‘The more I see of what you call civilisation, the more highly I think of what you call savagery.’
It was never about any kind of military threat or even dependence on Chinese supply chains. The Chinese threat is and always was about Chinese development undercutting US tech monopolies and in the process undercutting wall street. The oligarchy needs high tech patents, not to make stuff or be ahead for the sake of national security or just for the sake of being ahead, but to make money. By having patents they can keep being able to monopolize cutting edge sectors and have the world pay them premium to have access. At some point they just got bored of having to pay for that R&D and education. China is a threat by not only having large manufacturing base, but now also climbing up to being number one scientific superpower.
What was that study… if US loses 9 of it’s 55k substations simultaneously then the whole national electrical network would overload, shit would hit the fan and US could get 18+ month blackout from coast to coast. It’s not just about not being able to scale lake boiling amounts of AI-compute, but also a threat of emp strikes, domestic terrorism and solar flares.
Does anyone else find it suspicious there wasn’t any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures?
Nobody here disagrees with any point of the petition. I signed it. Even if gaming companies were rushing to send shills to raid discussions they would have done it months ago and last places they would go astroturff for is this Kazakhstani anti-whaling forum. Especially when their target now is the Eu bureaucracy and MEPs. Where I might say they have not a bad chance of succeeding.
donated to some fund that then went to paying a lobbyist/think tank to work for them
It would be more effective to get a quarter of 1.4 million people organized with united demands and on the streets of Brussels with the actual risk of projecting threat violence on EU bureaucrats, then StopKillingGames or any petition or demand would have a much better chance of passing. At that point you wouldn’t even need collect any names before hand :) All the voting, all the petitions all the representation only exists to act as an filter and push the little people people and their little people idea’s far away from actual power as possible.
I’ll be positively surprised if this passes, but I really really really doubt it. Too much money at stake here just for the sake of having some pro consumer common sense.
It’s just the basic logic of maturing market. They couldn’t really increase the game prices that much more without affecting demands, nor could they improve efficiency of making games (the capital costs and team sizes have only gotten up) so they did the thing they could. Try to turn games from a product that the sell into a service they provide and can therefore lock people into their walled gardens and keep continuously charging fees and subscriptions. Too bad games are more of an art form than a news paper or a some tool maintenance contract is.
That is not how their business model works. The consoles themselves are sold almost at cost of production or at a loss. The money for Microsoft, Nintendo, Microsoft comes from those exclusives and live service subscriptions. They want to maximize the amount of their hardware in homes and then make the money on selling the thing that actually makes them useful.
Double yikes. That almost by definition means cloud and data storage in god knows where. Somebody really wants that sweet sweet profitable metadata.