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I keep a separate savings account for things like that. I just call it “upgrade” in my banking app. Its money specifically earmarked for any kind of entirely-optional big purchases, like computer upgrades, server upgrades, home theatre upgrades, etc. I also have one earmarked for replacing my current cars and one for vacations, plus of course my emergency fund
The only problem with this approach is I tend to hoard my money and want to see my savings account go up, so I really don’t end up spending as much as I could on myself. Like I have an entire computer’s worth in the “upgrade” account right now
That certainly changes the calculation quite a bit, but how many people can be anticipated to claim a given free game is definitely going to be a point of negotiation on how much to pay the publisher to giveaway a given game, so in a roundabout way it does ultimately cost Epic more money if you do claim the games without downloading them
Honestly interest rates dropping might be ultimately be a good thing. The job market is so tight and most recession indicators have already been blazing. I doubt they’ll do the same hard drop they did in Q2 of 2020, but I do think more aggressive rate cuts might alleviate a lot of the burden consumers (especially young adults and anyone unfortunate enough to have been/be jobless over the last couple of years) have been feeling. A big chunk of the inflation consumers were seeing on goods in 2024 was just companies making opportunistic price increases, as evidenced by the heavily advertised price drops afterwards.
Additionally there is the statistic that nearly 50% of all retail spending in the United States is made by the top 10% of earners which is a heck of a dangerous tightrope for the economy. I do think that’s the other shoe waiting to drop right this second. If the wealthier Americans get spooked and start to pull back their spending this economy is going to tumble
A 5 year DRAM shortage is pretty hard to imagine. I have to suspect that’s a projection that assumes no AI bubble popping (which given how insanely over-leveraged basically every company involved in the bubble is, its inevitable. They’re literally spending more building these datacenters than they can ever dream of recouping once built!) The last DRAM shortage (around 2017-2019 by memory) was only really bad for about a year or so, getting gradually better until it became an absolute glut of DRAM supply that lasted until…well about 3 months ago. $60 per terabyte of SSD storage was glorious, and hopefully I can afford to benefit from the next DRAM glut in 2-5 years
Its almost like half-assing a store front that runs like shit, lacks the most basic features and is generally perceived to be user-hostile is a bad way to attract business. When the freaking open source Heroic Game Launcher does a better job hooking into Epic’s servers than their own damn launcher its time to do something. Take one of those millions of dollars you rake in every year and actually invest in the platform for cripes sake!
- Reduce auto-signouts. This creates friction and forces users to take extra steps to access the game they wish to play. This causes users to go “nah I didn’t really feel like playing that right now anyways”
- Embed system requirements for games into the launcher. Users want to know if they can even install a game before clicking install
- Show details about a game that a user has clicked on. Seriously if you’re going to give away a hundred free games a year, folks aren’t going to know jack shit about 90% of the indie titles you’re surfacing. Most of the free titles I’ve actually played I’ve played because the marketing screenshots and description sounded cool, and I don’t want to cross-reference between a web browser and a web-browser-wrapped-into-an-executable-that-runs-like-shit-but-installs-my-games-sometimes
- SHOW THE GODDAMN DOWNLOAD SIZE AND INSTALL SIZE BEFORE BEGINNING THE DOWNLOAD!!! My god this is not rocket science, its barely even computer science. Its literally the most basic feature of any software installer developed in the last 50 years, show an estimate for about how much hard drive space is needed. If I have 50GB free on a laptop with a 256GB drive in it, its just russian roulette for if I’ll install a game or have to manually sort out my drive being filled to 0 bytes remaining by a game download that never would’ve completed anyways.
- Stop forcing updates. If someone’s launching a game that needs an update, let them launch it without updating. Also make it easier to force it to check for updates/apply already released updates. The background polling has entirely missed major game updates for my wife’s Fortnite, and since those can be 30+GB downloads we’d really much prefer to run those updates when she isn’t sitting down to play a bit of Fortnite.
- Actually enable user reviews. Yes this requires moderation which requires workhours and therefore money. This is the kind of thing that that 10% cut of all sales you take is supposed to pay for. Users want to know what they’re getting into before buying a game and committing to installing it and trying it out, let them!
- Optimize the crap out of your launcher. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it can’t be gestures wildly at everything this. Reduce the filesize of the webpages, run a few fewer javascripts, use better image compression, just most importantly make the launcher not run like its full of molasses
The part that annoys me the most is Epic could simple reduce the free games to bi-weekly and rebudget those same dollars into platform improvements and actually create a viable platform that people don’t hate. Just look at Steam, its got some glaring issues (online DRM, massive illegal gambling problems, cyberbullying, unclear & inconsistent policies on adult content, rampant shovelware, etc. etc.) but by not being a pain in the butt to use, and having some decent company policies that aren’t obviously anti-consumer they have an entire fandom devoted to them. Its just wasted potential. If Tim Sweeney felt like it he could actually build an incredible platform and actually compete with Steam, but instead they just engage in the most disjointed corporate bullshit possible
Epic pays some amount of the price of the game to the devs for every free game claimed, so it costs Epic money and makes money for game devs in exchange for a bit of your time. Sometimes you end up trying a game you never would’ve purchased and end up loving it. For example, I snagged Sable a few months ago for free through Epic and was absolutely blown away by how good that game was. It wasn’t even on my radar but I saw it come up as the weekly free game and thought it looked neat so I downloaded it and booted it up
My approach was simply to setup Jellyfin in an unprivileged container that way the GPU can be shared with other services setup similarly
Really it only got left behind because of its 4C/8T limit as everything started supporting lots of threads instead of just a couple, and just being a 2nd Generation i7.
Past me made the accidentally more financially prudent move of opting for the i7-4790k over the i5-4690k which ultimately lasted me nearly a decade. At the time the advice was of course “4 cores is all you need, don’t waste the money on an i7” but those 4 extra threads made all the difference in the longevity of that PC
When I updated my wife’s computer for Windows 11 I went AMD for that reason as well. They released 2 generations in a row with now well-documented hardware bugs that slowly kill the processors. 13th and 14th gen CPUs simply will have zero resale value if they last long enough to hit the second hand market. I briefly worked at an MSP at the beginning of last year and the amount of gaming computers that came in via noncommercial walk-in customers for stability issues that ultimately turned out to be the Intel CPU bugs was incredible
I think RDR2 was so memorable because the Western genre is so underrepresented these days. Sure it was such a popular genre with ton of movies and books for a while decades ago before video games were really a thing, but what was the most recent Western movie or TV show any of us have seen? I think the newest one I’ve seen was 1999’s Wild Wild West. Maybe 2004’s Home on the Range if that counts?
If we were getting 3 AAA titles released each year that fall in the Wild West genre RDR2 would just fade into the noise. Its a brilliant game but the only thing it notably did differently from any other open world RPG was unabashedly be a Wild West game that hit every possible trope of the genre including the silly ones like dueling quick draws
This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.
I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later
It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it
Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap
Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.
Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!
Complete with microtransactions and a horrible lack of customizability! Seriously I just wanted to play some Minecraft in RTX but you literally can’t use the nVidia RTX stuff outside of the demo maps, otherwise you have to purchase a different texture pack with real money. And basically everything in the Bedrock Marketplace costs real money, and very little is free.
Meanwhile Java edition doesn’t have any paid content in part because the original Minecraft license specified anyone was free to make mods and custom content but were explicitly restricted from charging money for it
I’d say its more like going to a fancy ice cream shop with amazing ice cream and ordering vanilla (hehe see what I did there?) or a fancy pizza place known for their amazing topping combinations and just getting a slice of cheese pizza. Its perfectly fine and probably better than some other places you’ve had vanilla ice cream or cheese pizza, but holy crap are you missing out!
Back when I was first getting into gaming and learning about this Steam thing a friend told me I needed to play the Half Life games. I snagged them on sale started playing and every one I tried I ended up putting down pretty quickly because I’m just not a shooter fan.
Funnily enough I actually like more combat-oriented games more now but I’ve played too many newer games that were at least partially inspired by Half Life so I have a feeling I’ll go play it and find it’s too unpolished and not aged too well
The Anno games always had really good music. Anno 1602 for example had this as the title music
Anno 1503’s title music is engrained in my memory as well
Windows bloat does a pretty good job of making fairly recent computers feel sluggish though. I just updated my work laptop with a 12th gen CPU to Windows 11 and things are noticeably more sluggish immediately following applying the update. Which is sad since its about 8 years newer than my Linux laptop with similar (but older of course) specs and the Linux laptop is significantly snappier-feeling when in use.
The big benefit of linux servers for most businesses is that they tend to be configure-once systems, where you set it up, verify it works then no further maintenance is needed beyond applying updates in line with your update schedule and downtime windows. Sure there will every once in a while be something that changes but far less than you see with Windows Server where some registry values stopped working with a recent windows update without warning so now you have to track down new registry values to recreate the behavior. That and tracking down why Windows decided to ignore all of your settings and reboot this time (and how to stop it again)
Historically I’ve used lutris but more recently I’ve been observing more broken scripts than not. But Lutris is extremely handy for mapping to a pile of game data that I might grab from Itch for example. I also havent been gaming as much lately so maybe I’m just hitting some weird games and that’s all.
I’ve heard good things about Heroic Launcher which apparently is actually sponsored by GOG, but I’ve yet to try it on my Linux machine
The Pokescape rom hack is pretty cool. It’s a heavy modification of Pokemon Red but with music, maps, Pokemon and characters all based on RuneScape
Project Rene was literally the biggest news in the Sims space a couple of years ago, it’s not hard to find info about it.
But you know what is hard to find? Anything supporting the wild story you spun to dunk on people who are trying to be decent to their fellow human
That’s what I was trying to say is they have everything they need mechanics-wise built into these game development environments. The difference between AAA and indie is more on the scope of how much artwork, sound design, writing, voice acting, Foley work, etc. goes into the game
A solo independent developer can pretty easily recreate the mechanics of GTA V in Unreal for example, but they can’t realistically recreate a selectively compressed representation of the entire LA and San Bernardino counties plus a 14 hour (or however long it is) single player campaign
I mean defining “active users” is an inherently political choice in any metric. You’re ultimately choosing how to slice the data for analysis, so if you adjust your metrics on customers who only claim free games vs customers who actually spend money on the platform the data can tell completely different stories.
I suppose the point is, collecting the free games probably creates non-negligable costs for Epic, and how that looks on their released metrics is entirely up to how the data gets sliced