Once again, we have lawmakers just making spurious if not outright false statements with no repercussions. When your words decide people’s reality, you should be afraid of what you say. And I don’t see that fear in legislators.
They just say whatever the fuck incorrect bullshit they wish, and walk it back at their leisure when the effect is already resolved in throughout news media. The world’s gotten their soundclip, the base started foaming when they heard their whistles, and then the politican quietly amends “oh, I obviously didn’t mean that.” If more politicans shut the fuck up because they were scared of the repercussions of walking their statements back, then maybe there’d be more reporting on what they’ve done then the inflammatorily idiotic shit they spew every other day.
Yeah just get disabled, unable to work, and get ssi, then all the free health care. Just have to live with being disabled and not really able to do much, and being poor and hoping that the government doesn’t turn off your ssi cuase it will save them money.
Also, unless you’ve got a way to pay rent or a house you own, good luck getting on housing assistance. Most cities have a waiting list months or years long - I know last time I had to look into it for myself, it was something like 15 months of waiting for a potential open slot anywhere in the city.
Spacebar looks to be exactly what I’ve been looking for! Unfortunately, according to their FAQ the voice and video features aren’t implemented yet but here’s hoping that someone comes on-board to help set it up 🤞definitely an easy decision for a self hosted Discord alternative if that comes to fruition!
Fosscord changed to “spacebar” a while back. If you want a more Discord-like experience, try the Cinny or Comet Matrix client. And on mobile the SchildiNext Chat client. Although I really can’t recommend Matrix as a replacement at all.
I immediately go to vent pranks from like 17 years ago where they recorded people’s voices in public chats, then played it back to them and cause some amazing confusion
‘found a ring in there last night…dropped your pants?’
Now they’re made with marketable ‘passion’, ‘dedication’, and a team with ‘a family atmosphere’. My personal favorite ‘respect for the lore and previous games in the series’ definitely never has made a triple A game worse for wear.
Disingenuous buzzwords with no objective meaning behind them are my favorite things to hear in a game. It tells me to steer clear as far away as I possibly can. Which is a shame because I’d like to be excited about vampire: the masquerade 2.
Steph Sterlings’ recent video hits it directly. The big publishers see Balatro doing well, so they go copy Balatro. They spend a lot of effort looking for the next Balatro in all the wrong places. Their attempts to copy it will fail, because people who like Balatro will just play Balatro. This will continue until there’s a new indie darling dominating the sales charts, and then they’ll try to copy that.
I remember the DS had a similar feature. You could connect to people nearby and they could download the game and play with you. It was super cool, and I hope this becomes more common.
Yup, me and my sister did occasional Pokemon battles/trading and Mario Kart races with each other using the Download Play or whatever it was called. I think even 3DS had it, or something similar to that effect. I just wish I had enough friends who actually played Pokemon back then, cause at my elementary school only one friend had a 3DS and played Pokemon. Everyone else was too busy trying to be “cool” and play GTA and CoD 😮💨
Didn’t they lift the PSN account requirement on PC just a few days ago? Imagine if they could not play the game during the outage, if Sony didn’t lift the requirements. I kinda would have loved to see this, because it could mean a huge shift in gaming based on real world proof.
Well, we already have the proof, because it was broken on PS5.
If Sony had held firm on a PSN sign-in for Helldivers 2, it would have been just as borked on PC as it was on console. Ditto for if Sony had retained its log-in requirement for singleplayer games: You could effectively play God of War Ragnarok offline after creating or logging into a PSN account (unless you opted for a handy mod), but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
I want to address this section by the author. Should any old disc drive work offline? Yes. Do PlayStation’s? No.
In the interest of saving money, Sony doesn’t pre-pay for the Blu-Ray Disc Association License, so they use the internet to know when to pay the license fee on behalf of the user. So from a legal standpoint by an entity which does not want to get sued, their course of action to save money requires this.
I read an article testing the same disc drive in multiple PlayStations and they continued to work. My guess is that Sony pays for console X to be able to use a disc drive when one is inserted, and then pays for console Y when one is inserted. They probably can check the ID of the disc drive, but they also probably don’t care that much.
Oh! This is just the year in review thing, not your steam gameplay recordings. I don’t want my family members to hear me demolishing a burger while I watch my factory grow
“Abusing their dominant position” feels a bit far… the competition is just 💩 IMO. Just the fact that EGS practically gives out games for free, and still struggle to penetrate the market, should tell you all you need to know.
Steam provides discussion boards, workshop (mods), cloud saves, a whole console (deck), frequent games sales, achievements, best-in-class refund policy, regional CDNs for faster game downloads, and the list goes on. They even still support the Steam Link box which was discontinued several years ago.
They pretty much go above and beyond the current offerings of any other gaming platform, and have outlasted failed ones like Games For Windows. In the rare case that they do go out of business, there are steam emulators to run your games as long as they do not implement any additional DRM.
It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
EGS exclusives are worse, locking a whole other platform out for an entire year. With Steam’s agreement surely you could just run the sale on both platforms at the same time? Anyway, Amazon is well known for doing this, why not take them to court instead?
enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
The 30% fee is a bit high, but looking at everything that it pays for, and the contributions to open source, I don’t think it’s too bad. Publishers are also the ones choosing to price their games high, and to create as many DLCs as possible to increase recurring revenue. The ones who want lower fees already sell on EGS IMO…
I do think the 30% commission is high. But the problem I see now is, even if the gov’t gets involved and mandates their rev share be lower, game publishers will absolutely not lower their prices to coincide with that. Corps know people are already used to paying pretty exorbitant prices, so they’d happily have the government mandate they make more profit while valve makes less without having to do any work whatsoever.
Still is to my understanding. I saw someone else point out in a different thread that if they were taking less of a margin, they would still be blamed for anti competitive behaviour for it, as other sites may not be able to support taking less of a percentage. The whole thing smells odd.
i wonder how 5% of employees getting laid off will translate into executive bonuses. last year the top 2 guys made $72 million after laying off a bunch of people.
I thought companies made money by selling a product to customers? Hmm, seems like there is some kind of contradiction here, perhaps Phil should look into that.
Investors don’t care about that anymore. Line must go up more and right now. If not, they will replace you with someone who promises to do that.
The best ways to raise stock prices include downsizing, jacking up prices, and cutting product quality to save cost. None of these are even remotely beneficial to the customers.
It’s not a contradiction at all. Yes CEOs are the main beneficiary of the system but they’re still accountable to shareholders who run on pure capitalism. There’s plenty of examples of CEOs trying to do the right thing only to get sued by the shareholders then kicked out of their jobs. Nothing about corporations inherently needs to be done in a capitalist way, except the fact that publicly traded companies are legally required by law to run as capitalistically as possible, and if you don’t accept Venture Capital or go public, good luck getting anywhere in this system.
Hell, basically the entire premise of syndicalism is to put workers in control of the workplace and let things naturally evolve from there. Once you remove the core pillar holding capitalism up, everything will fall down one by one like dominos. If you want to see a fraction of how that works just look at places with high unionization compared to ones without and it’s like a completely different world.
You make money by both selling more and spending less.
Think about it, you can have none money left over at the end of the month by working extra hours at your job or by spending less money on something - but what if you can’t work extra hours because there’s none available? And what if you need that extra cash at the end of the month? The only thing you can do is spend less.
Phil is kind of saying the same thing you’re saying here, but it’s not easy to just “sell more”, not when everyone else is struggling to have that extra cash to spend.
The games industry right now, as a whole, isn’t growing. That means companies are selling less. Phil end everyone else would love to sell more, by all means if you’ve got some solid ideas on how to do that then every games industry veteran out there will happily listen to you, but the sad and shitty reality is that sales are down and when you’re a business, if you can’t increase sales you’ve got to cut costs.
And that means job losses. It fucking sucks and we can have debates all day long about the merits of capitalism and all that, but that’s the reality of today. That’s the game. Phil is being honest and up front here, it’s a shitty game but he’s playing it and if he wasn’t playing it, someone else would.
Profit, selling games, and maximizing value for shareholders are all fully correlated, to the point of being the same thing at different stages of the process.
Modern capitalism moves away from all three by focusing instead on current-quarter profit.
The perception of profit is a more powerful force than actual profit.
Markets select for profit by simply trimming away the things that don’t make profit.
Boards of directors select for the perception of profit by firing CEOs who don’t provide them with that perception.
These systems are both operating. The companies that don’t make a profit will still die. It’s just that under this system, a company that’s on track to making profit can be redirected by a Board onto a path where they aren’t, because of that second mechanism.
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