I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers

I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.

Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.

How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in

The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)

Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular

The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.

It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)

changed it from the side of union men to the side of flamboyant, sensitive baristas.

Lol based

Basically all media ratings bodies are weirdly corrupt and apply ratings without any clear rhyme or reason. There’s good reason to largely ignore the ratings as an adult and even as a parent

Bro, they politely asked you not to use potentially hurtful language in an open forum.

Is that really how you react in the real world of someone says “I don’t like that, please stop?” Because that’s some abuser-coded behavior right there

Yup that checks out. Say hi to Betty White for me!

My wife thought she was the same until suddenly it clicked and she realized she is in fact a gamer

I glanced at their site earlier (but after posting this comment) and it starts at $59/mo for a budget system with a 10th gen i5 and an RTX3050 so probably a $500ish PC when DIYed. And they have about a half dozen tiers above that up to the top $259/mo which is probably a $3000 PC if the parts were current. It’s still a bad deal no matter how you slice it though

A debt trap that’s such a bad deal that you’d be better off financing it with a payday loan

Literally a lower monthly payment, lower total paid and you end up owning a computer if you finance your computer with a predatory payday loan than with this rental program (per GN’s math)

Edit: at $259/mo that’s already $3108/year or 2-3x the cost of a good midrange DIY PC. Also at an incredible 36% interest rate because this hypothetical individual purchased a $3000 computer on a credit card and only pays a bit more than the minimum towards it, that’s only $177/mo on a 24 month loan. Or if you just got a $1500 computer (a pretty dang good computer!) on a 12% APR personal loan (pretty common from banks) you only pay $133/mo for 12 month, own the computer and only pay a total of $1600

The only way to make this rental program look at all good is if you are literally using the computer to make money but have very littlemoney upfront for a decent enough computer to do the same job (basically the “rent it for 1 month and win a fortnite tournament” fantasy one paid promoter suggested) except, oh look, you can buy a laptop from Dell for $520 or less than two months rental cost if you really don’t have the budget and then use that to make your money to fuel your future baller PC purchase. And I can assure you, that business laptop can run Fortnite if that’s your concern, because Fortnite will run on any potato PC if you turn the prettiness down enough.

Edit 2: Also I just found a similar laptop in 1 minute on ebay for $255 to further kill that “spend your allowance to rent a computer for a month to win a fortnite tournament” fantasy

You say that but there’s basically 0 chance I’ll buy it anytime soon because I wait for games to be down to about $20. If I really really want it I’ll snag it at $30-40 but I don’t think I’ve ever bought a title at $60

I started playing that one a couple of years ago but found myself horribly lost on one of the introductory quests (I think the first lockpicking was what did me on?) and kinda lost interest from there. I can see the appeal though and at some point I’ll certainly circle back to it

As others have said loss of interest can happen and the interest can of course come back with a vengeance. I’d recommend picking up another hobby until gaming suddenly grasps your interest again.

Two types of hobbies that have lasting positive impacts on people are creative hobbies and physical hobbies. Your brain is wired to invent and create and your body is wired to move, so being able to do each for fun is brilliant for your mental and physical health. Hop on a bicycle, go for a walk and enjoy the crisp fall air, stop off at that gym you forgot to cancel your membership for, and start doing it regularly.

For creative hobbies you can get a pack of printer paper for a couple of bucks and a pack of Crayola crayons or colored pencils and just start doodling. If you suck at drawing make wierd geometric shapes to rebuild the fine motor skills that computers have killed. Or if you want something more in-depth model making is always great because it has elements of fantasy while having entry points at any skill level. Personally I’ve been getting back into model railroading which if that seems boring to watch a train go around in circles, consider it has its own table top roleplay scene in the form of operations

The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

Probably the easiest way to do an off-site backup for low-double digit terabytes is an external drive in a bank safety deposit box. Remember your home could burn down fall over and sink into a swamp and no amount of parity drives within the home would keep that data safe.

There’s a group called Improv Everywhere that used to do really creative flash mobs like the No Pants Subway ride where they would all claim to have forgotten to put on pants that day, or going into a cafe and lugging 90s desktops in and dialing in, or during the Great Recession they had a suicide jumper on a 2ft high ledge which they dramatically had to talk down.

They once tried to do a “writers against libraries” stunt but it ended up not being funny enough because people kinda went “oh yeah libraries are kinda weird in that they just give out books for free”

With kids being able to pause when you have to stop the kids from killing themselves or eachother is usually a plus

I wonder if I’m missing something about myself

Lol I feel that. I can’t tell how much I might be a little bi or just horny

I support their rights, they are people

the genitals only mader in bed

These things are very tied together. Supporting people being who they are means supporting them if they want to publicly show their identity

I just don’t want aliens in the far future watching our shows and thinking “god damn, it was femboy paradies!”

What does that matter at all? Who cares what people in the far future think? What matters is what people think today, and representation helps people find their own identity and know that they’re included in society

I thought I’d never meet a trans person and very few gay people in the agricultural college I attended when I went back to college. Turned out every damn one of the friends I made was somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum. So as the other person said “as far as you know”

Acceptance of gay and trans rights has allowed so many people to realize they’re not so straight or not so cisgender and that’s wonderful. People are finally finding the freedom to be who they are!

If you think preventing predatory practices through legislation is a “nanny state” then I think you fail to understand the purpose of a government in a society with profit-driven companies

I mean, in the US before the reversal of the Chevron doctorine, the easy solution would be to pass legislation banning “dark patterns” then assign a regulatory agency to design guidance and enforce the law

Gambling is heavily regulated in most countries, often including requiring the odds of winning being clearly listed and regulating the profit margin that The House can take (usually limited to less than 10%)

Many casinos and developers of addictive games will hire psychologists and other experts on human condition to help them find ways to make the game more addictive and make it easier to seperate players from their money. These “dark patterns” both make gaming worse and make it more dangerous for anyone unfortunate enough to develop an addiction.

In short, I welcome regulation on the worst aspects of the game industry to keep the worst aspects from become too financially successful to not implement (see the $60 AA and AAA games that launched with lootboxes and predatory micro-transactions like this one about 10 years ago before some countries announced they were investigating regulating such practices)

By my memory of what I read headscale is a reverse engineered backend using the official tailscale client, so more opportunities for breakage or the weird issues that come from a reverse engineered server with a stock closed source client. I also could be horribly misinformed and/or misremembering

This guy clearly didn’t watch mythbusters in the mid 2000s

Oh yeah I fully expect it at some point in the future. Right now their business model appears to be “get the nerds hooked on using it on their personal stuff to see how awesome it is to then sell enterprise licenses” and they’re in the “establish growth” phase so I think there’s a few years before enshitification begins.

There is a competitor called Netbird that does similar and is fully open source and self-hostable. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks good on (virtual) paper

I think it was initially 5 before they upped it to 100. They said they initially assumed they’d have tons of people using the subnet routing to share more than the limited number of devices, but found that wasn’t the case so they upped the free accounts

That’s honestly kinda funny but also very useful!

Or just install Tailscale which makes it even easier and is free for like 3 computers.

Free for 100 devices! You can legit install it on every device virtual and physical device in your home and maybe run out of devices for the free plan. Right now I use it to secure the connection between my VPS proxy and my Minecraft server, as duct tape fixing some network fuckery, and as my primary means of connecting to services inside and outside of my LAN

If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.

That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck

Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.

Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it

Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense

I feel like some nudity and sex scenes when it’s appropriate are better than not. Really ruins my sense of immersion when there’s a naked person with a random potted plant conveniently blocking your view of their bits. Either commit to them being naked or don’t have them naked at all is my take

Witcher 3 it is more explicit if you buy the services on offer in the brothel. But it’s still far less than one romp in Wicked Whims, which of course is all mods so no motion capture there

I know very little about cars, and even less about trucks. When I think of a truck, I think of a bed in the back where you can haul stuff from Home Depot. Where is the “truck” part?

Generally if you get a truck and do truck things with it, there’s 2 specific things a truck will have that no other class has:

1. A protected bed that you can put bulky and dirty/stinky items into for transport
2. The ability to pull a large trailer

But hilariously your average crossover is fully capable of hauling an inexpensive trailer and a couple thousand pounds of whatever if not more than that, which covers 99.9% of the lifestyle arguments most pavement princes truck owners make for why they need a truck

My wife’s been playing a bunch of it and honestly best I can tell it’s an Unreal Engine tech demo combined with a easy-to-use game engine for beginners to make mini games in (similar to Roblox’s various games) with integrated hosting, release, discovery, authentication and payment processing.

Which is kinda confusing given Epic also has Core which is also an Unreal Engine tech demo combined with easy-to-use game engine with integrated hosting, release, discovery, authentication and payment processing

Oh and Fortnite has its official Battle Royale mode that’s largely a copy of PUBG

There’s actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected

Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in

Is Paradox doing okay? They own several franchises I care quite deeply about so I certainly hope this is a good decision cut their losses and not deliver a dud and not cost cutting to shore up worsening finances

Oh that’s good to know! Too bad my nearest target is 20 miles away and a very annoying drive over a poorly designed arterial road