Boozilla
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I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn’t trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.
Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.
Some potential places to hunt around in and/or ask in the forums:
I remember reading a very long (but fascinating) 11 part series of posts a couple of years ago on reddit about scummy stupid Blizzard. Here it is, if anyone still cares.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/riq4fq/games_world_of_warcraft_part_1_beta_and_vanilla/
Here’s 7.5 hours of music from Horizon Forbidden West:
Hardspace: Shipbreaker has a beautiful ambient folk vibe:
I think this explains at least part of the phenomenon…
Programming jobs will be safe for a while. They’ve been trying to eliminate those positions since at least the 90s. Because coders are expensive and often lack social skills.
But I do think the clock is ticking. We will see more and more sophisticated AI tools that are relatively idiot-proof and can do things like modify Salesforce, or create complex new Tableau reports with a few mouse clicks, and stuff like that. Jobs will be chiseled away like our unfortunate friends in graphic design.
It’s been a tremendous help to me as I relearn how to code on some personal projects. I have written 5 little apps that are very useful to me for my hobbies.
It’s also been helpful at work with some random database type stuff.
But it definitely gets stuff wrong. A lot of stuff.
The funny thing is, if you point out its mistakes, it often does better on subsequent attempts. It’s more like an iterative process of refinement than one prompt gives you the final answer.
Glad you brought up worker cooperatives. I have watched a few Richard Wolff videos and they sound awesome to me.
There’s also this guy, who looks legit on paper, but I can’t figure out if he really is legit or not. I hope he is…
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/employee-ownership-life-changing-for-family-60-minutes/
Yeah, I love Gabe, and I love Steam. Even if it was created because he dropped that installation disk on the floor.
My dream is that the poison pill thing becomes very effective and very common, and I think some folks kind of missed the nuances. Which is fine, that’s why we have a forum to hash this stuff out.
I know a lot of indy game developers do their thing hoping to get rich from it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And they don’t all do that. Some people just really love coding and creating, and just want to make a cool game. Nothing wrong with that, either.
But for once, I’d love to see some brilliant founder create a game studio that has some kind of poison pill clause that prevents it from ever going public or it’s IP ever being purchased by a large mega-corp. And in my wettest of wet dreams, that idea becomes a meme.
Something tells me that here in the United States of Greed, such a thing is ‘un-possible’, legally speaking. Our whole corrupt system is set up to make half a dozen business bros get wealthier. They won’t tolerate anything that jams a wrench into that machinery.
It is clunky and I am also old, slow, and uncoordinated. I did manage to finish it, and I ended up liking it overall. I didn’t care for the Batmobile stuff, and I was never good at it. But once I got “good enough” at the Batmobile sections and could solve the puzzles, etc, I have to admit I found it satisfying in the same way you feel after getting your taxes or colonoscopy over with.
If you decide to walk away from it, you aren’t missing anything super fantastic. I love the series, but there’s no requirement to complete all of the games. Life is short, there are lots of other things to do. No need to beat your head against the wall on it.
You might like the Spider-Man games better. The combo moves, power ups, suit choices, etc, are more customizable there and I think it ‘flows’ better. Zipping around a realistic map of NYC is really damned cool, too. (Though I did find myself missing the moody atmosphere and je ne sais quoi of Gotham and Bats). There is are the occasional nasty / annoying boss fights in Spider-Man (one of them early on) but once you face roll past them, the rest of the game is hella fun.
I keep hoping–perhaps naively so–for a major backlash against this. Sometimes consumers have power, and sometimes they don’t. But maybe we’ll all get fed up with this bullshit and start just dropping any and all unnecessary subscriptions from our lives. The big problem is when a brand becomes synonymous with a product (like fucking Adobe and ProTools, for two examples).
Interesting read.
Now can somebody please fix the horrible volume sliders on everything.