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Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.
Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?
Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?
It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.
Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!
That’s one theory.
Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.
I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.
Amazing that they weren’t using Signal
I wouldn’t rule it out. But you can’t do public comms over Signal.
it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.
Again, I wouldn’t rule it out. But if I’m on a public group that’s very likely compromised by the IDF, I’m not going to announce all the other protocols they need to block.
He’s just reporting one avenue that’s been closed to the protesters by a corporate entity that is now complicit in genocide.
blaming them on using WhatsApp is besides the point
WhatsApp admins are explicitly interfering with a public protest in order to satisfy a genocidal foreign government.
This is at least as big a deal as TikTok censorship of anti-China posters. It’s just on behalf of a US ally, so we’re defending it rather than threatening to interfere in their business practices in turn.
the shame is on the cess pool that is Meta
Who appoints WhatsApp administration heads if not Meta? It’s the same picture.
Depends on who is telling the story.
Japan / Korea were early instances of US industrial outsourcing. The consequences of the project was an economic boom during late 70s/early 80s in both countries, such that American politicians feared Japan and Korea would return to the world stage as independent regional powers. Reagan’s tariffs, the subsequent opening of Japanese import markets, and the further industrial outsourcing to China, the Philippines, and the rest of the South Pacific labor markets effectively clipped the wings of the Japanese/Korean wage laborer.
You could argue this was part of the “agreement” between Eastern Zaibatsu executives and Western investment banks. But I’d hardly call it a “measured response”. I certainly wouldn’t call it a policy that served the best interests of either Eastern or Western wage labor.
President Reagan decided Friday to impose punitive 100% tariffs on a wide variety of goods produced by Japanese electronic giants in retaliation for Tokyo’s failure to abide by the semiconductor trade agreement between the two nations.
In approving a recommendation Thursday by the Administration’s top economic officials, the White House decided to put the tariffs into effect about April 17, less than two weeks before Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone is scheduled to begin a visit to the United States aimed at easing trade frictions.
The tariffs will be targeted to bring in as much as $300 million and designed to punish such firms as NEC Corp., Hitachi Ltd., Fujitsu Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Oki Corp. by either pricing some of their goods out of the American market or by forcing them to accept substantial losses on U.S. sales.
Yeah, its kinda bleak to see
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I horded my wealth like a dragon and used it to burn down all the neighborhoods in my area, because the money drove me insane
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I wadded up my money into a basketball shaped bundle and just started tossing it anywhere that seemed politically correct and popular
That said, Wozniak did the best with the hand he was dealt. He kicked a bunch of Apple employees in on stock options long before it became company policy. He threw a bunch money into tech museums and art schools and colleges (which California’s state and municipalities have been underfunding in order to subsidize the private tech sector for decades). He invested in environmental R&D and even kicked some money into the effort to prevent Kessler Syndrome - which is, again, shit best served by a collaboration of G20 nations, not just some random rich guy from California. But hey, here we are.
Maybe capitalism wouldn’t be dogshit if we inverted the number of Wozniaks and Zuckerbergs. But also, maybe, billionaires (and heaven help us, trillionaires) were a bad idea to begin with.
The problem with “good games” is that you can only make them a few times before people stop getting excited.
Mario was a good game. A cloned, reskinned Mario knock off is derivative and hack.
At some point, you need to incorporate new technology, new art, and new game mechanics in order to draw in the crowds. Otherwise, why would I feel the urge to put down money for Starcraft 35 when I’ve got Starcraft 1 & 2 back home?
recognizing the slogan as a Zionist invention
Clipping off the bit about freedom is a Zionist framing, certainly. But when every expression of Palestinian solidarity is criminalized, there’s little to be gained in a debate about “framing”. At this point, “Death to Israel” is a perfectly valid and legitimate sentiment. The state is rotten to the core, from its corrupt fascist parliament to its bloody-fisted imperial expansion.
Pretending that “Israel has a right to exist” is any different than some Boer slogan championing White South Africa or a Neo-Confederate rallying cry for the restoration of America’s slave-owning past is what really plays into the Zionist’s hands.
I do in fact think “from the river to the sea” is neither an acceptable or advisable thing to say
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an unacceptable or inadvisable thing to say in the midst of a genocide of the Palestinian people, because it suggests that the state responsible for the genocide shouldn’t exist?
I’ll say “free Palestine” all day long but will never use the other slogan.
it assumes people will act at least mostly rationally
People generally do act rationally, just not optimally. The difference is rooted in availability of information and accumulation of priors.
“The Marshmallow Test” is a great example. People who are predisposed to distrust authority figures and experience chronic hunger will “fail” the test, because they rationally assume they better take the marshmallow now rather than put their trust in a second marshmallow later. This same group happens to underperform long term, not because they are short-sighted or dim-witted, but because they continue to experience the same psychological reinforcements - unreliable social services, inconsistent access to basic necessities, predation by private industry and law enforcement, notably higher rates of social murder - that lead them to take what’s in front of them rather than waiting patiently for a bigger reward.
The next big market crash will produce this kind of person in spades, just like 2008 and 2001 and 1987 did. As people experience retirement accounts as a scam and schools as a prison pipeline and professional careers as economic dead ends and police as occupying invaders, they stop engaging with these institutions innocently and start dealing with them adversarially.
These rational responses result in a vicious deteriorating cycle of distrust and division. Any individual action rationally follows from the prior experiences. But the system isn’t optimal - people suffer disproportionately the longer these rational actions continue.
Finding funding for those indies is another matter.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?
I will say, I know a guy with a ton of extra cash who could probably practice what he preaches.
But finding the next digital unicorn in a sea of mid-to-shit titles is no mean feat. For every Warcraft or Marathon there’s a thousand flops.
That is, I think, what makes the AAA studios look worse than they have a right to be. They’re Frankenstein companies, cobbled together from the bits of a dozen early stars. But that doesn’t guarantee hits, it just guarantees brand recognition. The latest Blizzard title isn’t going to have the secret sauce of StarCraft because they already made that game once. Merging with Activision doesn’t mean making a game that’s better than CoD and StarCraft combined.
Doesn’t seem like years of sanctions on Russia, Iran, or North Korea had a sufficient impact to cause any change.
Seems like it made them more insular, more self-sufficient, and more hostile to future diplomatic entreties.
Change by force can have negative results, and change by economic means can have positive ones
What if, instead of trying to extort or kill a nation’s residents in order to force them to adopt your preferred foreign policy, you simply afforded them an opportunity for peaceful coexistence?
…made in 2018 by a Russian team. Way before the whole Ukraine war thing, you understand
Flipping through a history book on Russian/Ukrainian relations in the 21st century
Closing the book, putting it back on the shelf, whistling, and walking away
More seriously, I’ll never understand folks who hear “So-and-so is from Nationality X, so now I must/must not purchase products from them because of their bloodline.”
single player games don’t come any where near the profitability of these multiplayer games
True, but they are still very lucrative. You can make them, release them, generate a healthy surplus, and roll that into making the next game with plenty of cash to spare.
Also, you don’t have half your dev team stuck supporting a legacy release, constantly fixated on juicing engagement and monetization. There’s a lot less overhead involved in a single-iteration.
Fortnite
Call of duty
World of Warcraft
Apex legends
Had truly phenomenal marketing budgets. It’s the same thing with AAA movies. 25-50% of the budget goes to marketing, on a title that eats up hundreds of millions to produce and support.
You didn’t need $100M to make BG3. You didn’t need an extra $25-50M to get people to notice it and pony up. These bigger titles have invested billions in their PR. And that’s paid out well in the end. But it also requires huge lines of credit, lots of mass media connections, and a lot of risk in the face of a flop.
For studios that can’t fling around nine figures to shout “Look At Me!” during the Super Bowl, there’s no reason to follow this model of development.
I mean, MMOs were supposed to be continuously supported and developed during the enrollment period. Earlier iterations of the model had live DMs running encounters, active continuous releases to expand the game world and advance the storyline, and robust customer support to address the bugs and defects. Also, just maintaining the servers necessary to support that much data processing was hella-expensive on its face.
Games as a service don’t need to be a scam.
But eventually, the studios figured out they can do the MMO business model on any game. Justifying a fee for Everquest was a lot more reasonable than justifying it for a glorified Team Fortress knock off. Or a freaking platformer.
I bought it and really tried to use it, but the reality was just too clunky for primary use. It has no dpad, a single crappy convex analog stick, terribly placed ABXY buttons, horrible shoulder buttons, and just a bit too much input lag on the trackpads.
Hard truths.
Why did they feel the need to replace analog controls with these weird, inconsistently responsive, difficult to map touch controls when every other console platform had already demonstrated why that’s a bad idea?
Was the SC innovative, bold and ahead of its time in many ways?
NO. It was kitsch and poorly engineered and obviously not play tested sufficiently before release. It was a hobbyist’s attempt at reinventing the mousetrap that got shoved into a major distribution pipeline when Playstation and Nintendo and XBox had already demonstrated why you don’t build controllers this way ten years earlier.
Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.
Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.
But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.
But then again, the mass general population is fucking dumb
That’s a lazy explanation. It neglects that Netflix did have a lot of accumulated goodwill from ease of access and quality content.
But now its in the enshittification era. All the streaming services are behaving like this. There’s no alternative that doesn’t suck with a comparable library.
*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention.
I’ve seen the articles dealing with the phenomenon of “Standard Netflix Show” and how it has become so painfully formulaic that it can only be described as background noise.
Really not a great sign when your premium service is treated like elevator music. But hey, they’ve got a near-trillion dollar valuation, so clearly I’m dumb and their C-levels have earned every penny.
Netflix getting in on the streamed video games wasn’t all that crazy. I flirted with it initially, as they had a few good Steam titles on there that I was effectively getting handed for free.
But the marketing approach of jamming “Play this clickbait garbage game, you stupid idiot!” install button into my face every time I visited the site ultimately lead me to cancel my subscription. Like so much else in modern streaming, the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.
But I don’t feel that Steam alone accounts for PC gaming.
If we’re putting the SteamDeck against Nintendo, I’d say the natural comparison is Steam exclusives against Nintendo exclusives.
Even on my Steam Deck, I use GOG, Epic, and itch.io quite regularly.
Sure. Because it is functionally just a computer with a Valve-branded Linux distro. But there are PC games ported to Mobile. I’m not going to count all Android phones to the “PC” side of the aisle just because I can install Balatro on my OnePlus.
The whole reason the Steam Deck exists is to compete as a portable full sized hand-held console comparable to the Switch. If you’re not talking about portable consoles, you’re not really talking apples-to-apples. Anyone crammed into the coach end on an airplane can tell you the quality of life difference between a gaming laptop and a hand-held.
So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment. I would still consider the Steam Deck a “failure” if it couldn’t move enough units to justify its production cost, but it looks like they’re still churning them out, so… eh, it’s not great but its fine.
I would argue that merely comparing generic PC sales to Switch sales also misses the mark. At the very least, you’d focus on unique Steam installs or Active Steam Accounts if you’re really interested in counting the success of Steam relative to Nintendo.
Even then, what you’re really competing with isn’t “SteamDeck sales v. Switch sales”. I’d say its “SteamDeck sales per $1 advertising spent v. …” Given that Nintendo spent around $730M in advertising last year and Valve spent under $100M, it seems that Nintendo has to spend roughly $50/unit to move a Switch relative to Valve coming in closer to $40/unit.
It’s very difficult to compare popularity under two wildly divergent marketing strategies.
‘It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users
Free Basics, built for developing markets, focuses on ‘western corporate content’ and violates net neutrality principles, researchers say
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“Facebook is not introducing people to open internet where you can learn, create and build things,” said Ellery Biddle, advocacy director of Global Voices. “It’s building this little web that turns the user into a mostly passive consumer of mostly western corporate content. That’s digital colonialism.”
To deliver the service, which is now active in 65 countries, Facebook partners with local mobile operators. Mobile operators agree to “zero-rate” the data consumed by the app, making it free, while Facebook does the technical heavy lifting to ensure that they can do this as cheaply as possible. Each version is localized, offering a slightly different set of up to 150 sites and services. But many of the services with the most prominent placement – on the app’s homepage - are created by private US companies, regardless of the market. These include AccuWeather, Johnson & Johnson-owned BabyCenter, BBC News, ESPN and the search engine Bing. There are no other social networking sites apart from Facebook and no email provider.
Incidentally, “Free Basics” and its derivatives are some of the biggest drivers of new Facebook user activity. The walled garden of internet access forces people to choose between open internet rates they are too poor to afford and being guinea pigs in Mark Zuckerberg’s AI maze of misinformation and saturation advertisement. Zuck can go to investors and insist “Our growth in these emerging markets is enormous!” and then go to the national governments of these poor countries and say “If you don’t legislate favorably, we’re going to flood your populations’ media feeds with advertisements by the political opposition.”
Was going to say… Who is out there buying games way outside their machines’ specs? Seems pretty straightforward.
I do get a little annoyed at the folks angry at BL4 using a higher end engine. Like, it does look a lot better than previous iterations. That engine upgrade wasn’t for nothing.
There are a ton of looter shooters floating around that aren’t using the Unreal 5 engine. Just play one of those instead. Hell, go back and play BL1. I’m pretty sure that thing runs on a toaster.