You must live in a pretty privileged country if you can compare the LGBT rights movement to the anti-slavery movement, a nice “it’s done, let’s go have some beers now” state of things, eh?

It’s certainly not so clear cut in a lot of the world. People are still fighting for their rights and pride is part of it.

If you were in 1850s or 1860s in the US, hell, even some time after that, and your company said “We support black people’s rights”, that would be very political. Morally the right message to put out, but you suddenly lose half your customers and a bunch of idiots want to kill you. Not a smart business move tbh. Now if you said that for years in a row and then decided “We’ll stop our black people’s rights campaign”, now you’re making a whole new political statement, in the exact opposite direction to the original one, and significantly worse. Now you’re also alienating the people who DO agree with what you originally said, and hoping that the people you originally alienated, are coming back. They are not.

I didn’t say cancelling it was neutral. I was commenting on the people’s opinions that companies should take stances.

Jagex here, clearly already took a stance (they had pride for several years) and then canceled it last minute after already announcing event dates for this year. That’s straight up cowardice on their part. Like I’ve said before - if you’re going to do pride as a company, fucking stick to your guns or you’ll reveal you were never really an ally.

fake frames

And that’s my main problem with what the industry has become. Nvidia always had sizable jumps generation to generation, in raw performance. They STILL get better raw performance, but now it’s nowhere near impressive enough and they have to add their fake frame technologies into their graphs. Don’t get me wrong, they always had questionable marketing tactics, but now it’s getting even worse.

No idea when I’m replacing my 3060ti, but it won’t be nVidia.

I first noticed the shift in pop culture around 2003. There was a russian pop singer duo/band called tatu. Terrible music, but they kissed in their one hit wonder music video.

Unrelated rant following:

Back in around 2002-2003 as I started becoming cognitive enough to appreciate different artists and styles, I didn’t have Internet at home (Eastern Europe yay), but we had a couple of non-local TV channels somehow. One being VIVA (the German channel, not the UK one), which at some time of day just played the week’s top 100 hits for Germany, many of which were one hit wonders. Tatu was one of them, though they were more of a 1.5 hit wonder (they’re not gonna get us was half a hit compared to the big one).

This was wonderful, because it got me hearing all kinds of music as a 7 year old that I normally wouldn’t have. Where the hell else was I going to hear The Rasmus - In The Shadows, a bunch of songs by Eminem, and then suddenly Las Ketchup Song? Or for something way less commonly known: Travel Time by Starsplash

Not the person you replied to, but agree with them to some degree, at least on the fact that any strong political stances are dangerous for a business.

If I ran a service and gay people are celebrating pride on it, that’s none of my business and they can keep on doing whatever they want. Similarly, if conservatives want to throw a straight party without outright saying gay people deserve fewer rights, it’s fucking weird, but it’s their business. The moment anyone advocates for harming someone else, THAT’s when it becomes a problem for me. Goal of a business, in my opinion, is to serve as many people as possible.

I just wouldn’t want to voice support for, or against, anyone’s rights, as a business. It’s horrible that LGBT rights are a politicized issue, sure. But if I ran a business, and there are 30% otherwise quite well-behaved customers who would drop my business because I changed my logo to a rainbow colored one… I just don’t see myself doing that. If I’m providing a service at the best price/quality ratio, it would just mean they drop me to go pay a homophobic business owner even more money for the same service. Does that actually benefit anyone, other than the hypothetical homophobic business owner?

But the worst, most cowardly thing, is supporting LGBT rights and then WITHDRAWING that support. If you’re political already, fucking stick to your beliefs. Don’t abandon them the second the political landscape starts changing.

No, it’s definitely political. So was the Civil Rights movement in the US. So was Womens’ suffrage.

Pushing for change is political, even if it’s nearly universally agreed that the particular change is necessary and good. I agree with LGBT rights and as far as I care, they can have a month long pride if they want, it doesn’t in any way chafe my willy. However, I agree with the person you replied to. As a business, ANY stance on ANY political cause risks alienation of some part of your customer base. Doing a 180 on your stance like Jagex did is of course the worst thing you can do, because then you alienate the people who agreed with you, but the others will still remember when you disagreed with them. Once they decided to do pride, they should’ve fucking stuck to it, at least for the year where they already had events scheduled!

If I ran a public-facing business at all, it would have literally no political allegiance or opinions. No stance on LGBT rights, no political donations (not really a huge thing in my country anyway), etc. Just do my thing, provide a great service, make sure my employees and customers are happy, and… The LGBT folks can do whatever they want, I’m just not voicing support for them as a business. Even if I as a person root for equal rights, I just don’t want to take a stance as a business owner. Donations to charities, including LGBT charities, are fine - I just don’t want it to be particularly public. But then I just prefer privacy in these kinds of matters.

have people not played the Horizon games? They’re awesome, they’re fun as hell.

I have actually not. Thank you!

Female protags are rare. They used to be epic loot, but it’s getting better now.

I guess it’s Portal for me too. Then Oblivion with a female character with that golden armor from shivering isles for shiny boobs. I was a horny teen and porn was getting boring lol

Yeah so others already explained it to you, but I’ll give you a quick summary.

Witcher is kind of a job title, but to get in you pretty much join a cult that gives you mutagens that give you cool powers, but also make you infertile and I believe resistant to STDs (this is why Geralt fucks so much).

Ciri trained with the witchers of the Wolf school. I don’t remember if she went through the mutations or not, but she has elder blood so she’s already more powerful than Geralt. She’s part of an end of the world prophecy. She’s also essentially Geralt’s adoptive daughter.

By the end of Witcher 3, Geralt is getting kind of tired. There’s literally no other Witcher in the universe more deserving to be the next lead than the spacetime manipulating princess who doesn’t even want to inherit her real father’s continent spanning empire because she’d rather be a badass Witcher.

Yeah. I haven’t played 1 much beyond the first 10 minutes, was too janky. 2 was mostly focused on the war, with Geralt being the most important character IMO. In 3 he was no longer THE most important character, but he was a close second - out of a large cast of supporting characters that aided them on the way.

You’re not going to play Witcher 4 because you don’t like the games, I’m not going to play because my PC is aging and I feel new GPUs are so ridiculously overpriced, I don’t want to replace my RTX 3060 ti anytime soon.

I’ve never read the books, but… It was clear from game 3 that she was going to play an important role in the future. The entire plot of the main campaign in Witcher 3 was about HER powers. The Wild Hunt wanted her, not Geralt.

Plus also she’s awesome anyway. What the fuck is wrong with people? Oh I can’t enjoy my vibeo game with a wahmen as main character, it’ll ruin my mood!

Honestly I’d rather be looking at a cute girl dashing around than an old man, even if I identify more with the latter. Video games are for exploring things. Fantasy worlds, dragons, wraiths… And the biggest problem with suspending disbelief is playing a character who isn’t the same gender as the player? lmao.

Maybe I’m just not enough of a gamer. Only been two and a half decades or so since I first touched a computer and played games.

It’s what the shareholders care about though.

Well Ubisoft’s stock has tanked hard over the years as they’ve been doing shady things.

I’ve been very tempted to try their new Assassins Creed, but hey, I’ve managed to refrain from doing so.

I tried to sign that petition but for some reason I couldn’t. Don’t remember why.

They also seem to have no marketing. I only see ads for Apple, Samsung and the big Chinese manufacturers in public, despite the fact that Sony also has phones available here. Online I have no idea, I don’t view ads online.

Linux for gaming and most other use cases, Windows for the one proprietary application I use. Although I suppose I might go IoT LTSC.

I’m holding out some hope for GTA VI still. Reason being, while Cyberpunk promised to be super duper everything interconnected magic programming to follow an absolutely awesome but technologically realistic game (Witcher 3), I haven’t seen hype like that for GTA VI. The expectation is to get a well polished freeroam game with lots of fun toys to play around with, a story that’s hopefully long enough to be worth the game’s price, and a new Online mode that gets updates over time. Basically GTA V with a new city and a more polished game overall, but no exponential leaps - despite the fact that the budget is much larger than Cyberpunk.

But I mean MudRunner is also awesome. Couldn’t get into Death Stranding myself, just wasn’t feeling it. Should pick up Art of Rally soon. Tons of great AA and indie games out there if GTA VI flops indeed.

The good news is that the live service bubble burst so hard and spectacularly that we may see a return to actual good games getting funding after investors are done licking their wounds.

Did it?

I honestly have no idea what’s going on in that space anymore. I’m still playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because I’ve been extremely busy since about August 2023. Got into Act 2 yesterday! When I’m finished with that, I can get back to the game I was playing before BG3, which I STILL haven’t finished, which is Elden Ring. I got stuck there and bought BG3 lol

The only good thing about not having time to play video games is that you can fill the entirety of your video game time with awesome single player games.

It’s unfortunate, but if you’re developing a game and are in dire need of cash, Epic is your best bet.

Way before the whole store debacle, Epic also had a lot of grants and stuff, but those didn’t require you to give up publishing rights IIRC. Honestly, the EGS greed aside, they’ve been excellent for the gaming industry.

You already got an answer more or less, but to specify, Fitgirl is one specific repacker of games that a lot of people trust. She (or he, or they or it, nobody really knows) specializes in compression to make the releases quick to download on slow Internet connections. Of course if you’re sitting on gigabit download speeds or something, the decompression will take way longer than what you save from the download.

Hmm, how’s Switch piracy these days? If I’m emulating, I’m probably not going to be paying for games either since I can’t have physical copies

I don’t get how a Steam Deck is a replacement for a Switch tbh.

You buy the Switch to play Nintendo games mostly, though it’s nice that you can take it with you.

You buy the Steam Deck because you can take it with you and it has a huge library - but it has no Nintendo games, so it fails to scratch that one particular itch.

There is. Wubi was more about giving 14 year old me the confidence to try out an entirely different os.

but if someone asked me to buy them a Xbox I honestly don’t know which one is best… Xbox one series S? I think??

Aaaand they’ve already failed. Series S is barely better than the previous gen, it’s Series X that you want.

The only real benefit of having an xbox is that you cross-own the games with PC. BUT you’re restricted to the Windows Store versions, so you can’t play on Linux, so for me at least the benefit immediately washes away, as I no longer use Windows. Oh well, I’ll just buy my games on Steam and sure, SOME of them will be Microsoft games, but only titles in the like 2 or 3 franchises I care about, Forza and… Oh wait, it’s not like the next TES game is ever going to come out. So it’s just Forza.

VMs are still slow unless you’re talking linux on linux with KVM

Wubi was great because you got native speed to test Linux with, which was probably better than Windows for at least most versions of Windows.

That’s one yeah

There’s about 5 games a decade that are exciting anymore even, unfortunately. I might just have to give up gaming then.

Exactly.

It’s like promoting Linux to people: Why would I care that my operating system is open source? Or free for that matter if I pirate it anyway?

Some people never will care.

This doesn’t work. It will never work. You can’t shame conscious consumers into voting with their wallets while the other 99% keeps buying the bad practices.

Thing is, if nobody on Lemmy, and literally nobody in general who cares about anticheat, buys GTA 6, you know what effect that would have on the company’s bottom line? None, they’ll make record profits.

Yeah I don’t even want to talk about that at this point…

Anyone who wants “their IP” can find a way to do it regardless of any kernel level anticheat anyway.

Yes, that’s part of the StopKillingGames agenda as well. Allow us to control our own servers! For fuck’s sake, it’s CHEAPER for them, because WE’RE paying for hosting. A dedicated server costs money! And it keeps people buying into the ecosystem after the initial sales high because you form communities and then tell people IRL how awesome the game is. Assuming you have time for real life friends of course.

I’m not against the existence of a matchmaking system, or even against it being the default. Just give us a tiny menu item “Dedicated Servers” somewhere and keep that one around forever, even when the publisher is long bankrupt because the CEO blew all their profit on sculptures of oddly shaped penises or something.

It is going to be hard to potentially have to make GTA 6 the first one I skip entirely (minus II and London I guess, I never got around to playing those. Or the stories).

I had 2000 hours in SA:MP in the ~one year I actively used xFire. I am an absolute GTA nerd.

I’ll survive it, maybe borrow the console version off a friend who ends up buying it or something. But I know for sure I’ll hate myself for having principles. Or I’ll cave in and hate myself for having principles and caving in.

Maybe you’re not coming across them regularly but they’re well known outside the corporate world - not to the extent of Microsoft but it’s not the last time they’ll be in the spotlight.

Indeed, not regularly. I only had the pleasure of hearing about them when I had a job that mandated it. They are explicitly targeted at business users.

It should be said that I’m not against games detecting cheaters and banning them from online play. It’s very specifically kernel-level anticheats that I can’t stand on principle.

Epic games launcher is no where best as bad as anyone says.

Is it better now? Last I used it, earlier this year, it still took me half a year for any UI change to happen when I did anything.

To be clear, I hated Steam for ages too. Only maybe 6 years ago I started actually buying games there. Before then I’d just pirate everything. The Steam application often had issues and I had no money before then anyway. But nowadays I find Steam more convenient than piracy. I do not find EGS more convenient than piracy. I do wish Steam had more meaningful competition.

It IS an 8 year old game at this point though - many games don’t get fixes beyond the first patch or 2.

I’m neither a, s nor p lmao.

So why don’t you move back to Russia? Presumably you still have a citizenship.

So many Russians abroad praise the homeland while enjoying the relative freedom that other countries bring to the table. Yet none seem to understand that others don’t want to live in Russia either.

Ukrainians tend to be proud of their national identity - which, yes, I know, only Russians are allowed to be, but apparently many people don’t seem to care - so it’s pretty hard to convince them to go back to being second class citizens of yet another attempt at a Russian Empire.

They have no reason not to at this point.

Do you think a single Ukrainian wants to live under Russian rule now? The few I’ve spoken to don’t even want to be spoken to in the language and that was even BEFORE 2014.

Dude, most of Europe is also pledged to help the US when attacked. In fact the US is the ONLY country ever to have invoked article 5.

Ukraine is not a member but is strategically important to NATO because it’s strategically important to the Russian empire’s restoration, which we kinda want to prevent. Plus they’ll be a powerful ally once they can join, which they really want to nowadays.

Now the US could go full isolationist, but if a Russian-Chinese alliance takes over all of Eurasia, y’all are really going to lose out on a lot of trade and access to resources, plus might actually be susceptible to invasion if you have no allies left.

Worst part is, they got acquired the year after release, so even if KC:D 2 is good, their games in the more distant future are bound to be enshittified.