Monkey With A Shell

They claim $100 B in ‘losses’ to this kind of game. Unless they’re actually running red on their books what they really mean is ‘we think we should make at least $100 B more per year’.

I’m sure that the vast majority of that would go directly to the front of house employees they’re pinning this too

This may be the most soft-slap low key form of war protest in history…

My single user Lemmy instance is targeted by Chinese scanning, as is pretty well every other IP on the web…

As ready as they’ll ever be, which probably isn’t all that ready in absolute terms…

What is DLC vs an expansion has become somewhat blurry. There was StarCraft BroodWar that was really an entire separate game to the point of launching them separately at the menu. Now things like Rimworld (which I play far too much of) have these expansion/plugins that add new mechanics and features but don’t create a separate game in their own right.

I actually read an article recently about 20 years of Oblivion horse armor or some such. They made an interesting point that a lot of the acceptance of micro buys came from online games letting you show off your new gear to the masses.

As a fellow ancient of the game world, I would say 20ish years is not far off give or take. The Atari 2600 was around in the 70s and the original NES came out in 1985(?). The NES was really the beginning of the end for the arcade scene. True that a lot of the arcade ports where terrible, but the power just wasn’t there to do it in a small box yet. $1 rentals from the local video shop would let you play a game all night or longer depending on who it was from.

While the online game services from Xbox and co could be seen as returning to a pay-to-play situation, they where never a must have. You could still play with friends locally without a subscription and the mass push for DLC buys wasn’t there yet.

I would really put the return to money snatching along side the rise of mobile games. Buying addons and in game coins to get an advantage really picked up with the ease of always on connections and purchases with a simple swipe of the finger. Once that ‘just one more boost will do it’ addictive mechanic was made the norm it was all over for the concept of a game that you just bought as a complete thing. Now it’s a novel thing to see a game offered that you just buy and play as it is.

So pretty much one of those smart speaker things with a pin on it, for hundreds of $$$ and a subscription to boot? What a great idea…

I’ve never heard of this thing, is it supposed to do what the analyze this picture or ID the song playing features of my phone already could do, or is there something novel I’m missing?

Ignoring people who sit about complaining ‘both sides/it doesn’t matter/stay home/reeeee’ who care so little about things they won’t take an action as simple as voting. Yet you have all the time in the world to go online and gripe about the one viable party that’s marginally closer to your purported ideals without spending a breath on the party actively hostile to everything these supposed leftists want.

Yeah, that’s the tough part. I would say base it on those who use both platforms but I suspect those who use multiple platforms tend to use a primary first and others if they can’t find it. Maybe a survey when you buy it asking why you chose this format could help?

Defiantly, GOG is the first choice here old or new even if it’s cheaper elsewhere just to support that model.

This is of course assuming they wouldn’t have had those extra 20% of sales if they went without.

Someone should try a comparison to release on one platform with the DRM and also on GOG with a discount for the amount the DRM would have otherwise added to the price and see which sells better.

Frankly fo my time, best gaming series ever. With a few exceptions each one stands alone as it’s own story, but there are the ever present threads that in some cases turned into almost easter-egg items in a given game. Where are Biggs and Wedge going to show up this time? Can I get my hands on a choccobo? Hey Cid, thanks for the airship…

My thinking with a lot of those games where you have the handful of over-the-top ‘spenders’ is that at least a few are employees of the company given a free pass to add to their accounts. It’s not like it costs them anything, but it sure incentivizes a bunch of others to buy to try and compete.

You mean there are people who LIKE pay-to-win?

So you play as a pharmaceuticals CEO?

The amusing thing about the people who complain that capitalists are the root of all problems, they don’t make an effort to correct it.

Take the situation of this story. If your ideals are pure and would have the popular support of a critical mass of people, there is absolutely not one thing preventing the establishment of a company, chartered as a public good corporation, and ran as a non-profit entity to provide these kind of material goods for people at cost, or if someone is willing to subsidise the production even less so if you like. You could even get the seed money from a crowd sourced campaign, or so called ‘angel investors’ no strings attached, no ownership stakes to distribute.

For those willing to do a bit of CLI work there are even tools to pull your whole library automagically. Just make sure you got the space for it. Sitting at just over 1.5 TB here.

https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader

The whole concept of corporations as distinct eternal entities could use a reworking. From copyright, to liability, to corporate ‘speech’, it all shields to interests of the well heeled from responsibility for their actions. Some level of separation from an individual is needed or no small business would ever date take the risk of starting up, but at a certain point somebody needs to own the actions of it. How we define that is beyond me, but for now I’d take removing non-breathing entities from the voting pool and political funding as a start.

They as a candidate don’t, the campaign as a whole is important to support though. Particularly if it can be shown that the funds come from small doners it shows popular support. I would rather see a crowd funded candidate with millions of $5 donations than a handful of super-pacs funneling dark money into it. It’s exactly the kind of problem that citizens United caused that we need to revert to show the popular will of the people.