I mean this is kind of true, but taking care of the money printing machine is kind of what every profitable company does. They definitely still innovate, even if nothing comes close to being as profitable as Steam.
Right now they are making more upstream contributions to the Linux ecosystem than anyone else as well, which is awesome.
It would still be tedious to inspect every bit to ensure that a rogue service isn’t just tacking chunks of noise onto a legitimate data stream. I’d argue that it’s almost impossible to verify that every bit is legitimate unless you also control the host and know exactly what the traffic is supposed to look like.
This wouldn’t be conclusive since it would be pretty easy to just hide these payloads in some other traffic stream to a compromised node, which is a super common way cyberthreat command and control functions. If the user never initiates a connection to the host, the payloads just wait around so as not to generate suspicious traffic.
Obviously the threat model for advertising is a bit different, but there’s no reason someone trying to hide this functionality wouldn’t take similar steps.
Good old fashioned nepotism. People generally get into executive roles because of who they know, not anything they’ve done. Don’t get me wrong, you need some minimum level of demonstrated competency, but these aren’t rocket scientists we’re talking about. They are people who managed to finish an MBA without shitting themselves and then did time at some excel jockey jobs before shaking hands with the right person.
The reality is that actual good ideas are often threatening to the people currently in charge because it makes them look bad. Thinking outside the box is thumbing your nose at “what we know works.” It’s “rocking the boat” but what that really means is “wait your turn pleb.”
Yes, I would absolutely love to see small studios taking Sony’s money, making a great game, and then using that as leverage to undermine dumb “platform engagement” bullshit which adds zero value to the game. Sony has been cancer to the gaming industry for a long time now, and I give less than zero fucks about whatever kind of metastisized bullshit they had planned here.
Having seen this play out at a smaller scale before, there is 100% an ego driven calculus at play here, because there are probably 200 different overpaid executives who supported the PSN bait and switch as a “strategic initiative” to “drive platform engagement” for “revenue expansion roadmaps” who would look like they’ve accomplished nothing at all if this was truly dead. It’s not like they can just make a good game which produces stable long term cashflow. That’s so 2012. Now we need “metrics,” and “telemetry,” and “app installs.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career it’s that you will never convince anyone wearing a suit that they are wrong. The best you can hope for is to make them think they came up with an even better idea on their own.
Yeah I hate it when I am just trying to watch TV and someone keeps coming into my house and putting porn on and I say “hey buddy, why do you keep coming into my house and putting porn on the TV? One of these days I’m going to have enough of it, and then I’m going to post about it on the internet. You’ll see.”
I was literally just saying this in a meeting with my boss today that since the invention of Twitch, there has just been too many boobs on the Internet.
Iike without twitch, there would be a perfect amount of boobs on the Internet, but you know those thirst streamers they force you watch before you can view any other content really just pushed the whole thing over the edge.
Eh, I think comfort is a big factor as well. Having something strapped to your face for hours at a time is just never going to be something most people do unless there is a really compelling reason for it. Right now, there just isn’t. You can already watch TV on an airplane just fine. The games are cool, but there’s just nothing “can’t miss” out there yet. That’s probably why porn is really the biggest hit with VR, because it does offer a new experience, and it is naturally consumed in short bursts
Sure, but the original iteration of the flight mechanics in Arena Commander was legitimately very fun. I played the shit out of it, and the ability to basically fling yourself across the map while strafing around asteroids in dog fights, launching missiles and dodging while you are in a three or four way fight with several players at once is still one of the best times I’ve ever had doing PvP in any game. The controls were intuitive but complex enough to require a decent amount of skill, and would have made for a really cool multiplayer experience.
The only people not having fun were the flight stick crowd, because they couldn’t fly and shoot at the same time. God forbid they put a mouse down next to their stick. Mind you, this was in small fighters - the whole meta at the time was that the mechanics for larger ships would be different and favor pure flying more over this mixed combat. But that wasn’t enough. They absolutely had to have their way. Suddenly realism was super important and these people spent all day making super serious posts on the forums twisting themselves in circles to justify why a flight stick was really the most scientific method for 6dof flight. So the devs started nerfing combat. First they killed the missiles, then they stared introducing stupid aim mechanics and before you knew it, what was once a very fun space combat sim was just boring.
Oh there’s a good reason for the flight controls change. Because the fucking neck beards who spend $10k on a “realistic flight sim” setup demand that their loud whining be accommodated or they will never stop whining on the official forums because their idiotic controllers couldn’t beat people flying with a keyboard and mouse. Because, you know their Cheeto stained fingers obviously know more about how futuristic space combat will work than actual engineers designing a space combat sim.
This is basically why I stopped playing. The willingness to let idiots dictate game design and balance made the meta insufferable and impossible to follow.
London is out of what?