were able to self-host and moderate before matchmaking and corporate automated moderation became the norm.
The BLS jobs estimate report is utterly garbage data.
Go look back over the last year or two.
Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior.
All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions.
Also, the BLS jobs estimate is an estimate that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependency on other statistics like estimated populations growth.
Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls, from actual money going out to actual employees.
You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.
…
Also the unemployment rates that are widely reported on don’t count people who’ve been unemployed so long that they fall out of the labor force.
In our modern economy, if you fall off the treadmill, you stay unemployed for that long, you’ll likely never get hired in that field again, or at least not without having to start out at an entry level or junior position, because of how absurd companies are with job requirements, how every job opening has 1000 applicants in 72 hrs, how something like 2/3rds of those job openings are fake and will never hire anyone.
What are you talking about? They’re both estimates extrapolated from samples. I think most statisticians would prefer stratified sampling over one company’s payrolls processing, but whatever. Maybe chuds would argue that ADP is so much more efficient/accurate because it’s outside of the “swamp” of govt, it’s certainly an independent data point. I mean I agree with you in that BLS is not reliable either. Real time economics is hard.
If you honestly preferred ADP all along and will continue to espouse it’s superiority when it next contradicts your view rather than confirming it (as it will because data are noisy) then more power to you.
Well now you’ve met a statistician, a person with an Econ degree, specialization in Econometrics who is telling you the BLS numbers have been garbage for 2 years, based off of how many revisions they have to keep doing, and the magnitude of those adjustments.
I’ve been a professional data analyst at multiple large companies for years, I’m not going to explain this further unless you want to pay me for the full 40 page methodology breakdown.
Real time economics is not hard for me, it was my career until I retired.
Damn near every single measurable metric in the US economy beyond what’s in the most easy to consume, most non specialist oriented media is screaming that everything is going tits up.
Hey when was the last time the Fed had to significantly jump into the Repo market to bail it out?
Oh, right, it was this past week.
I’m not going to bother to list out every single indicator/methodology I consider because 1) I’d break the lemmy comment post character limit (its 10k, btw) and 2) I’m used to being paid for such detail.
Remember how I was saying BLS jobs estimate data is bullshit, that keeps getting revised down?
Well they fucking blew the lid off of it this time, turns out that 258k jobs they initially said were added in May+June?
Poof, all gone, not real, we actually only added 33k, not 281k, in May + June, according to BLS.
And you know the measely 78k from July could also be revised downward too, in the coming months!
Trump actually fired the head of the BLS over this.
…
Sorry to get so irate over this whole issue and channel it all toward you, but jfc, I was right, 95% of finance bros and ‘economists’ most people hear from or about are actually fucking bad at their jobs.
See, technically, I am an econometrician, not economist.
It means I specialize in the metrics, the statistics, the data quality.
… it also means I am not surprised by things that other people get surprised by.
I’m a younger millennial and bought just under 2 years ago. At like peak interest rates… Other than cost of houses what would a crash mean to the economy anyway?
The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.
And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so… everything gets more expensive.
Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine… and we can’t actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs…
Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.
Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand…
Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.
… I hope to god you didn’t buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.
SoCals gonna burn down, Florida’s gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.
Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might ‘melt up’ to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there…
… but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can’t afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11… rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.
Or maybe they’ll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we’ll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.
They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.
I live in the UK, but our economy seems to generally follow the US except without any increase in productivity for over a decade and wages are trending towards minimum wage.
Ah. Well, as you can see, I am most familiar with the US economy…
but uh… broadly speaking, ya’ll did the whole Brexit thing, and as best I am aware off the top of my head, ya’ll are a bit more economically intertwined with the US than most of the rest of the EU…
So, as the US collapses, that’ll disproportionately affect the UK as compared to other Eurozone economies, the financial / currency / bond market situation in the US will ‘contagion’ over to the UK faster, as will demand collapse for material goods and services.
But, I’d have to look over UK econ data in detail to be more specific than that.
Out of curiosity, can I ask what you approximatelty paid for the house in the UK?
One weird thing that could start happening (or intensifying) is that as the US dollar devalues… is that people/corporations with mostly USD will start trying to buy homes in places that they expect will have relative currency appreciation compared to the USD… basically, slow or long term currency arbitrage via homes as mainly financial assets.
£230k which is on the cheaper end, got a small bungalow.
A fair few people here already dislike Londoners buying property and driving up prices because they earn more than the local population can. Tourist destinations get it particularly bad. I think a few parts of Wales have increased council tax (similar to property tax) for second homes that are left empty. An empty house doesn’t contribute to the local economy.
Yeah, in the US, that’s significantly on the cheaper end as well, broadly speaking… i think what you call a bungalow is roughly what we’d call a starter home… but the problem in the US is… we don’t really build those anymore, the construction companies can only turn a profit by making larger homes, that are also built to very shoddy standards.
That and the only areas with $315 or lower as a median home price are quite poor, with terrible economies and no reasonable transportation options… and the US largely murdered remote working after the corpos realized it would make their commericial office values collapse.
US median home sale price, over the whole US, is about $425k as of May, about £315k.
Maybe that will change after the whole housing market crashes, but that level of specificity is way too hard to meaningfully predict.
As to a second home tax… yeah you would think this we be an obvious thing to do, to combat gentrification, or at least make it have more fair broad social impacts… but here in the States, nearly nowhere actually does it, and there are a ton of legal loopholes and bs you can do to get around it.
Instead, a lot of places actually encourage second homes with tax incentives and write offs for getting one… because… entrepreneurship, or something.
Also competition, and I’m not actually talking about indie games, although that’s helping. Competition with older games. Why in the world would someone pay $80 for a mediocre new game when they could replay a classic hit that they haven’t played in few years? When was the last time you played the witcher 3, or the mass effect trilogy? Would you rather replay one of those, or pay $80 for the new assassin’s creed?
Or even better, play an old game that you still haven’t played. I can get titanfall 2 for the price of a coffee and play it for the first time if I’m craving for a good AAA fps.
Oh shiiiit, do that and come back and talk to us when you get to the time travel level.
Are we just in the phase of the medium where technology isn’t the defining quality. It would be slightly weird to try to stay at the forefront of, say, novels without any regard for reading classics. Why shouldn’t games be the same?
I remember at the time titanfall came out, the mechs moving like a human was a selling point. I do agree though it is odd to experience when its not a novelty.
There’s also lots of (frequently not even that) old games that I never got around to/never heard about that I can now get on sale for 5$ or whatever, so it’s not always a matter of replaying.
Just (re) started Dead Space after not playing it for 10-15 years. Still good, still enjoy, why buy when I can just replay games I’ve forgotten the story to?
Same for Control a few months ago… And I’m sure others.
I’m current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I’m fed up of playing the last of them, it’s been long enough since I played the first one that it’s once interesting to play it.
Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that.
I’ve barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago.
It’s not even because I can’t afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it’s almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn’t have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.
I’m a pretty conservative game purchaser. I’ve never paid over $40 for a game (including games on sale) because there are so, so many amazing indie games on Steam that charge so little for many hours of fun.
When I see a AAA game come out, I know it’s going to be profit-driven, uninspired, and rushed because it exists solely for the purpose of making money for a large corp. For that reason (among others), I avoid them altogether because I know my dollar goes way further going toward an independent developer who makes games for passion (and only sometimes for money). The passion always shines through in their work, unlike passionless AAA games.
I’m pushing 40 so I’m not young but I’ve actually been buying more games lately thanks to being patient and not rushing out to buy AAA games along with switching from console to PC, gotta love Steam sales. I just bought two games I’ve been wanting to play for $30.
Exactly, picked up RDR2, AC Odyssey and Bloodborne for about $45 recently. This constant pressure to move people toward a subscription model only works if there’s trust. Too much bullshit = shrinking sales
Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.
Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”
Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio
To save people from looking it up: The studio that made Dave the Diver is traded on the Tokyo stock exchange, has 7,000 employees, and brings in $2 billion USD per year.
I echo this a developer with a top app on the Meta Quest. My USA sales have fallen off a cliff, while other regions like Asia and Europe have increased a little.
In addition to other’s comments, I think that we just have enough good games by now that a lot of people can find a game they enjoy enough to sink hundreds or thousands of hours into. Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, etc.
Mayhaps the former young Americans are now aging into, uh… being not young Americans? Mayhaps said former young Americans also don’t have children because this entire county’s culture is all about feeding all the money to 1%ers yacht purchases?
I honestly don’t trust any “adult” who’s my age that doesn’t play viddy games, like what are you into for entertainment? A lamp?
the people around 25-35 that dont play vidya are either into extreme sports outside all the time (adrenaline junkie)
or are fat fucks who watch every show on the planet with 100 bucks a month in subscriptions (sedated paypig)
oh and
the other option is exhausted parents whose only wish would be uninterrupted sleep
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For me, its the long term viability of older games vs new ones. I can play older games on their original console or pc and they don’t have always onoine functions that break the game when the server shuts down. Hell, I am having a great time re-playing nfsu2 on my og xbox. I don’t find it any less fun than most wanted or some of the newer ones when I only have 30 minutes to play.
Survivorship of older games is a really good indicator that they’ll continue to be available in the future. Like you said, too many modern games are online only and turn to expensive nothingness when the servers are shut down.
Single data point: my young, working, well off gaming part of my family is just out of energy. It’s easier to watch a YouTube video instead of TV or gaming, before then falling asleep to wake up for work. Seems like much of their circle is similar.
As for myself, I’m going through a, uh, icky phase of life and am not really motivated to play unless it’s coop.
…Maybe others are struggling similarly?
Also, the games we do look at tend to be from indie to mid-size studios, with BG3 and KCD2 being the only recent exceptions.
This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit. It’s kind of awesome.
I get paid less than I could be, but I don’t care about that since it means I don’t need to work 70 hours a week and spend the rest of my time sleeping.
Neither do they! They aren’t workaholics, they’re home bodies that work the least they can!
It’s just that the workplaces are shit. One went back to mandated RTO for no reason even though much of the work is overseas at odd hours. The company’s literally trying to make employees miserable so they quit without severence. The other is work-from-home, but with enough pointless meetings and complete workplace dysfunction to eat energy.
And these seem like well above average jobs.
All I can say is: unionize. My position is union (and has been for a very long time so its ingrained into the culture there), and it’s difficult to even comprehend the number of ways it has improved working conditions. Literally invaluable. I couldn’t work there more than 35 hours a week if I wanted to.
BG3 is still from a mid-size studio, Larian is not AAA, they are AA. They are just really fucking good at what they do and are able to pump out AAA quality cause they focus on their strengths, which is making CRPGs, instead of trying to chase trends.
Back in the early 90s I would walk into a store, buy a game that came in a box with a manual, take it home and it was mine.
I bought the 1st Civilization like this. I still have it. No Internet needed.
That’s the way it should be. All the online, dlc, mini boxes, group play, create online accounts…fuck all that shit.
I’m just done with Capitalism in general. I got 1000 games, 200 of which are GOG offline installers. Those are burned onto M-Disc storage for the apocalypse. Cancelled all TV streaming, no buying games or books even. Nothing but food and bills now as I wait for it all to collapse.
If everyone thought like you, we’d all be dead.
The Cult of Consumption
woah woah woah, Mr. Namedrop. What is this, now? 100GB RW Blu-rays? $57 for a pack of 6?
$57 for 600GB
$100 for a 4TB WD Red
That implies it’s powered. Would it last as long as cold storage? (with running disk checks every six months)
…this is so offtopic, but I must know.
For a WD Red? Get that shingled magnetic shit out of my NAS.
I’m riding the hobo, external bus here, senior admin.
Hard drives are affected by bit rot even when not in use. A disk check every six months would help, but is not a guarantee against data corruption or loss. M-DISCs are physically etched, and should last around a lifetime to a thousand years, depending on who you believe. The catch would be being able to read it in the distant future (in other words, if you’re using M-DISC as a backup solution, you should also have a backup disc drive).
I’d need roughly 15-16 packs to do my entire archive atm, which is nearly $860.
…buuuut, I also see value in doing something like this over time. Say, I buy a pack once or twice a month, back up some data.
Yeah. In my case, I’m mainly only doing this for irreplaceable data, such as documents and photos.
You would have to weigh disk rot vs hard disk mechanical component failure.
M-discs don’t rot, theoretically they’re one of the best consumer long term storage mediums. I think the practical issue with them on a super long timescale is keeping a functional reader if blurays fall out of fashion.
M-Discs are just like Blu-ray storage. However, they are not re-writable, instead being physically engraved with a laser. They are marketed as lasting 1000 years. Get yourself a nice Bluray-writer and you’re all set.
While I’ll believe that you have solid storage longevity, prepping for societal collapse by archiving 1000 video games seems kind of unorthodox.
Hey, having access to entertainment is actually pretty damn important. What you gonna do to pass the time?
Though honestly, wasting the limited power someone would have after the grid fails on gaming isn’t the brightest of ideas.
Not to mention, after the collapse, free time will basically be a rare luxury. Your entire time would be taken up by surviving and maintaining your ability to continue to survive, especially if you aren’t preconfiguring a community support network for when shit hits the fan and just going the “lone prepper” route.
Ugh first millennials aren’t buying homes fast enough now it’s this darn gen Z and not buying video games and 12 different streaming platforms. Such spoiled generations
Saw this stupid fucking headline on some magazine a coworker left behind today.
Gross
Hmmm, I dunno if I trust her, guys…
How dare they? They should be starving themselves so they can play great art such as Concord.
Looks at:
AAA games costing 100€+ between base game and season pass.
Online services on consoles constantly raising prices.
Consoles that, over the time cost more instead of less.
Wages frozen in time for years.
Rest of unrelated to videogames stuff but that drain people’s wages.
I WONDER WHY YOUNG PEOPLE SPEND LESS IN VIDEOGAMES…
Don’t forget all the online requirements with accounts even if you want to play single player, and constant server issues on launch that seem to happen with every game now because none of them allow community servers anymore.
The death of community servers is why I stopped playing multiplayer.
The gaming landscape was just so much better back when communities were able to self-host and moderate before matchmaking and corporate automated moderation became the norm.
I still play multiplayer, but on games that still support community servers like Minecraft, Enshrouded, Arma 3, Space Engineers…
How has Enshrouded been doing? I haven’t been able to get on my PC in almost a year and only got to play it on initial release.
It’s good, there’s been a few major updates adding new zones, better NPCs, animals, more gear/weapons, and so on…
At least it is still being updated and just happy to hear it hasn’t gone dark like most other Early Access titles.
Yeah they’re making steady progress on major updates, and releasing patches for bugs and tweaks in between.
That and broad, massive economic collapse in basically every other sector, at least in the US.
Can’t play vidya gaem if hev no food starve.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/adp-jobs-report-june-2025.html
Oops.
Labor market (# of actual jobs) is now actually net contracting, shrinking.
Expected: +100k jobs
Reality: -33k jobs
Firings / Layoffs > Hiring.
Also the population grows, so uh, it actually has to be something like +200k to +250k to remain steady in terms of working age people vs jobs.
Sure, there are lots of ‘job openings’, but they’re all fake ghost job bullshit that never actually hire anyone.
And they don’t pay enough to bother doing them, and they have insane requirements that make no sense.
Great Depression 2.0 Gaming!
(The housing market is also collapsing if any readers haven’t been paying attention.
My semi-educated guess is about a 55% drop by 24 months from now, compared to roughly '23-'24 highs.
Hope your boomer parents didn’t buy in the last 5 years rofl!)
BLS jobs report was a beat, +140k jobs and unemployment down a shade. I agree with you on the themes but it doesn’t help to cherry pick data.
The BLS jobs estimate report is utterly garbage data.
Go look back over the last year or two.
Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior.
All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions.
Also, the BLS jobs estimate is an estimate that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependency on other statistics like estimated populations growth.
Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls, from actual money going out to actual employees.
You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.
…
Also the unemployment rates that are widely reported on don’t count people who’ve been unemployed so long that they fall out of the labor force.
In our modern economy, if you fall off the treadmill, you stay unemployed for that long, you’ll likely never get hired in that field again, or at least not without having to start out at an entry level or junior position, because of how absurd companies are with job requirements, how every job opening has 1000 applicants in 72 hrs, how something like 2/3rds of those job openings are fake and will never hire anyone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylrobinson/2025/04/02/why-no-one-is-hiring-you-and-its-not-your-resume/
What are you talking about? They’re both estimates extrapolated from samples. I think most statisticians would prefer stratified sampling over one company’s payrolls processing, but whatever. Maybe chuds would argue that ADP is so much more efficient/accurate because it’s outside of the “swamp” of govt, it’s certainly an independent data point. I mean I agree with you in that BLS is not reliable either. Real time economics is hard.
If you honestly preferred ADP all along and will continue to espouse it’s superiority when it next contradicts your view rather than confirming it (as it will because data are noisy) then more power to you.
Well now you’ve met a statistician, a person with an Econ degree, specialization in Econometrics who is telling you the BLS numbers have been garbage for 2 years, based off of how many revisions they have to keep doing, and the magnitude of those adjustments.
I’ve been a professional data analyst at multiple large companies for years, I’m not going to explain this further unless you want to pay me for the full 40 page methodology breakdown.
Real time economics is not hard for me, it was my career until I retired.
Damn near every single measurable metric in the US economy beyond what’s in the most easy to consume, most non specialist oriented media is screaming that everything is going tits up.
Hey when was the last time the Fed had to significantly jump into the Repo market to bail it out?
Oh, right, it was this past week.
I’m not going to bother to list out every single indicator/methodology I consider because 1) I’d break the lemmy comment post character limit (its 10k, btw) and 2) I’m used to being paid for such detail.
Ah an economist, say no more fam.
Hey there, sorry to necropost, but uh:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/july-s-jobs-report-included-big-downward-revisions-here-s-why-the-numbers-change/ar-AA1JJV2e
Remember how I was saying BLS jobs estimate data is bullshit, that keeps getting revised down?
Well they fucking blew the lid off of it this time, turns out that 258k jobs they initially said were added in May+June?
Poof, all gone, not real, we actually only added 33k, not 281k, in May + June, according to BLS.
And you know the measely 78k from July could also be revised downward too, in the coming months!
Trump actually fired the head of the BLS over this.
…
Sorry to get so irate over this whole issue and channel it all toward you, but jfc, I was right, 95% of finance bros and ‘economists’ most people hear from or about are actually fucking bad at their jobs.
See, technically, I am an econometrician, not economist.
It means I specialize in the metrics, the statistics, the data quality.
… it also means I am not surprised by things that other people get surprised by.
I’m a younger millennial and bought just under 2 years ago. At like peak interest rates… Other than cost of houses what would a crash mean to the economy anyway?
Uh, in a few words:
Great Depression 2.0, potentially worse.
The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.
And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so… everything gets more expensive.
Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine… and we can’t actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs…
Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.
Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand…
Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.
… I hope to god you didn’t buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.
SoCals gonna burn down, Florida’s gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.
Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might ‘melt up’ to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there…
… but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can’t afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11… rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.
Or maybe they’ll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we’ll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.
They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.
I live in the UK, but our economy seems to generally follow the US except without any increase in productivity for over a decade and wages are trending towards minimum wage.
Ah. Well, as you can see, I am most familiar with the US economy…
but uh… broadly speaking, ya’ll did the whole Brexit thing, and as best I am aware off the top of my head, ya’ll are a bit more economically intertwined with the US than most of the rest of the EU…
So, as the US collapses, that’ll disproportionately affect the UK as compared to other Eurozone economies, the financial / currency / bond market situation in the US will ‘contagion’ over to the UK faster, as will demand collapse for material goods and services.
But, I’d have to look over UK econ data in detail to be more specific than that.
Out of curiosity, can I ask what you approximatelty paid for the house in the UK?
One weird thing that could start happening (or intensifying) is that as the US dollar devalues… is that people/corporations with mostly USD will start trying to buy homes in places that they expect will have relative currency appreciation compared to the USD… basically, slow or long term currency arbitrage via homes as mainly financial assets.
£230k which is on the cheaper end, got a small bungalow.
A fair few people here already dislike Londoners buying property and driving up prices because they earn more than the local population can. Tourist destinations get it particularly bad. I think a few parts of Wales have increased council tax (similar to property tax) for second homes that are left empty. An empty house doesn’t contribute to the local economy.
£230k is approximately $315k…
Yeah, in the US, that’s significantly on the cheaper end as well, broadly speaking… i think what you call a bungalow is roughly what we’d call a starter home… but the problem in the US is… we don’t really build those anymore, the construction companies can only turn a profit by making larger homes, that are also built to very shoddy standards.
That and the only areas with $315 or lower as a median home price are quite poor, with terrible economies and no reasonable transportation options… and the US largely murdered remote working after the corpos realized it would make their commericial office values collapse.
US median home sale price, over the whole US, is about $425k as of May, about £315k.
Maybe that will change after the whole housing market crashes, but that level of specificity is way too hard to meaningfully predict.
As to a second home tax… yeah you would think this we be an obvious thing to do, to combat gentrification, or at least make it have more fair broad social impacts… but here in the States, nearly nowhere actually does it, and there are a ton of legal loopholes and bs you can do to get around it.
Instead, a lot of places actually encourage second homes with tax incentives and write offs for getting one… because… entrepreneurship, or something.
Also, with the speed that games have been coming out the last 20 years, there’s always something on sale to play
Yup, no way to figured this one out.
Also competition, and I’m not actually talking about indie games, although that’s helping. Competition with older games. Why in the world would someone pay $80 for a mediocre new game when they could replay a classic hit that they haven’t played in few years? When was the last time you played the witcher 3, or the mass effect trilogy? Would you rather replay one of those, or pay $80 for the new assassin’s creed?
I replay TLOU, TLOU 2 and Days Gone yearly.
I used to play new big AAA games, but none of them seem interesting these days.
I’d rather replay old games that are top tier than waste time on mediocre new crap.
Or even better, play an old game that you still haven’t played. I can get titanfall 2 for the price of a coffee and play it for the first time if I’m craving for a good AAA fps.
Oh shiiiit, do that and come back and talk to us when you get to the time travel level.
Are we just in the phase of the medium where technology isn’t the defining quality. It would be slightly weird to try to stay at the forefront of, say, novels without any regard for reading classics. Why shouldn’t games be the same?
And even today’s potato PCs can run old AAA titles just fine.
The single player is pretty good in that. It’s definitely worth trying out.
Being in the giant mech doesn’t feel any different than not being in it though. That’s my only complaint.
I remember at the time titanfall came out, the mechs moving like a human was a selling point. I do agree though it is odd to experience when its not a novelty.
There’s also lots of (frequently not even that) old games that I never got around to/never heard about that I can now get on sale for 5$ or whatever, so it’s not always a matter of replaying.
Especially when most games that’ve come out this year run like shit, and a new graphics card is nearly a rent payment
Just (re) started Dead Space after not playing it for 10-15 years. Still good, still enjoy, why buy when I can just replay games I’ve forgotten the story to?
Same for Control a few months ago… And I’m sure others.
I’m current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I’m fed up of playing the last of them, it’s been long enough since I played the first one that it’s once interesting to play it.
Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that.
I’ve barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago.
It’s not even because I can’t afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it’s almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn’t have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.
Also, the games market was brought up a lot by the global pandemic and had to come down eventually.
I’m a pretty conservative game purchaser. I’ve never paid over $40 for a game (including games on sale) because there are so, so many amazing indie games on Steam that charge so little for many hours of fun.
When I see a AAA game come out, I know it’s going to be profit-driven, uninspired, and rushed because it exists solely for the purpose of making money for a large corp. For that reason (among others), I avoid them altogether because I know my dollar goes way further going toward an independent developer who makes games for passion (and only sometimes for money). The passion always shines through in their work, unlike passionless AAA games.
Free games like fortnite
Studies conducted at my desk and on my couch have also found a downward trend in video game quality.
I don’t need the 7th iteration of the same game dressed up with new graphics for the price they’re charging.
I’m pushing 40 so I’m not young but I’ve actually been buying more games lately thanks to being patient and not rushing out to buy AAA games along with switching from console to PC, gotta love Steam sales. I just bought two games I’ve been wanting to play for $30.
I picked up three games for mad cheap that I’ve pirated for a long time. I’ll give you money devs, if the price is right.
I’m a bit younger, though not a lot.
I all but stopped buying games because Epic and Amazon give so many away for free.
I’ve got like 500 free games that I haven’t even installed once.
The only time I’d actually pay for a game is if it’s a special one I want, and they’ve gotten few and far between.
Exactly, picked up RDR2, AC Odyssey and Bloodborne for about $45 recently. This constant pressure to move people toward a subscription model only works if there’s trust. Too much bullshit = shrinking sales
Somewhere out there is an article by someone who walked around a games conference and came away from the experience horrified that so much of the content he was seeing was from small indie studios who weren’t in a position to hire wastes of oxygen like himself, and was furiously nail-biting about what this would do to the state of the industry.
Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio, and they do not deserve the award they just received for “best independent blah blah,” because “indie” has at this point simply become completely synonymous with “original and good.”
To save people from looking it up: The studio that made Dave the Diver is traded on the Tokyo stock exchange, has 7,000 employees, and brings in $2 billion USD per year.
Maybe it’s because all the good games are indie games that cost a fraction of the batshit insane prices these shady corpo outfits are pushing?
Young Americans can already barely pay for food and rent let alone luxuries like entertainment
I echo this a developer with a top app on the Meta Quest. My USA sales have fallen off a cliff, while other regions like Asia and Europe have increased a little.
When new games are approaching $100 and you know you can wait a month or two for it to drop $40 it’s an easy decision
60-80 for the base half-finished game plus 30+ for DLC, console extras
I know I’d rather wait a month than spend $40+ extra for the privilege of being an unpaid beta tester
Might as well wait for them to finish the game and release it as a game of the year edition, whatever that means anymore
kinda stupid that it isnt called complete edition
In addition to other’s comments, I think that we just have enough good games by now that a lot of people can find a game they enjoy enough to sink hundreds or thousands of hours into. Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory, Hollow Knight, Elden Ring, etc.
Mayhaps the former young Americans are now aging into, uh… being not young Americans? Mayhaps said former young Americans also don’t have children because this entire county’s culture is all about feeding all the money to 1%ers yacht purchases?
I honestly don’t trust any “adult” who’s my age that doesn’t play viddy games, like what are you into for entertainment? A lamp?
Show me the Lämp, brother
Wing noises intensify.
This is like the modern version of, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”
the people around 25-35 that dont play vidya are either into extreme sports outside all the time (adrenaline junkie) or are fat fucks who watch every show on the planet with 100 bucks a month in subscriptions (sedated paypig)
oh and the other option is exhausted parents whose only wish would be uninterrupted sleep
I work a hard job then doomscroll Lemmy and YouTube when I’m not working in my shop.