There was a really interesting interview on The Verge with the CEO of Telly. Basically, TVs are so cheap now because they make all of their profit selling your data. His pitch is “why pay for a TV and then also have your data mined. They should at least give you the TV for free.”
It’s frustrating because even if we buy a “premium” devices like an LG C3 or one of the nice Samsung TVs, they’re still going to spy on us. (PiHole FTW).
He’s right, but I don’t like the framing of TV companies are going to spy on you anyway so we’re the best option since you get a free TV. I would like the option to not be spied on. In fact I’m choosing that by not having a TV to begin with.
That’s one of the reasons i’ve stayed with a TV from 2009 for so long. It was just before they started doing all that Internet TV bullshit, so no spying possible.
You can still do that and get a TV (for now), you just have to not connect it to the internet. Mine has never seen Ethernet cable nor my wifi password and gives me zero problems. I don’t even use the TV interface since I have an HDMI switcher that auto switches to the most recently powered device.
isnt that why if you value privacy (or customization) youre supposed to not plug the tv to the internet and use your prefered streaming setup connected over hdmi. its ultimately a self inflicted problem of people using the built in stuff rather than take the time and setup an actual setup (that would stay the same between tvs as long as said device doesnt die on you)
then convenience is sold, especially if its free, then your data is going to be sold with it.
which is why ones better off with a modified Nvidia Shield or Apple TV to minimize data collection, if you arent using an HTPC for a streaming server. Not a binary system, its a game of whose doing it the least, and the TV companies have a huge incentive to collect money off the integrated stuff vs companies whose cost is moreso on the hardware, and make money off their intended subscription services (Apple One for Apple TV, Nvidia Geforce Now for gaming on the Shield)
Home entertainment is such a closed system that all these companies are just beta testing shitty ideas for each other. Eventually they all do the same thing as long as any backlash was neither too destructive to revenue nor sustained. See endless streaming services price hikes, account sharing lockdowns, or the fact that you just can’t buy dumb TVs anymore.
This particular idea probbaly has technical limitations.
A device can only monitor and analyze and modify what a user is viewing if it’s being used as a pass-through device in a daisy chain of devices.
As long as there is any device out there that can take multiple video signals from different inputs, let the user choose which they want to use, they can just not daisy-chain them, have them connected in parallel to different inputs. And even if one could try to get manufacturers colluding on creating a world where daisy-chaining is the only option, they have no incentive to do so on this point – in doing this, they’re trying to steal eyeball time from each other.
Now, that being said, I suppose that device manufacturers may not care, if 95% of users are going to just daisy-chain their devices. If it’s only a few privacy nuts out there who are constantly keeping on top of the latest shennanigans and figuring out how to avoid them, if the Roku manual says “daisy chain” and most users just follow the pictures there…shrugs
the time in which the TV is on but users aren’t doing anything is valuable
Ads are making everything worse. Yes and ads are disturbing the doing nothing. Doing nothing is very valuable to me. It’s the time when I have some time for myself.
Ads have funded a lot of content in the past. I don’t mean just in the Internet era, but in the TV era and the radio era and the newspaper era. We’re talking centuries.
Unless you’re gonna get people to pay for your content, which can create difficulties, attaching it to ads can be a way to pay for that content.
Now, all that being said, that isn’t to say that one needs to want to choose ads or needs to want to choose ads in all contexts or can want unlimited ads. I’d generally rather pay for something up front. Let’s say that it takes $10 to produce a piece of content. For ads to make sense, it has to make the average user ultimately spend at least $10 more on some advertised product than they otherwise would have, or it wouldn’t make sense for the advertiser to give the content creator $10. I’d just as soon spend $10 on the content directly instead and not watch the ads. Ultimately, the average user has to pay at least as much under an ad regime as if they just paid for the content up front, and doesn’t have to deal with the overhead of me staring at ads.
But for that to work, the content provider has to be able to actually get people to pay for whatever content they’re putting out. If it gets pirated, or people disproportionately weight the cost of that up-front payment, or people are worried about the security of their transaction, or what-have-you, then the content provider is gonna fall back to being paid in ads.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with advertising in general. I kinda hate that too. What I have a problem with is super invasive advertising where it collects a monumental amount of personal information, maliciously and often without your consent, to target ads for specific products.
And anyone who says they’re not doing it, I don’t believe them anymore.
Roku is capturing everything that’s on your TV and processing it as personal data.
Currently playing TW3, so yeah. Other games in my library are Terraria, Stardew Valley, the Portal duology, and Minecraft. Only newish game is Hyperbolica.
As a gamer since early 90s I decided to look through my played games list of at least 256 games, avg year of the game release is 2005, oldest I’ve played is from 1981 and newest is 2023. By the decades:
80s - 10 games (actually more but I did not record them all)
90s - 51 games
2000s - 113 games
2010s - 72 games
2020s - 10 games
About play time… I play mostly pre2020 stuff, mostly minecraft (lol) and playing all the good classic stuff I’ve missed since 3d era, finished Thief 1/2 recently. I actually trying to find something new I like since I bought decent gpu, but it is hard… I don’t care about Fortnite/Overwatch/CS2 (CS 1.x + bots/Source ftw)/AnyGameWithLargeSword. Meme about buying $ XXX gpu just to play Terraria is real.
I am in my mid-30s, and play fortnite semi regularly. Zero-build is just a solid FPS, and the changing load outs keep it fresh. I play pretty much exclusively with friends my age that have moved to other parts of the country and it’s a great way to keep in touch with them.
Fortnite is okay in my book, because while it may not be a game I’ll ever play, it subsidizes all the freebies from Epic. I have a library of well over 200 games, most being excellent indies with a few AAA titles, and I’ve never given Epic a single cent.
On the one hand, there is definitely a part of me that thinks it’s kinda neat that a f2p game with not super predatory monetization has gotten so much support for so many years. I’m well aware that around Lemmy people think any monetization is bad but tbh fortnite really doesn’t do it that bad. It’s all cosmetic, you can earn most of the currency by playing and advancing the battle pass. It’s not the worst example out there. The game is very accessible and can be totally free if you want it to be
At the same time I have 0 interest in fortnite or any other live service game. I hate that live service games have a tendency to remove old content over time. Give me a live service game that’s fun, doesn’t have fomo, and isn’t predatory with micro transactions… I guess that’s kinda helldivers rn which I am enjoying but we’ll see how it shapes up as time goes on.
Overall, it’s bleh news because it just reinforces companies continuing down this path of a model that encourages lost media and nickel and diming you for everything…
Live service games have always kinda rubbed me the wrong way, and that’s past just the obviously predatory stuff. I like to hop around from game to game to game. But the live service games are all like “what about the daily log in bonuses and weekly challenges?” I can ignore that, but it still bothers me how much they try to badger you into being obligated to play. Give me a regular old single player game any day of the week.
That being said, I suspect that as time goes on, AAA single player games are going to be harder and harder to find. Multiplayer is simply where the money is(and where the players are), and in this stupid “perpetual growth no matter what” economy, that’s all the suits will pay money for. Thankfully, we still have indies making great stuff.
Totally agree. Everything else aside, the fomo aspect of these games really irritate me. When destiny 2 completely ripped out their original campaign the game launched with I was baffled. Destiny’s moment to moment gameplay is bluntly, really damn good. The gun play feels great. But when you have to dedicate all your time to 1 game to get everything out of it? Nah, not for me. With stuff like halo infinite and helldivers, I do love that the battle pass which are normally timed things, are always available. You never get locked out of anything by not playing on a certain day, or month, or year.
Don’t even get me started on the new hitman games and their elusive contracts. That’s the stuff that grind my gears. Game is great and fun. But you want to play these special missions we made? Well you better be on and playing during this 1 week, and then they’re never there again!
If they want to do this kind of thing they should always least either leave them to be played whenever but offer some kind of double xp or whatever while the event is actually on, or run the event as an annual thing so you can experience it every year and you don’t feel like you’re missing out because you didn’t get the game at release for whatever reason
It’s been a while since I played so idk if it’s been happening recently, but they have re-run the events a few times over in the past, but I just wish they’d make it a permanent thing. I get the point of it is to make it limited so it’s harder to look it up ahead of time, and you can’t save during it so you have to do it in one shot. It’s a glorified daily run in a rogue like game. Except instead of being randomly generated they actually created whole new scenarios around it with new voice acting and briefs and everything. Let them have their timed event where you have to do it in one shot, and give the people a trophy or something. But make the content available to play whenever you want after that…
Also, like, with every game with private servers, the private servers are pretty much universally better than the public ones. Someone close to the server has to care enough to put the thing up, which goes a long way past some company opening a few hundred for money.
Yeah… I largely live under a rock and vastly prefer indie games (and older/abandoned big-name games) to most of the usual AAA games and live-service games.
Which makes it quite funny when I see so many Gamers complaining about how “gaming is dying” due to the enshittification of mainstream games, when I’m quite happy under my rock and sheltered from all that 😅
My biggest gripe is that fortnite(along with a lot of games that feature battlepasses and rotating stores) preys on FOMO. If they didn’t do that, I probably wouldn’t mind nearly as much
For The Crew especially, an offline version would’ve been easily doable, as in, most online feature of The Crew feel optional to begin with. To just drive around the map or race against AI, no online features are required.
an offline version would’ve been easily doable, as in, most online feature of The Crew feel optional to begin with.
I never claimed that it was easy in a technical sense, just in a mechanical sense. But to double down on my point, if Ivory Tower had created The Crew with the possibility of ripping out the online mode entirely in mind, then the structure and the mechanics of the game would’ve made it very easy to do so.
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