2004 was also great! Too bad that’s not available for free as well.

You’re making a false equivalence, but regardless, I am fine with any of that, even though I hate Nazis and the IDF, because it’s a video game. It’s virtual.

Wouldn’t they want to roll this out to all users as soon as possible to save on bandwidth? They have an “are you still watching?” prompt to save on bandwidth as well, right?

The end of my post is where I address this. Publishers have the option to use their bigger cut to reduce prices, but even if they don’t, money is moving closer to the people actually making the games possible instead of a platform provider. There are also a lot of indie developers. It’s not just all greedy publishers.

I was thinking the other day about how Spore would benefit from modern hardware. Spore came out when multicore processing for gaming was still relatively new and memory amounts were a handful of gigabytes at most.

Momentum. Steam was among the first on the scene and provided the best experience. Thankfully Steam has kept the momentum going instead of enshittification (thanks to being a privately held company), but almost a third of the price of the game is still ridiculous if you consider the effort that goes into making a game vs maintaining a mature platform.

I won’t say no to cheaper games. The 30% cut was settled upon in the days where physical copies were the norm and Steam was still under heavy development. Given how established Steam and digital distribution in general is, it’s not really fair to developers to dedicate almost a third of the price of the game to a hosting platform. Yes, exposure is important, but that’s a service provided passively due to the fact of being the largest platform. Reducing Steam’s cut hurts no one except maybe Gabe’s ability to buy another yacht (and even then, not likely). Even if customers don’t see lower prices if Steam were to reduce their cut, it’d be great to see the actual developers getting more money from the games they put all the effort into making.

Perception plays a huge role, that’s true, but I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree since it’s ultimately subjective.

The arcade experience is fundamentally different from the console experience. Arcade games are generally crafted to eat quarters and kick players off as soon as possible without making them feel ripped off. Jumping in and out of games is common at arcades. While it’s nice to save that couple of seconds on a console game, it’s not something that adds up a lot unless you’re jumping between games a few minutes at a time, which again, is more like an arcade and doesn’t make as much sense in a console gaming context because you generally have a better idea of what games you own and want to play.

As for the second issue, if it was a feature that wasn’t worthwhile and that nobody cared about, then why was he considering it in the first place? There are many technical details in games that exist that casual players don’t pay attention to, but subconsciously would enjoy. Surround sound adds quite a bit to a racing game, considering that the entire game is about racing against other characters that are positioned all around you.

The title states “Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo” presumably because you actually cannot have Dolby sound without the logo. Yes, technically you could, but it’s likely part of the license agreement and so him refusing to display the logo as outlined by the license means he couldn’t use Dolby sound in the game (or would get sued if he went ahead and did it anyway).

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. This is a significant enough feature that a couple seconds is really not a big deal. There are likely time-wasters just as long, if not longer, elsewhere in the game and they do not contribute a much richer audio experience. While I’d love to minimize time wasting as much as possible, this is something that appears once on boot-up while I’m sure there are other time-wasters that appear multiple times while you’re playing the game. If they’re even a fraction of a second, they will quickly add up more than this logo’s time.

Donald Knuth has a great quote on this: “The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”

That’s nice, but I’m more interested in prices coming back down. The manufacturers have been pumping up storage prices even though demand has gone down by artificially constricting supply.

That’s funny that they think that the number must go up. Phones are getting more and more powerful, and I’ve actually seen pretty impressive desktop modes for them. I’m not talking about $1000 phones either, but $200 phones. You could easily do office work on such a phone with a docking station, plugged into a monitor with a keyboard and mouse. You can even do some decent gaming on such a setup.

Besides that, hardware in general just lasts longer. I built my current PC in 2016 that I’m still using and can still play new games (I played Armored Core 6 to completion most recently). With the laughable prices of graphics cards now, I’m content with keeping this system going for even more years. I may even opt to go for an APU in my next build, if only to tell nvidia to fuck off with their price gouging.

Isn’t it all about the AI now?

Triangle Strategy. I hit a number of points where I had to think hard to make my decision and even then I wasn’t sure if it was what I should’ve gone with. Trying to save and reload to pick something else is futile since I’d just run into another tough decision down the line which modifies things further and it’d take too long to play through multiple key points. It’s an amazing strategy game as well.

That explains why cats can be dicks.

Duke Nukem 3D Gets me pumped to this day.

Didn’t even know this was a thing.

Works great. I use it in case I need to transfer large files instead of having to carry a dedicated USB drive around.

Either way, it pays for itself.

The hit will be less than the hit of trying to run native 4k.

Just idiots applying peer pressure to get others down to their level.