Depends on how far ahead he planned the sale. It does sound like he’s getting ready to deploy a golden parachute while the company burns. Clean out his own stock while the price is still high enough and then say, “well shucks, who’d have thought that developers would leave in droves when we instituted micro-transactions for using our engine?” And walk on to overseeing his next disaster.
Seems like it’s planned enshitification. Use lower costs and even free for individuals to get market share, then crank up the price once you have a large audience. It’ll be interesting to see if and where indie developers jump to.
It was a scheduled sale. There's a term for it, but it's a fairly normal thing to have set up.
What it really sounds like is they looked to see that they had a scheduled sale, and then delayed the announcement of the new fees (and the planning of how they'd work) so that the sale price would be higher.
Or, another alternative here. They looked at the sale price, and thought "gee whiz this is low, how do I boost the stock price higher?" and since this idiot worked on microtransactions for EA, he thought that adding those to Unity made some sort of sense.
I very much think games like Balatro DO need to be assessed and probably have an increased rating because they are unabashedly designed to be as addictive as possible. Same as ARPGs that have been built around skinner boxes basically since Diablo.
But this was never that. It was just “oh, cards and poker theming? GAMBLING!!!”
I can’t speak to factorio since every time that dev has ever opened his mouth it has just been horrific hateful bullshit.
But Civ is more just “addictive” because the gameplay is fun. That is not to downplay that but it is generally closer to “escapism” than not when you get into that “one more turn” cycle and realize it is 3 am.
ARPGs were very much designed around skinner boxes/operant conditioning chambers which are one of the core tenets of how things like slot machines are designed. We can see similar (and it was outright acknowledged by many reviewers/influencers) with games like Vampire Survivors.
At the end of the day, the reality is that the “This is fine if you are 13” system is idiotic and what we actually need is fine grain warnings… which will go down great in an era of “Eww, trigger warnings are woke”. But, like, I have a cousin who is well aware that he is incredibly prone to addiction when it comes to gambling and on many occasions he has texted family and friends to ask if it is “safe” for him to play a new game. And… it is kind of concerning how often the answer is “no”.
Link for context…he didn’t know statutory rape stood for sex with children as he is not a native speaker. This does not excuse other things he has said that may be terrible, but cancel culture is a cancer.
Til both that he’s trash and that Uncle Bob is trash. It makes sense honestly, Uncle Bob was always hyped to no end with his mediocre contributions to software. Also the agile manifesto sucks ass.
He wrote some hyped up programming books and he was involved in the creation of extreme programming (a bust), cucumber (an almost completely useless waste of time), and agile (an ok idea but in reality it’s a huge bust, it’s biggest effect is that management tells everyone “we need to be agile” all the time).
Agile just means that you don’t have a project plan, but you see that’s okay because you planned not to have a project plan, and therefore it’s totally fine.
Extreme programming is basically pair programming. It sucks and doesn’t work. Cucumber is also known as “behavioral driven (design/development)” or BDD. It manifests as test documents written in “plain English” that are executed via code. It inevitably becomes unit tests but worse because it’s based mainly around regex matches to bits of text within the steps.
Civ is a bit exploitative in that they deliberately release a half-arsed base product with glaring flaws, charging big $$$ for it; and then release a chain of expansion packs to flesh it out and make it complete.
I was on the beta team for Civ 5; and it was a real eye-opener to see that this is a deliberate strategy. It isn’t just that games are hard to get right. They deliberately hold back to squeeze more cash out. I haven’t bought any civ game since then.
But yeah, I agree that it isn’t the same type of exploitation as gambling.
My issue with the ruling wasn’t the ruling itself, cause I can understand the argument. It was the non-equal enforcement of it. Games with actual gambling in it were rated lower than a game with the similar aspects but no actual monetary aspects. That’s ridiculous. If you want to make poker 18+, then just do it across the board instead of picking and choosing your ratings.
While the game can be “addicting”, it is mostly because it is fun to play. Not all “addicting” forms of entertainment need elevated ratings because they are fun to consume. We don’t increase the ratings for binge worthy TV shows and we don’t restrict books if they are page turners, so why should we with a video game. At some point people need to regulate the use of their time themselves.
How many millennial/genx gamers have stories about staying up all night playing Diablo 2 or WoW? Hell, it was almost a requirement for any games media person to have an “I almost flunked out of college because of WoW” story.
It was hard to care TOO much with D2 because any additional monetization was mostly illegal gold farmers (and let’s ignore the various former devs who have acknowledged they were involved in those…). But starting with WoW? That was a subscription model. That “I need to run this raid 500 times to get the drop I want” equated to increased subscriptions which was profit. Again, there were limits-ish in that very few people ran multiple accounts so it was a fixed cost per year. But it was still there.
Fast forward again and we have the same concepts going into loot boxes and, eventually, gacha games where it is 100% predatory and basically what the majority of successful live service games are built around.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to. But it is also important to actually think critically and wonder if you REALLY like the gameplay of that game or if you just like the flashing lights and sparkles of a good drop?
To make it clear (to the people who have read beyond just getting pissy and smacking the go away button): I love Balatro and Vampire Survivors and play the ever loving hell out of them. But any time “Oh god… they have a mobile port. This will be the end of me” is even jokingly uttered… that is when you take a look at what you are doing and add some restrictions.
Because, at the end of the day ,time is not just money: it is life. Yeah, there is the aspect of “I stayed up all night and performed worse at work/school and got fired/expelled”. But there is also just “I spent all night locked in a room and didn’t interact with a single human being or spend any time improving myself” to worry about.
Ugh, I remember those days well. I saw personally what MMOs did to two friends of mine (one from high school and one from college), and how the high school friend was able to really pull himself together and make a good life for himself after we helped pull him out of MMO addiction, and how the college friend we couldn’t help just wallowed in a sea of empty energy drink cans and turned EVERYTHING into WoW during that time. I don’t know if he was able to build a solid life/career after college, but I could imagine him looking back at that time and wanting more from it. Either way, I saw both their situations and vowed to never pick up an MMO because I didn’t want the same to happen to me. Just because an addicting game isn’t extractive of one’s money doesn’t mean it’s not harmful if you have a hard time with self-control and moderation. You either lose your money directly or your time, which may cost you money in other ways in addition to other indirect costs. Ultimately you’ll end up losing something of great value you will unlikely get back, if ever.
In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.
I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.
A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.
Like anything, it is about understanding what you are and aren’t susceptible to.
Hard agree. I get sucked hard into good stories and know I’d lose a lot of time to them, so I refused to let myself start anything over 30,000 words for a period of time.
It should be a cost/benefit evaluation of “how much enjoyment will I gain from this game and is the time spent enjoying worth it compared to all the other things I could be doing?” Sadly some things hijack this decision-making, and with some things you really only get to try once before you get hooked. “Try everything once” shouldn’t include heroin. I think that’s part of why knowing if a game is addictive is helpful for some people, so they know if they can try it or have to stay away forever. I have heard enough stories of MMO addiction that I’ve decided that I should never play one. Reviews are also really helpful, because what takes one person in might not interest another. As much as I fear MMO addiction, I know I am good at not getting addicted to gacha.
Factorio has extracted £60 from me for the base game and new DLC! I’ve only played 2100 hours, that’s almost £0.03 per hour. Complete bullshit how expensive everything is now…
I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?
I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.
Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.
Like I said in this and the branch below it, many games, balatro included, include game and visual design that evoke psychological experiments and concepts that are basically the foundation of slot machines and the like.
And these are the same concepts people deride when we call them loot boxes (but not gacha for some reason).
I don't understand what you're talking about. Balatro does not contain loot boxes/gacha. In a world where so many modern AAA games are exploiting all kinds of shady dark patterns, Balatro took off by not doing any of that shit. It's just a sincerely fun game, and it sounds like you're literally just complaining that it's too fun and that should somehow be policed.
The guy is clearly an idiot. He made this stupid comment and he can’t justify it but rather than admit that it’s a stupid comment and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s trying to back it up in some bizarre way with this mumbo jumbo non-logic.
The difference is one is manipulating a continuous flow of money out of your wallet and you pay once for Balatro to get the same rush without getting psychofinancially milked for the CHANCE at a hit of dopamine before you pay again for the privilege.
Hmm. At least in my experience, the people decrying loot boxes also condemn gacha for the exact same reasons, but we could have had separate experiences.
Just once, I would love to see a game being played via musical instrument, and when you’re actually in the shit against a boss, it ends up creating a banger of a song.
Sekiro has a very heavy emphasis on every boss having a “rhythm” to their attacks. Would probably need some post processing (playing the same string on a guitar endlessly will never work but swapping out the “instrument” every so often would) but I could see that actually making a nice melody.
I’ll never forget hiding under a table in the corridor with the Alien walking around me in circles. He knew I was there but seemingly couldn’t figure out how to get me. I thought I was safe but maybe I moved a few pixels in the wrong direction as after a long wait, it grabbed me and gave me the deadly kiss.
fuck notcoin that piece of shit legitimised all these other grifts. now they all are selling boosters with other cryptos with no sign of actual launch. crypto is cancer.
I respectfully disagree. There are legitimate use cases do make sense. Of course, these don’t make tech bros rich quick so you don’t often hear about them.
One of them that I like the idea of is NanoGPT. It’s a frontend to various AI services where you pay per request instead of making accounts for each and pay with Nano. I haven’t used it yet, but the currency makes a lot of sense there, as it is feeless and requests can cost less than a cent.
Another one is Monero for goods and services that might be illicit under one’s jurisdiction. I don’t want to go into the discussion whether this is right or wrong; all I want to say is that laws can be nonsensical and dangerous.
NanoGPT? What’s special about it? Is mining the nano coin used to create the AIs responses or is it just a crypto skin on top. If the latter we can self host AI.
But beyond that many dislike crypto for gas cost and same for AI so strapping them together is way less palatable.
It’s just used as a means of payment for very small amounts, even less than a single cent if you calculate in dollars.
If the latter we can self host AI.
Sure you can; I certainly can’t, lacking the equipment, and the investment would be much higher than any return on it.
But beyond that many dislike crypto for gas cost and same for AI so strapping them together is way less palatable.
Nano, as I said, has no fees, and there’s no miners, it’s quite ecologically friendly. It does have other challenges (for example only being pseudonymous and fully traceable, plus fighting spam is an ongoing battle, no standard way of association a payment with an invoice). But I always liked its premise and it does make sense for such cases for me.
The beauty with how they implemented is that there’s no explicit about apart from a wallet address they create for you, saved in a cookie, so you can straight up use it.
I’m not trying to argue that this is somehow revolutionary or the right way to do it, but it manages to leverage the advantages quote well in my opinion.
So if I made a confident AI and hosted it on a website you could visit, you buy my tokens $5 for 5 tokens, responses priced at .01 tokens. Essentially its very cheap.
The thing is it’s unlikely you’d find a payment provider making this viable. For example, PayPal charges 49 US cents as a minimum fee, or 39 Eurocents. Even just credit card companies charge 5 cents fixed, so cheap payment processors will charge you about 10 cents per transaction plus variable rates and possibly a monthly fee.
True but these companies are gate keeper that also work with fiet to crypto so its just moving the issue. If I want to convert my British pounds I will be charged even if I sent it physically. How do you buy nano coin?
It’s true that you need to factor in the conversion fees. The same however is true, maybe for a smaller fee, when converting between fiat currencies, though my bank is usually pretty fair. Other providers - again PayPal being an offender and often ATM operators - will often have worse rates.
NanoGPT itself doesn’t sell crypto I think, they include sellers for convenience. I provided mine years ago on Kraken which is a market exchange.
For testing, I just transferred 0.1 XNO to them, which arrived basically instantly without fees, it was credited to the wallet before I switched back windows to my browser.
I’ll try a prompt and get back here if you want? I mean this is not really the core of the discussion but for completion’s sake…
So entry cost is the kicker, like for myself I don’t have any crypto, or at least crypto I can access (lost my monero keys) so for me to use nano I would still need to face conversion fees.
Tbh I hear about speeds but I’ve not had issues of slow transfers when it comes to fiat.
Lol that picture is good but the little girl has a baby hand.
I’ve seen presidents with smaller hands… anyhow, NanoGPT doesn’t run the models themselves, they have professional accounts for the models with the respective providers and basically resell access in per request amounts without an account or anything (your account is just a wallet address, no name or email required). I just wanted to showcase something where cryptocurrency can actually fill a niche.
That’s very nice of you but I won’t deprive you of your coins, another time maybe
All good, I still keep to the idea of cryptocurrency as a decentralized currency for the internet and have no issue with tipping some away if people actually engage in discussion honestly
Nano is a scam. They mined all the coins up front, and then told the most gullible rubes in the universe that everyone else had to fill out CAPTCHAs too.
Nano wasn’t mined, it was all created at inception, and as you correctly said distributed via CAPTCHA; this was to disincentivize or stop people running bots to claim it automatically. After the distribution period ended, the Nano foundation burned undistributed coins minus an amount that they kept to ensure further development. This fund ran out in 2023 if I’m not mistaken. It’s now being developed by volunteers.
Do you know a better idea how such an initial airdrop would be done?
You are one of those suckers if you believe every distributed coin was solved by a CAPTCHA. The centralized(!) foundation pinky promises that they didn’t sock puppet ten times as many suckers at launch, and then keep a controlling share of stake permanently.
A better way to do the initial “airdrop” is to not do centralized issuance at all, because anyone would be a complete fool to trust any crypto foundation.
What would be a controlling share with Nano? The largest representatives according to voting weight were the exchanges last time I checked, which would imply most of the currency is in “circulation” as in no longer held by the foundation. And even then, voting weight doesn’t grant you an immediate advantage in Nano, as there’s no staking.
So I mean, while I can’t prove that the foundation held now coins than they claimed, I’m unaware that there was ever a sign of them actually doing so.
A better way to do the initial “airdrop” is to not do centralized issuance at all, because anyone would be a complete fool to trust any crypto foundation.
It has to come from somewhere, right? How would you fairly distribute coins that aren’t mined?
Anyhow, I’m not here to shill the coin, the ones I bought I bought off an exchange long after the original issuance and all I wanted to show was an example for a good technical solution. Not perfect mind you, just something of which I thought is a positive example where it’s just used as a means of payment.
The largest representatives according to voting weight were the exchanges last time I checked
Which is irrelevant because holders can just choose different representatives.
So I mean, while I can’t prove that the foundation held more coins than they claimed, I’m unaware that there was ever a sign of them actually doing so.
The sign is them creating a design that expects this tremendous amount of trust. It’s extremely conspicuous to create a vulnerability that only the foundation can exploit, that can go undetected if they don’t make a huge mistake.
It has to come from somewhere, right? How would you fairly distribute coins that aren’t mined?
You can’t fairly distribute a premine. Don’t use coins with premines.
I’m glad you’re not here to shill Nano, but it is a scam and you are promoting it.
Can’t make it right for everyone… Some people will complain about mining and the energy consumption (Bitcoin is supposed to currently use about 850 kWh per transaction), others complain about a supposedly unfair premine. They didn’t even hold an ICO.
51%
That’s not currently a required percentage, you need 67% of votes to confirm a transaction. Which in turn means 33% are enough to stall the network. But even then, what would their gain be, apart from owning more of their own currency?
Which is irrelevant because holders can just choose different representatives.
You can, but then you can no longer vote. And if you can’t vote, holding Nano does nothing.
I don’t think there’s a cryptocurrency today that comes without downsides, be it high resource usage, lack of anonymity or others, if they’re not straight up money grabs and a copy paste of another random junk on ETH. Bitcoin is not an option for me because of the monster mining has become - I don’t blame Satoshi, this is something I didn’t expect either, but it’s insanity currently.
That’s whataboutism - a low carbon footprint doesn’t change whether or not Nano is a scam. My Excel spreadsheet has an even lower carbon footprint than the AI you’re pitching here. If they own a large enough majority to control the network, then they can keep dictate policy or favor their own blocks for free money.
It’s ok dude, I’m not trying to sway you. I’m not invested into the topic enough to defend something against theoretical and unsubstantiated claims. Use what you want or don’t
I’m warning potential readers about the scam you’re promoting. If you don’t care, then stop.
If a cryptocurrency involves trusting a central foundation at any point, it’s a scam. It’s an unnecessary security hole, and one would be damn foolish to invest in it just because the hole remains unused.
Before you throw stones be advised that this team is like 5 people at most, the game just blew up and some gamers are giving it the Valheim treatment wanting faster and faster updates.
Such a childish take expecting AAA speed from tiny homebrew dev teams imo. Obviously progress is going to come slower in most instances, they don’t have a tiny island nation’s worth of man power to throw. That and, I’m sorry, if my homebrew passion project blows up stupid big when I go for early access for seed money / water testing, I promise you I will be taking time off to celebrate the accomplishment.
This shit is a grind. Lots of dedication over a long period of time. Go on, hit that resort life for a minute, you earned it. Come back and finish up when you get some r&r. 🤙
Obviously still expecting progress down the line, but if I’m supporting early access I know what I’m getting into. Indie scene is where the love is, but it’s ma & pa shit. Plus there’s thousands of other ways to waste my time, I’ll check back in later if I’m bored with the game’s current build.
Waiting sucks, but chill. Save outrage for where it really matters, like genuinely shitty devs. Juuust my pocket change. 🙌
Calling things in OverWatch style shooter is a bit like calling every first person shooter a Doom clone. Just call it a hero shooter I know what a hero shooter is. You don’t need to compare it to another game.
It’s bad enough that the term a “roguelike” exists, I can guarantee that hardly anyone who plays them has ever actually played rogue, and fair enough since it’s ancient, so they have no idea if the game they’re playing is like it or not.
“Roguelike” has also become very watered down. I see “roguelite” used less often, though it’s more accurate, but there isn’t a good alternative term right now. Turn-based-dungeon-crawler-with-permadeath is historically accurate but there’s a tendency to lump action games like Rogue Legacy and Enter the Gungeon in that needs to be accounted for.
(And no I haven’t played Rogue but I did play a bunch of NetHack)
Based on reviews I’ve read there are some issues but it’s a small dev team (1 man shop iirc) and it’s the best medieval city builder since Banished according to reviews.
Banished is a low bar. It had a lot of issues. I would argue the recently released Farthest Frontier is a better comparison. It also has some flaws but is leaps and bounds better than Banished.
Think you just described colony builders quite accurately. Loved the idea of an ant farm when I was a kid until I put the small ones in instead of the big ones
I bought it last night and only have a few hours in. So far it’s pretty great though. I look forward to seeing it continue to develop, and according to reviews posted by pre-release testers the developer is very open to community feedback.
It’s definitely not a fully complete game yet, but I expect I’ll get at least a couple weekend binges out of it before I shelve it and wait for more content.
Also, it’s working perfectly in Linux (through Proton) so extra points there.
It definitely still feels like it’s in EA. There’s only one map and there are a ton of buttons that do nothing. But the game is aesthetic AF and the core gameplay is solid.
I played some last night going in completely blind. I enjoyed it, but there isn’t really a tutorial, just tooltips that come up periodically. Unfortunately my town died after a few hours because I didn’t understand I was supposed to be preparing food for as soon as possible (crops grow on a year cycle, so you need the seeds in ASAP). Makes logical sense, but the game doesn’t tell you and then I was stuffed.
I think it’s totally fun as a sandbox/run-based game, but if you’re looking for something more you’ll need to wait.
eurogamer.net
Ważne