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The wisdom of streams is simple.
I do shit with my life other than gaming. If I want to experience a cool game without spending the money and without investing the time to get good at the game, it’s a no-brainer to watch a playthrough done by a professional gamer and a professional live commentator like the best streamers are.
Am I crazy or is 53% not a wild number? For one thing, I play multiplayer games all the time but I much prefer my best single player experience to my best multiplayer experience I would absolutely identify as preferring single player games despite probably playing more multiplayer games.
For another thing, 53% is pretty low, about half of gamers prefer single player. If anything that number should be higher cause I bet the amount of single player games dwarfs multiplayer games (this also would include single player campaigns in multiplayer games).
Yeah, people are either spoiled or deluded with games needing to be 100+ hours, especially cause those hours are often padded with garbage.
Shadows of doubt gives you at least 10-20 hours of hilarious procedural generation that actually hangs together as an immersive sim. You start to see the seams pretty quickly but by the time that happens you’re digging into the actual mechanics. Also the devs take their time on updates but the last update was pretty huge so they obviously have a pretty big scope for the game.
You’re definitely right that you picked apart their argument because ackshually there will always be a richest person. But clearly the sentiment is that someone shouldn’t get excessive wealth past their threshold.
How do we define excessive wealth and how do we limit it? Well there are lots and lots of proposals I would suggest reading up on some (you can Google that question to get 10 op eds that suggest 20 different solutions). I wouldn’t mind defining it as a certain percentage higher than the median wealth of the country. It would be funny to give Gabe Newell a “you won capitalism” trophy and taking excess wealth he gains.
As for motivation. It’s a much murkier subject than you imply. In an economy where the state takes every penny of a successful business’s wealth, yeah it makes sense that there’s no motivation to make a successful business. But if one could still get rich off of running a business (just not god-tier level wealth) I’m sure there would be plenty of motivation. And hell, if we give them prestige like we do now there’s tons of people who do what they do just for the fame with no profit. There’s tons of evidence that people aren’t purely motivated by the infinite profit of business people all over the world work their asses off in jobs they enjoy or respect that will never pay them Gabe Newell bucks.
I would bet it’s more like “gaming has expanded to a larger market”. Gamers who were willing to fiddle with computers and online gaming, hell, up till the late 2000s are probably also the same type of people who are willing to be patient and fiddle with a complex game and learn where the fun is. Now playing a game is easy as 1,2,3 no matter where you get it, I’m not talking down on anyone, and I don’t care if that’s where the AAA trend is going, just that when the access gets easier the group expands to more and more casual audiences.
Also, console games have always been way more “casual” as those markets expand gamers kind of defacto have a larger preference for casual games.
I think it’s a classic problem in arts. The initial game was easy money: make a good Harry Potter branded game and if it even did 1% of the numbers that the books did it’s a slam dunk.
The cost to add DLC is enormous and based on the way the game was received (lots of controversy when it came out) and the natural fall off of any videogame player base, the money might still be good, but it won’t be guaranteed. And that’s the only thing corporations as big as WB care about.
Yeah the dark future is that AI takes up all of the office type jobs that just require reading and writing text and the only jobs left are physical labor that everyone is forced into to survive whether we need to do it or not.
My hope is that when we have AI to do these “intellectual” jobs and machines to do the manual labor there will necessarily be not enough work for everyone and society will be forced to reckon with the fact that we have so much abundance that humans don’t need to work if they don’t want to. Something that’s been true for a while but has been swept under the rug for a number of reasons.
I would argue smart phones were the last game changer (iPhone was 2007 I think). If you’re privileged (like in the grand scale of the world), a smartphone is a quality of life upgrade. But all over the planet, the access to wifi combined with a super cheap smartphone allows people to start businesses they otherwise would have been able to, open and manage bank accounts etc. when it would have never been possible.
I kind of see the logic of dismissing AI as a trend, only because pointing to each tech dad and claiming it will change the world gets old, and saying “I called it” 10 years later when it does change the world doesn’t really do anything.
But at the same time, chat gpt3 is only a little over year old, which I would mark as the beginning of public enthusiasm and attention for AI. Really great voice recreation AI is even newer, and both are already shredding through entertainment, calling out a “plateau” when it’s only “plateaued” for a few months is a little hasty.
Edit: I know the person I replied to wasn’t on the other side of this, I was just continuing the convo.
When you see ai-related stories just remember: we’re currently living through what, in another 10 or 20 years, will be remembered as the takeoff of AI. Wherever it goes, either heavily regulated or widespread, AI is only going to get exponentially better and it won’t just be artists crowing about losing their jobs to it.
But hardly a restart simulator. That’s 4 good 2hr+ runs to one unavoidable 15 minute restart (or more likely you losing). That’s a great rate. And as the person above you was pointing out, it’s not that you get a string of unwinnable seeds, you just aren’t good enough at the game yet. If you don’t enjoy losing and retrying with better knowledge and being better at the game then rogue-likes just aren’t for you and that’s fine.