Never bought a single game at full price. Almost all the time, it’s at least 90% off. Lots of game bundles abound. And free games are given away all the time.
I don’t. You are exposing children to those exact mechanics and normalizing that behaviour. Without further thought in the future they will go for increasingly scammy shit tactics.
Seriously, you played behind your mom’s back. As did I and everyone else. Be careful, talk to her about the shitty tactics. She has to be aware of them, spot them, and know how they work to be able to avoid them. The hardest part will be for her to actually believe it. Those life service shit uses the most disgusting psychological tricks.
Or she will spent all her money behind your back someday.
We all had our tricks, and children will always be cleverer than their parents.
We all know that decent games exist, somewhere. But the amount of effort it would take to wade through all the shovelware and gacha to try to find an even halfway passable game on Google Play simply isn't worth my time.
And with the mobile market being what it is, it arguably isn't worth it for developers to try and sell any serious game as mobile-first, because it's so difficult for those types of games to succeed when mobile gamers want gacha and those that don't simply aren't playing on mobile. If it's truly worth my time, it should be ported to other platforms.
Word of mouth is certainly a large part of it, yes. People talk about successful games. One way or another, the games I like make it onto my radar when I see buzz about them.
But what are the most successful games on mobile? What are the games mobile gamers talk about? Gacha. It's all gacha. Whatever else is out there, nobody's talking about it and I'm never going to see it. Nor do I have any reason to go searching through a toxic cesspit in the hopes that maybe I'll eventually find something, when it is far easier to look elsewhere, on platforms that haven't been thoroughly corrupted by the race to the bottom.
But again, the real takeaway I want to stress is that the market has been this way for long enough that both gamers and developers know the well is poisoned, and it will never be unpoisoned. The fact that mobile has become dominated by gacha has reinforced itself - everyone not interested in gacha has left the platform, and mobile developers will keep selling more gacha because that's what the remaining audience wants. They even know that the average mobile gamer won't spend money on a more ethical business model.
I know that developers know that I know that this is what mobile is. The way I see it, mobile itself has become a red flag. If a game is trying to be more than gacha trash, well why don't the developers have the sense to put it on other platforms where non-gacha gamers are? If not, they're shooting themselves in the foot and I have no pity.
Here’s where you and I differ: I don’t trust word of mouth. I don’t trust canons. I don’t trust marketing. And frankly, I don’t trust the so-called “gamers” who repeat the same tired narratives.
Instead, I dive deep—into the bowels of app stores, into archive.org, anywhere I can find games no one else has played or talked about. Then I judge for myself whether they’re worth a damn.
That’s how I’ve uncovered hidden gems, and why I know most of what passes for “good taste” is just groupthink dressed up as expertise.
The only people with real taste? The ones willing to seek things out and form their own opinions. Everything else is just noise.
So what, you just buy games at random and hope maybe you landed on something good? Without anything that would make for an informed purchase? Sounds like a horribly inefficient way of running headfirst into Sturgeon's Law.
But usually, I’m a deal hunter—I scour for discounts, read descriptions carefully, study screenshots, and watch gameplay footage. If it grabs my interest, I pull the trigger.
Surprisingly, most of the games that catch my eye turn out to be pretty good.
You should give it a shot. Ignore the hype, forget word of mouth and influencers. Dive into something completely new and different—you might just be pleasantly surprised.
I do. But to me, step one of filtering out Sturgeon's Law is looking in the right place - platforms that are not overflowing with so much poison that I already know I'm unlikely to ever find what I want.
Correct, they do scale the boss HP when solo vs a normal trio game, you also get one guaranteed free revive and shops are guaranteed to sell a revive item. Personally, I’d still rather queue with randoms, but we’ll see how that goes when they add duo games. Queue times can already be a bit long sometimes, and I’m a bit concerned that losing duo teams to their own mode will make solo queues even longer and more annoying.
A friend convinced me to pick up RE Village because it suposedly plays more like an FPS than a classical RE horror game. I did beat Dimitrescu recently and I kinda have to disagree with him. There are so many moments that feel very tense because enemies aren’t vulnerable because “magic” so you have to play cat and mouse like in RE 3 with Nemesis. I do like it enough that I’ll keep at it though. Love turning those red rooms blue on the map.
I’m not sure why you’re on a crusade to convince people to like mobile games. I’ve always got my phone on me, and I frequently find myself on a subway ride that’s too short to bother with a Steam Deck. Mobile games would fit in great there. My options are pretty terrible. For the kinds of games I like to play, the only ones that actually have mobile versions are basically digital versions of board games and a small handful of roguelikes. I tend to just read on the subway instead. It’s not for lack of trying. The library just sucks, and it offers less value than other places I can buy games. Your daughter is playing games designed to keep you “engaged” and addicted with all of the greatest tricks of the gambling industry; you can find the GDC talks with a quick search on your favorite search engine.
Whenever I see an echo chamber where people parrot the same shallow talking points—no nuance, no real analysis—the contrarian in me kicks in.
You claim there’s “no library” on mobile, but even a basic look at the stats and available titles proves otherwise.
If you actually want fun, premium mobile games with zero microtransactions, they’re not hard to find. You just have to look beyond the surface—and actually try.
I’m not parroting anything. I’ve looked. Sure, sometimes you get a port of XCOM or Slay the Spire, but then it’s not going to carry over progress back to my PC, where I’m more comfortable playing at home, and my reluctance to buy a version of the game like that explains why there isn’t enough money in trying to port the kinds of games that I like to mobile. Sometimes a game has a port, but it fell out of compatibility with modern Android and never got updated; and let me tell you, that’s a great way to convince me to stop looking. Even crazier is when something like Fire Emblem Heroes happens, because it’s adapting a traditional handheld/console game into an interface that makes way more sense for controlling the game, but it’s not a proper version of that series; it’s a gacha game. If I have any kind of extended anticipated desire to game on the go, my Steam Deck is just a better answer than trying to find the few games I would like that also got Android versions, because I’m going to spend more time playing them at home anyway.
My 13 and 15 year olds are PC first gamers, then consoles, then mobile. I raised them that way on purpose because I wanted to avoid tablet and phone screens. I could control access better that way.
And yea, also because I’m a pc and console gamer and wanted to play my favorite games with them.
The older one has started playing mobile games more often and yea, it’s Genshin and Honkai. That kid was always in love with Fire Emblem, so Honkai makes sense to me. The stories are all kind of the same.
A friend stayed with us for a few days and they have a 12 and 10 year old. I have every console imaginable, PCs on big screens, and they never left their tablets.
I think once kids get on the tablet/phone/mobile games, they don’t really leave. I don’t know that I would have either.
Yes cause they are designed to be addictive and maximize the profitability with addictive content like loot boxes and fomo tactics to push micro transactions.
In case you’re wondering, the graph looks like this. There have currently been 16k new signatures today. The required pace to make it would be 10k a day. Yesterday the count increased by about 30k signatures.
TL;DR Keep spreading this to people you know, and keep signing. It’s working.
Until last week I thought it was done, but somehow it flipped around. Things are looking pretty good, with massive youtubers and streamers taöking about it.
I’m glad the ball is rolling again. This can change gaming and set a precedent for other things as well.
It flipped around because the founder of the movement, Ross, of AccursedFarms on youtube… released a video giving a status report…
And spending a good deal of the video explaining how Thor, PirateSoftware on youtube… has basically been making up bullshit and spreading nonsense about SKG for months now, actively campaigning against SKG, again, based almost entirely on him jumping to hysterical, catastrophic conclusions without factual basis
After that video… basically every single AngloSphere Gamer Youtuber has been putting out videos spreading the SKG messsge, and dogpiling on Thor for being a confused, overconfident narcissist… and Thor is now double triple quadrupling down with ‘im the real victim’ and other such tactics often employed by manipulative narcissists facing the revelation of their public persona as essentially entirely hypocritical.
EDIT: Also, as of right now, I’m seeing 723k…
Which is roughly +20k in only 6 hours from the time this OP was made.
EDIT 2:
If you’ve ever heard of, or seen the Freeman’s Mind series… yeah, that’s Ross, basically being Freeman’s internal monologue, and turning the entirety of Half Life into an action comedy bonanza.
He had more recently been attempting to get through all of HL2 this way as well, in addition to doing esoteric game reviews… untill he got so pissed about Ubisoft being able to just murder The Crew, and what is going on with all games in terms of consumer rights… that he started the SKG movement, and hasn’t had much time to work on his other stuff as much.
To be honest, neither did I… and I may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment, could have sworn someone was asking ‘why line go up so fast now’.
Probably not, I’m the one that’s hated and shunned and gaslit by the entire family because of how easily and often I point out that they are both hypocrites and objectively wrong about nearly every single political, economic or sociological idea they have.
But I do appreciate your validation, lol!
Yeah, got two bachelors degree’s simultaneously.
Managed to do it in 4 years + 1 summer quarter.
But uh yeah, I’m basically too knowledgeable for my own good, and the autism doesn’t help with dealing with abusive narcissist family members.
Oh well!
I ghosted them to the point they probably think I am actually dead.
I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts and, y'know, contributing what I can to the state of human knowledge, or what remains of it anyway. I can't blame people for being defensive about it. It's the AIs themselves I'm offended by, they're the ones doing wrong. We're all just trying to cope with the avalanche of unverified garbage they're putting out. It's digital pollution.
Yeah. I hear you there. Problem I usually have is that the odds of an accusation tend to scale less with posting style in my experience and more with level of disagreement, or whether or not the poster has personally witnessed something. Basically, “I didn’t see this with my own two eyes/dislike you, so this is obviously bot behavior.” It’s a conspiracy theorist-like attitude, and it’s predated LLMs entirely.
Nonetheless, I’m not happy that an entire new form of bot scrutiny has been introduced, and I absolutely cannot wait for GenAI/LLM hype to die the fuck down.
It’s an official EU citizens initiative, hosted on the EU web portal. The one maintained by the EU for the very purpose of digitally facilitating any and all citizens initiatives.
I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts
From cecilkorik, who I was replying to. That kind of bot accusation scarcely ever occurred before LLMs entered the picture. You posted too hastily here and missed a huge chunk of context.
Botting something like a citizens initiative, where every signature WILL get scrutinized by government would be seriously stupid. Or are you saying commenters like me are bots?
Is it really that hard for you to imagine the possibility… that people care?
Or are just not aware of the chain of youtubers doing a call to arms on this, getting millions of views, completely explaining the signature spike?
There is zero scrutiny possible for the form which is 100% based on trust that the signer is who they say they are adults where they say they are. If you want to be John Smith in UK, Paddy Murphy in Ireland and Jurgen Schmidt in Germany, you can be. There’s a reason none of these initiatives have done anything except keep people who care about something busy with dopamine graphing instead of doing something like boycotting relevant games and publishers.
And no, like to the EU, Youtuber noise is not relevant to me. Millions of views is literally nothing. You see the general state of the world, yes?
Right. Because caring about A means you can’t care about B. If you support legislation, you must be boycoting nothing, because no-one in the history of existence has ever done both.
You’re claiming mutual exclusivity where none exists.
You sound more like you’re scared of the implications of this passing, because you’d have us voting with out wallets rather than… actually voting. Nevermind that even games not worth buying should still also be preserved.
Pre-orders, micro-transactions and battle-passes are still a thing, no matter how much we’ve shouted about “big company bad”. This type of crap isn’t something we solve by any one method alone.
And you don’t need to engage with youtube or any other social media, to accept that the phenomenon they enable, occur. To dismiss that reality would be idiotic delusion.
Millions of views is a lot, when all you need to get started, is one of those millions to sign a petition.
I… What? Is that not a mutual exclusivity argument? For you to have a point, this time and effort would need to be better spent elsewhere. I not only disagree with that, but I have the time and energy to do the other things you are claiming will make a difference.
Man what the fuck are you talking about, it requires an EU, country specific verification document(s)/id(s), or the intraEU digital ID to verify you are an actual real person who lives where you say you do.
This is an official EU webportal for formal citizens initiatives petitions.
Like, ok, I guess you could just spam it with a bot/script, and then INTERPOL comes after you for fucking with an official government website, potentially hundreds or thousands of counts of attempted impersonation / identity theft and lying on a government/legal document.
Like sure, go do a DDOS on I dunno, whitehouse.gov, or your US’s state’s unemployment assistance application web portal.
Those are approximately equivalently stupid things to do.
OK buddy, cybercrime never happens and interpol will come arrest your python script if it did because you messed with an EU “government” form that might have resulted in them having to get a 60 year old Greek politican to ask what a EULA was
What happens if you try to just brute force guess at a bunch of possible credit card numbers and addresses and names in some kind of online store?
After maybe a couple of tries, 30 seconds or less of that… the system is rejecting your bullshit fake numbers everytime, and after enough, it auto ip bans you, sends an email to the security admin team, and your journey to getting a chat from INTERPOL or the FBI or what not has now officially begun.
This system doesn’t just accept any old random bullshit you give it.
It is not a random slapdash online poll.
Its only going to count up on that total signatures count if the system actually verifies the info you put in as being consistent with an actual, real, specific person in the system.
I again repeat: You are an idiot.
And I use idiot specifically: you are not only drastically misinformed, but determined, and seem to think very dangerous actions… are not dangerous… you think very unfeasible methods… are feasible.
Your idiot noises have no power over me, you contemptible boffin.
You aren’t worth explaining anything further to, such is the density of your thick skull, such is the extent of the gaping, cavernous void present in the part of your mind where relevant contextual information should be.
If you must pester me further, my server admin tutoring rate is $100 per hour, if you can’t afford the cost, just admit you’re lost.
What do you think the word boffin means? Do you mean buffoon? You should probably double-check your phrasing before quoting anime protagonists from memory
I think they will verify with the municipality of the person who signed whether they actually exist. Theoretically you could sign on someone you know this information for, but I think IP logging would burn you pretty quick if even one of those is bogus/duplicate.
Also, I don’t know whether such signatures would be counted before any verification would take place
I mean yeah, technically there will be some EU member states with different guidelines (due to different id/privacy laws) where maybe yes, a few of them could theoretically maybe be pumped up by a bot.
But uh, for some thing… you’d need a fairly well done bot net to even kind of pull that off for long.
As in like, a new and convincingly distinct bot/ip to burn for each signature, that is actually an ip that makes geo sense for the person/real world address it is spoofing…
As you say: basic ip logging.
If its all coming from… a single, or small number of ips… assuming the EU is at least as competent of a server admin as I am, yeah, that’s gonna look pretty fuckywucky in the logs, probably get noticed within 24 hours max.
And yes, I also seriously doubt there would not be some kind of verification of signees at at least some level, that would be initiated after all the thresholds are passed.
But its wildly innacurate to portray this as if… oh yeah any idiot vibe coder could just drill this up to whatever number after 30 minutes.
That was the way the internet worked back in 2006, or how stupid say Twitter polls are now.
Not the same level of inept incompetence going on with EU government websites.
That’s entirely backwards. I’ve boycotted these online kill-switched games pretty well, but that means fuck all because the general public is incapable of collectively caring about anything. Regulation on the other hand does have an effect, and should the initiative pass, EU is required to properly answer it.
Answering doesn’t mean doing anything, and all they have to do is generally wave in the direction of the overwhelming popularity and profitability of the products compared to the online petition that 0.2% of the EU’s adult population will have signed.
If the general public does not care, legislation will not follow. Filling out and promotinh a glorified change.org form is energy wasted on actually popularising your viewpoint instead of trying uselessly to get it in unpopularly.
Entirely discounting the fact that the EU has a track record of consumer friendly regulation. I agree, instead of doing what has the highest chance of success, let’s do nothing that could have an impact instead.
What on earth makes you think an online petition, which has never led to any of the consumer friendly regulation you mention, has the ‘highest’ chance? Or that the alternative to a petition is doing nothing?
All of that regulation came primarily from legal cases.
The fact that it isn’t just a petition, and if successful will put the issue before EU lawmakers. I’m presenting the alternative as doing nothing because you talked about voting with your wallet, and that is essentially doing nothing.
The reason I see this as having a higher chance of success than a legal case is the monetary limitation inherent to the latter. As far as I know there isn’t a big track record of successful ECI’s, so I would assume you’re basing your opinions on regular petitions. Correct me if I’m wrong.
No, I talked about putting this energy into convincing others to vote with their wallets, not just “doing nothing”. A boycott is an active campaign. It doesnt just mean not buying a product. It means not buying any associated product. Not even tolerating them in conversation.
I’m basing my opinion on how the commission has responded to similar successfully raised initiatives: “that’s already covered by legislation and up to EU states to manage”, “no that’s something we cant support, but feel free to appeal endlessly”, and in the most effective one, “committing to making a legislative proposal by 2023 but actually if thats ok we’ll make it 2026 and I suppose then if legislation is agreed it may be in place within a decade” (end cage farming, which polls at 86% approval already in the EU).
Yes, that’s what I was referring to; I didn’t mean you personally voting with your wallet, but in the broader sense. In my opinion there’s little chance of having success with this method in this field.
I’m not saying you’re wrong in basing your opinion on this, but I think the sample size is very small and not necessarily indicative of future results. I’m not saying the chances are sky-high either, but I think this is the best way forward, especially right now with the campaign having received a second wind.
If there are alternative roads to the same goal, I wouldn’t be against supporting those either. I believe this is the best we have right now, that’s why I’ve put it before friends, family etc. If you have a better idea, you should definitely do the same, but downplaying the potential of this campaign helps nobody but those in the games industry.
Citizens iniatives may be a form of petition, but the difference is they come with actual legal requirements.
This isn’t some change.org bs, a list of names totaling some arbitrary number. That’s why it has a hard deadline. And requirements for how signatures have to come from more than one country.
This is a pre-existing system for the people of the EU to force it to tackle an issue. Most EU countries have equivalent systems locally, as well. This isn’t new or unusual for us.
Legal precedent is how the US works. Where lawsuits catalyzing the setting of new standards for what is legal, is the most common way the law changes. If you thought that’s how EU legislation got done, then you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Almost everything the EU does, is based on proposals. Not legal cases.
Those can happen in the EU, too, but we have additional ways to propose law as citizens, and legal cases are more common on the national level, rather than the continental level.
If you can gather proof (signatures) of concern on a given issue, you can force a proposal through the door that normally has to come from elected representatives.
It does mean doing something: they have to spell out whether consumers should have rights on this or not. Currently it’s undefined, which is equivalent to “not.”
popularizing your viewpont
And the initiative works against that? You say the cause could have gotten more publicity without it? I really don’t see how that could happen, or understand the point in guilt tripping over it.
energy wasted
I’m starting to think this argument is energy wasted.
Why? Because her Android has Genshin Impact, Fortnite, Roblox, Candy Crush, Wuthering Waves, and Sky: Children of Light.
These games are all great examples of everything I hate about mobile gaming: full of incessant ads for microtransactions. Literally every mobile game I’ve ever played (outside of FDroid) is this way.
Plus you need a controller anyway, at which point you might as well just carry a handheld ging system.
You could buy whatever your favorite Anbernic device for $50 and have access to a library of thousands of fun ad-free games.
Mobile gaming, on Android, is an interesting space right now. I used to buy flagship phones exclusively, as high spec as I could just…because I could. I played a few emulated Nintendo Switch games on them, as well as the odd Game Pass title (with a telescoping GameSir Xbox mounted controller thing) and then I realized I really had no use for them. I rarely played, and my most recent phone purchases have been mid-range.
The scene for Android emulation is incredibly dramatic with frequent in-fighting, but also pretty impressive from a technical standpoint. It’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea - and that’s fine, but the mobile scene which isn’t just gatcha games hooking kids on the Play Store is so varied. Then you’ve got actually impressive games like DREDGE getting a Android release, replete with custom builds and changes for the Android system (no lazy ports!). Heck, even No Man’s Sky is coming to Android soon!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne