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I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.
Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.
- Starting from zero will cost bajillions and take decades to get competitive
- Samsung’s probably not divisible in a way that makes their fabs buyable
- They can’t buy into any of the 7nm/5nm level players in the PRC and fund their modernization due to sanctions
- Does anyone else have sub-10nm at anything buy lab scales?
Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.
But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.
Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.
There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.
As a (non-game) developer, AI isn’t even that great at reducing my burden.
The organization is enthusiastic about AI, so we set up the Gitlab Copilot plugin for our development tools.
Even as “spicy autocomplete” only about one time in 4 or so it makes a useful suggestion.
There’s so much hallucination, trying to guess the next thing I want and usually deciding on something that came out of its shiny metal ass. It actually undermines the tool’s non-AI features, which pre-index the code to reliably complete fields and function names that actually exist.
I think you’re thinking of the Socket A Athlon/Duron/Sempron. A lot of coolers used shitty mounting designs so it was possible to get it off alignment or over-pressure it and crack the die, and no heatspreader + poor thermal controls allowed for a meltdown if the mountng was bad.
The K6-2 was pretty solid aside from not quite holding performance crowns.
Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.
I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.
I wonder if part of the emotional risk is due to the general social stigma attached to porn. It becomes something that has to be explained and justified.
If done to grand excess, deepfakes could crash the market on that, so to speak. Yeah, everyone saw your face on an AI-generated video. They also saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their Aunt Matilda, and for good measure, Barry Bonds, and that was just a typical Thursday.
The shock value is burnt through, and “I got deepfaked” ends with a social stigma on the level of “I got in a shouting match with a cashier” or “I stumbled into work an hour late recently.”
I don’t get why day-1 private servers aren’t a thing. If nothing else, it allows them to cast off some problematic customers: the guys in Outer Slobavia with 1750 ping can set up a private server and have a better experience, the chuds can set up their own servers where the gameplay is just exchanging slurs without burdening the official GMs.
I suspect it’s about economics; someone will setup a PS with the microtransactions turned off, or not enforcing license keys/accounts, and people will crowd it.
I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.
I’ve been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you’ve hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.
Pulling off a game of pretty vast scope, supporting several very different host platforms, on a multi-year development timeline, and having it thrive in a hypercompetitive market is still an impressive technical achievement.
If all they wanted was to deliver “casino for horny teenage boys”, they could have done far less and still achieved that goal.
TBH, I could see a viable angle in livestream-style QVC… with the proviso that the presenters are usefully interactive.
“Can you turn to the side so I can see how the shirt you’re selling shirt looks from that angle” or “what do those four buttons on the doodad do?” It’s approaching the experience of a store with helpful salespeople, only delivered remotely a la peak pandemic.
But that wouldn’t scale to a huge audience, likely filled with trolls trying to convince the streamer to do something lewd or destructive.
I tried Sword and Fairy 7 at half-off ($18 with DLC) figuring “could this be an interesting snippet of a branch of gaming that didn’t quite resonate with the West” – we all know the JRPGs, German Industrial Sim Games, and Korean Grindfest MMOs so I wanted to see what 1.4 billion people were playing.
Two or so hours in, the game itself has some frustrating control aspects (if you enter an “indoors” scene you slow your walk to a crawl, and the maps are often surprisingly narrow), but the combat is very fluid and the graphics quite pretty.
However, it seems like compatibility is a mess. You can’t tell it “fullscreen at a different resolution than desktop”, and at 4K with all the pretty stuff on, it does pretty intensely tax a 6900XT (I saw the hotspot temperature top 100C). So I tried it under Linux and it seemed to run cooler (since I use 1440p there as “real” desktop resolution instead of 150% scaling) but there’s some weird glitch on the cutscenes where it shows a literal TV-style test pattern instead of a cutscene.
Vampire’s Dawn 3. I suspect I’m exhausting my opportunities to powerlevel through the content, being that my party reached level 86 and never having seen any zone tagged at a level over 85. I might have to use gasp strategy to finish it.