I would love for some other store to give me a reason to shop with them instead. GOG is closest, and they still can't be bothered to give me a Galaxy client on Linux.
I feel now is like a mistake buying from other places. I bought cyberpunk from gog, I wish now I didn’t. For Christmas I got gifted lots of games from my steam wishlist. I couldn’t add phantom liberty coz I didn’t bought the base game from steam.
Sadly for every other company, Steam = more features and stability.
Exactly why I don't want to use GOG. There are third party clients, but I refuse to build an entire catalog if the company does not provide something official.
What monopoly? If I have to choose between GOG, Steam, Epic, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Rockstar, EA, and others I am going with the least user-hostile, and the one that has Linux support.
Steam is the only one that actually cares about the quality of a service, so maybe look at that instead of crying monopoly.
I can see why Steam seems to have a monopoly on PC gaming. Pretty much everybody uses Steam as a launcher and store, and Valve has seen success with the Steam Deck so thats the hardware field also covered. They even managed to upset Nintendo when the Switch emulator was showcased lol.
A good size of the fanbase are also massive Valve fanboys, so there is a lot of brand loyalty, making the service have a larger presence than others.
At the end of the day, the fact remains is that there are other storefronts, launchers, and Valve has even opened up the Steam Deck’s specs and OS. Theres like, no monopoly there. I hope the parent commenter can eventually see that.
How would they even break up Steam? Separate their software and hardware development from the store? Can’t imagine that making any real impact on their practices.
It is always amusing to see the head of optional entertainment industries make statements like they are making a declaration on par with climate change, a economic depression, etc. As if they expect massive press coverage and endless crying by their would be customers.
When in reality the actual reaction by most is along the lines of “oh no, anyway” and move on to the next bit of optional entertainment media while they and their company are forgotten to the trash pile of failed companies.
All you See Sweets can keep trying to quantify what it is gamers like. The truth is its ephemeral until it is materialized and on our screens. You never know how fun your thing is until milliona of people can access it. So stop trying to codify it, or find a formula. There is none. Make fun shit, take all the risk. Make new shit that no one has ever made before. But for the love of fps fucking please don’t pretend you’ve drilled down on what gamers like. Thats a promise to fail.
I played EQ in that era and I absolutely love playing Project 99… to a point. It ends up with the same problem that every older online game seems to have: all the veterans that never left act like they own the place, and take it way too seriously.
If I do go back to P99 it will just be to level a character up until I get bored. There’s lots of essence to EQ that you just don’t get in modern MMORPGs; mostly because content is difficult to solo, working with others makes your entire life easier, and everyone is struggling together. I’ve had so many good conversations with people while camping in Blackburrow and Guk and the Karanas and so many places. I recommend it to anyone for that.
Didn’t click the link but this is the true order whether the link agrees or not. ESO/76 doesn’t even make my list and I’m behind on SF, haven’t played it yet, so it is left off as a “TBD.”
People are a bit optimistic about how it could be used, it’s still a bit dumb. In all likelihood it’s likely to be used in asset creation since that’s one of the pricier aspects of game design, automating and replacing the more grunt work stuff. Not design so much as textures, object modeling, etc., which are already easy to do via AI (and easy to train, avoiding lawsuits by keeping things in house). That’ll displace “artists” although texture creation is a bit of a slog anyway.
Should people be worried about writers? Maybe, but I’m not-- at least not yet. AI can create filler, but it’s story writing is abysmal. You’ll still need a creative behind the curtain to build the world, subvert tropes, and so on. AI can assist but if it’s better than you on writing, you really shouldn’t be a writer.
To use an example from when ChatGPT became mainstream, a certain scifi serial magazine had to close submissions because they were bombarded with cheap and fast short story submissions. According to the editors, these stories were some of the worst they’ve ever seen. I forget the name of the magazine, but I thought it was pretty funny since I was playing with the tool and couldn’t agree more.
None the less, it’s probably for the best. I hate making assets, and my wife used to do translation and that’s really boring and under paid. A lot of game design is incredibly boring and laying off people making those things is probably in their best interest, those jobs suck. Main downside is the business class of the industry will pocket the profits instead of reinvesting in their products or reducing prices.
The fuck is what, the jobs in question won’t even pay rent. Translation, for instance, is contract work and pays less than minimum wage if you do it well and it’s not a job of passion. If that’s what’s keeping you afloat, your problem isn’t with the gaming industry, it’s with society itself.
Quitting that work was also the best decision my wife ever made, so fuck off with bleeding heart nonsense. Those jobs aren’t jobs society should have.
Those jobs are jobs society does have even if you think it shouldn’t. You know what happens if ai takes everyone’s jobs that you think shouldn’t exist? No one has any money. No society is laying out plans for this, no one is setting up any systems to help people when this happens.
And who saves the money? Share holders. you have the problem with society, everyone else is just trying to pay rent.
Even if you remove the jobs, it doesn't create jobs. If you remove those jobs the people who were taking them are still there.
Where do they go when the jobs are gone? Is this just meant to force those people to change careers? Did your wife's skillset transfer anywhere or is she still unemployed? Or did she get a new job that has nothing to do with translation?
Well putting it another way, labor market always stabilizes, and it’s only the last few decades labor didn’t raise with demand (at least in the U.S.). But inevitably people find work or create work, the speed of which could be days or it can be decades depending on a ton of factors that won’t fit in a one off explanation on Lemmy (especially given how much people don’t like hearing what I have to say, regardless of my own training in policy lol).
But to explain at least a little nuance, people in jobs with low entry requirements often do change industry and people with training or education sometimes do. Tech companies gave us a great example recently with massive layoffs. Reports are still out but it seems like many of them just found more work or made start ups. It was kind of interesting that some left tech, but it’s a high paying job and even outside of layoffs, there’s a concept that if you want a raise, you change jobs because there’s always someone looking for programmers.
My wife actually ended up in localization, which is slightly different from translation but has room to go up (which she did). Same industry. Not going to dox her, of course, but she managed to get work within a week and has a weirdly high success rate even if the industry still grossly underpays everyone (gaming is a passion field). Bilingual skill is not easy to train, so she was valuable-- she just didn’t know it when she was just doing contact based translation work.
Ugh, and there’s another long winded explanation I meant to avoid, haha. Look, I don’t worry too much about it if you’re American (or Western European). If you guys want to get upset about something, it can and will harm the jobs that were outsourced decades ago. Translation for instance is big in Eastern Europe (e.g. Romania) and automation easily removes those jobs.
Ideally, yeah, AI should be used to automate boring grunt work and enable more people to engage in something creative. Maybe those jobs in the future can transform into something like managing AI’s output and fixing unique edge cases, where human input is still required.
Yes exactly! And ideally in the short term we can minimize the damages that charges like that make. I’ve seen places where factory jobs left, and it’s not great without some intervention.
I’d love basic income but… not optimistic, but we can always dream.
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