Not surprised with the lobbying group.

Ross did an amazing job addressing the babble in the statement. Specially because he’s being extra careful on saying things to the best of his knowledge - note how he doesn’t say “it’s false”, or “it’s a lie”, but rather “a German lawyer thinks this is false” and “this sounds like a lie”; gotta respect that.

Some additional comments:

The first paragraph of the lobbying group’s statement might sound like an introduction, but it’s already a straw man - it’s clearly misleading the reader on what Stop Killing Games is about.

as the protections we put in place

Excuse me?

1. Sod off with this “THINK ON PROTEKSHUN!” idiotic argument;
2. let us not forget the main concern when it comes to data protection are companies harvesting data so they can sell it to their “affiliate partners” (i.e. data vultures eager who’ll use it for targetted spam).

Note #1 is a cancer way more widespread than just the gaming industry. Every fucking bloody time some megacorpo wants to fight against some sane customer protection law, they babble shite like this. And it always sounds like “a user/customer is not a rational human being, it’s irrational trash, and if you let it do what it wants it’ll cause itself harm, so We need to protect those filthy things. And how convenient, the way to protect this filth against itself magically aligns with our financial interests!”

these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

This is not even a fallacy. Not even bullshit. It’s simply to be a lying bastard, and to call the readers bloody muppets by proxy.

1M+ sign European Citizen’s Initiative “Stop Destroying Videogames”: Help us protect gamers’ consumer rights!

I think it would be sensible if the word “gamer” was replaced with “citizen” here. Because it’s what politicians care about.

As I mentioned in another thread, São Paulo state’s customer protection organ is basically telling people to not buy Nintendo. Indirectly, with pretty words, but that’s what it’s doing.

[IANAL] Also, note some stuff in the Switch 2 user agreement is legally invalid in Brazil. Nintendo is shielding itself with an “ackshyually we don’t sell it in Brazil lol lmao”, that’s why Procon - SP is calling it out.

Agreed. It’s the best of both worlds: retro-inspired games can pick what the retro games did right, and still add modern improvements.

So do I, but plenty people want MP.

However adding MP to a game is never as simple as those people claim it is. Now your game has to handle the connection, data sharing, making sure all MP players are seeing the exact same thing. And it needs to do it with good performance, because laggy MP is hell. It’ll probably need a server too, either external or one of the players - the later having performance costs. Balance is often thrown out of the window and needs adjustments, because as soon as you add another player into the game they gather resources 2x faster together.

“just add multyplaier lol how hard is that lmao” - spammed in every bloody community about every SP game ever.

Mewgenics is actually going to be released? I thought it was vaporware!

…I’m actually glad. I was quite interested on the game when announced back then. The video makes me feel that it’s completely different from what I expected, but still fun. (I like this sort of X-COM-like game.)

The Minecraft modding scene was always insane.

Forge in special has always been a hotbed for drama, since inception - Eloraam (RedPower) and FlowerChild (Better than Wolves) were both founding members, they started fighting because Eloraam was copying BTW features, FC left, booom. Eventually Eloraam and Spacetoad left, and LexManos - not a founding member, but someone invited into Forge by Eloraam - became the head developer, and he makes Arthmoor look nice in comparison.

Still more civilised than the Minecraft modding scene! *cough Forge drama cough cough*

I’m not into Bethesda games so saying this based on the article: Arthmoor sounds like a piece of shit. It’s fine if you have a “vision” for the game, and your mod is about that vision, but you shouldn’t pretend that your vision is something else, like simple bug-fixing patches.

Be prepared to welcome Discordfugees in the same fashion as the Redditfugees.

Props for the dev. In fact because of these news I went to check their games out and find a good free one, Viridi; you build a succulents pot. Basically small version of my succulents/cactuses garden.

Bad connection, eh? Either Starlink is crap and prone to bad connections… or not even its owner uses it.

Survive-em-up?

Seriously I fucking loved the name.

Normal bullet hell (Touhou): the enemies shoot a hell of bullets at you. And your job is to avoid it. Reverse bullet hell (Vampire Survivors): you shoot a hell of bullets at the enemies. And your job is to shoot even more, bigger, stronger bullets.

Pew Pew Woosh.
Epilepsy-vania
GPU Fryer.
S3: Survive and Shoot the Swarm.

I’m still watching it as it’s a rather long video, but thank you for sharing that.

At those times you kind of get why Ninhelldo is suing Palworld. It is not about direct competition (Palworld plays a lot more like Ark than Pokemon); it’s because Palworld makes Pokémon look boring, uninspired, stale.

Tights/leggings

Touka approves this rank!

Sorry. I couldn’t resist. (The intro of this anime is such a banger that I still remember the MC’s obsession with leggings and tights.)

People like Musk rarely take into account the overall impact of this sort of tariff in the international chain.

I’ll give you an example. I live in Latin America. My processor is AMD, so made in USA with Taiwanese semiconductors.

But let’s pretend that I were to upgrade my processor today. AMD gets 25% tariffs over Taiwanese semiconductors, but it won’t “eat” the tariff, it simply relays it to the customers. So I’d pay more for the processor.

Would I? Fuck no. I’ve run a potato computer for years, might as well do it in the future. If some Taiwanese, Chinese or European alternative pops up, less unreasonably priced, I’d be willing to buy it. Taiwan still profits, so does the local market, but instead of a chunk of my money going to USA, it would go to one of those three.

Except that I’m not the only one. Others would do the same as me. Slow but sure and cumulatively, international trade swaps the middlemen in USA with middlemen elsewhere.

AMD is getting less sales, thus less profits. Investors hate it. Why bother investing in USA? They’ll invest in a booming tariff-free alternative. Vulture capital flies away in a flock, once the carcass is gone.

And it is not just CPUs; it’s also GPUs and everything else electronics. And it is not just AMD, but Intel and every other business relying on Taiwanese microchips.

With less money entering USA, the local customer market is slightly poorer. Now there’s less pressure to attend that market. In those situations, is it worth for AMD to keep itself in USA? Rename itself to “IMD”, set up base in Ireland, boom, done.

Musk is sinking the economy of his own banana republic maize dictatorship. And it’s getting amusing to see.

[And in case anyone is wondering why I’m saying “Musk” instead of “Trump”, it’s because I genuinely believe that the later is there because the former wants it, not the opposite. Trump is that sort of tiny useful idiot, easy to control, just call him “who’s a good boy? strong man? Yes, you are, Trump! Good boy! Strong man!” and he’ll bark in the desired direction.]

Their brains were already this sort of sludge. They never gave a bloody fuck about people, their shtick was always profits. But they were willing to pink-wash, black-wash, rainbow-wash their junk, as it was good advertisement.

Now that they feel like they have the back of some banana republic maize republic they’re going all out.

Yup, it does sound like him. But I genuinely believe that his goal is manufactories beelining to USA, and that doesn’t seem too likely for me.

I’ll go further. My headcanon is that Trump didn’t come up with this idea; someone else did, and carefully led Trump to it. That person knows that the manufactories won’t go to USA, but they don’t really care - they benefit from USA being economical and politically isolated, perhaps even at its population having decreased living standards.

EDIT: or, summed up in a single picture.

Yes and this might hurt China a bit, but it’ll hurt USA even more. It’s like shitting your own pants to make someone else smell it.

They were supposed to force those manufacturing plants to go to USA, but as the article shows it is not working:

[AsRock] “As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries.” [emphasis on the plural]

We already saw signs of this late last year, when PC Partner decided to relocate its headquarters from China to Singapore

And they likely won’t move into USA territory because USA might create some tax against the governments they import raw materials from, labour costs are high, and all that talk about expelling illegal immigrants will make labour costs even higher (lower labour supply = higher prices).

Yup. You can craft leaves that grant you bonuses once equipped. In a game about blowing leaves out of your screen. (One of the achievements even pokes fun at this contradiction.)

The game is weird, to say the least, but actually fun. It reminds me Anti-Idle, as there are multiple mechanics that are barely associated with each other, except on making some numbers go up; except that those mechanics revolve around leaves as a common theme.

Picture related:

I’m a sucker for crafting and breeding systems that allow you to customise equipment and/or characters. But it’s really hard to find good implementations of the idea, most have some obvious flaw:

• Pokémon (breeding) - in early games RNG plays too much of a role, so it’s hard to get what you want. Late games don’t fix this, instead they allow you to skip the process altogether (see: hyper training).
• Niche - the breeding part of the game is actually really good, a shame that the rest of the game is a slop. For example gathering food gets a PITA once you got too many nichelings, and yet you want them to support your breeding pairs.
• RimWorld (Biotech; germline genes) - arbitrary restrictions that must be lifted through the usage of mods.
• RimWorld (crafting) - now we’re talking. If you pay close attention to which materials you’re using for which tasks, it pays off in the long run. There’s some luck involved, but you can get perfect (legendary) stuff fairly often if you know what you’re doing.
• Leaf Blower Revolution (leaf crafting) - the game encourages you to craft a lot of leaves and salvage most of them. That’s fine, it’s easy to get cheese anyway. The problem is the sheer amount of beer that you need to get the properties that you want in each leaf.
• Monster Breeder (old Flash game) - the game is a bugfest, and the lack of any sorting system makes you have a hard time even knowing which monster you should be breeding with which.
• Minecraft (tools and weapons) - vanilla has a really dumb system that doesn’t fit well in a game that encourages hoarding piles of materials into chests. The mod Tinkers’ Construct fixes this, and makes the system next to ideal.

Plus a lot more that I didn’t mention. Sorry for the wall of text.

As I mentioned in another thread, I don’t think that he’ll be able to attract chip makers to USA. Instead I think that he’ll kick every industry relying on those chips out of USA.

All those “explanations” babbling about Musk’s “intentions”… aaah, when will they cut off the crap???

Like. Let’s pretend for a moment that Musk was totally trying to convey “my heart goes out to you” or crap like that. It doesn’t bloody matter - regardless of his “intentions”, the gesture conveys support to Nazism, and it’s the only sensible way to interpret it within that context.

It’s the pot calling the kettle black.

I mentioned IPOs as an example of things making a company take a 180°, from “we luuuv customers!” to “customers are things to be milked, not humans to care about”. There are a thousand other possibilities - being bought by another (and more abusive) corporation, being inherited by arseholes and/or fools, or even a change in the mindset of its current owners.

There’s absolutely nothing preventing all those shitty outcomes. Nothing. And when one of them happens, the suckers who “buy” games through the platform - including myself, and probably you - will be shown a middle finger, and hear a moronic “ackshyually u didn’t buy the games lol you licensed them lmao”.

You can’t trust it.

Remember when Google’s motto was “don’t be evil”? Remember when Facebook was innovative? Remember when [insert any post-IPO platform] was privately owned?

Look at the past and future, not just the present. Corporations eventually go sour, and fight against the very users that they were supposed to serve. Give Steam/Valve enough power and it’ll do the same. We don’t need corporations serving us software; we need open systems.

That said Valve is situationally useful here because it’s eroding Microsoft’s power.

I hope that SteamOS finds more of its way into desktop computers. Sure, I don’t trust Valve; just like I don’t trust any other corporation. But it’s like fighting a big cancer with a smaller meta-cancer, if they hurt Windows/Microsoft I’m happy.

Plus its current relationship with GNU/Linux is symbiotic.

requesting permission to use it if Palworld doesn’t? It’s for a book.

You’re welcome to use this idea for whatever reason you want, mate.

I actually got a good deal for the 6600, only um barão e duzentos pila 1199 reals. I also remember seeing the 6750 XT, plenty times the price was a bit lower than you’ve mentioned. But I bought my GPU by, like, checking Terabyte+Pichau every bloody single day. (I refuse to buy it from Kabum after MagaLu bought it - quality went rock bottom after it.)

If Palworld devs were as petty as I am they’d probably make a Pal that looks like an obese and hostile Pikachu with a Mario hat.

• Name: Renjiyu / レンヂユ; after a really shitty Mandarin joke with Nintendo’s name (basically calling it hell’s company).
• It would make a noise that sounds a lot like uttaeru / 訴える “to sue, to complain” with an incredibly whiny voice
• Drop: meat and sulphur (the in-game sulphur looks a lot like fool’s gold)
• “Utility”: when it’s running around your base, Renjiyu makes your pals drop whatever they are doing to listen to its ramblings. As in, negative utility.

Bonus points if the logo in the hat resembles a pokeball from a distance.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to stop supporting 7 years old hardware.

I think that it is; gimme a decade or so then we talk. Specially when feature-wise W11 is basically W10.

What I’m picking at is not requiring some min HW to run their adware. It’s how much, compared with the development of their OS. W11 is mostly W10+trash.

Thank you!

It was: the dollar will probably get higher here in Brazil in the next year, I got a fairly decent deal for the RX 6600, my other parts are rather new so the GPU was the bottleneck, and the old GPU was a NVidia GTX 580 that I installed in my computer while my nephew was still a baby. Like, I remember him playing around me and my computer as I was building the computer, nowadays the same nephew wears a stubby beard! I wish that I could’ve bought it earlier but well, Latin America, you never have money when you need it.

I caved in and bought a new GPU this month, so what’s more important to me is the prices of AMD GPUs in the next decade.

My sides! That crap is losing ground to older versions, and now they’re lowering the requirements!

Hey, when is Windows going to stop working if your keyboard doesn’t have a Microsoft® approved Copilot® keyboard? It would be damn great!

apt-get moo for you guys.

EDIT: why are yall downvoting this and the_crotch’s comments? Serious question.

I’m typically quite pessimistic when it comes to new games, but I think that I’ll buy this one blind. Stardew Valley has been nothing but joy for me, and the fact that CA stopped working on HC because of SV says a lot about his desire to make good games.