scrubbles

scrubbles, 2 dni temu

Welcome to the family! I can’t remember the last time I needed windows for a game!

scrubbles, 5 dni temu

Oh man we’re getting… A Minecraft generator or something equally lame.

scrubbles, 7 dni temu

Just another reminder that we are not the majority, and many people will happily buy things even though the company actively hurts them

scrubbles, 8 dni temu

I assume the idea came from Red Dead Redemption, where it does done very well. Of course, you have to have the courage to make a game like that, and I doubt Ubisoft/new ownership will ever be on board with anything that takes courage. Better to make another bland boring empty world.

scrubbles, 7 dni temu

I’ll agree RDR1 didn’t do much (except the Mexico plight). RDR2 was much better. I can honestly say that I’ve never felt as much joy than punching klansman and just absolutely destroying racists

scrubbles, 7 dni temu

It’s why Indie games are doing so well, people are obviously tired of bland corporate slop over and over again.

scrubbles, 8 dni temu

At this point I’m lucky if there are two games worth paying for in a year. Just bland boring empty soulless games every time.

scrubbles, 8 dni temu

The investors are betting that AI-based cost cuts will significantly boost EA’s profits in the coming years, people involved in the transition told the Financial Times

As an engineer who uses AI regularly, have built models, and knows the subject deeply - LOL. This is huge Bro energy with little understanding of AI and they are fully on the hype train.

I did a long comment on my experience working for private equity, and just love how it’s going to destroy EA: poptalk.scrubbles.tech/comment/5086464

scrubbles, 10 dni temu

I finally finished satisfactory! I’ve played during early access but there wasn’t really an ending for it then. 2,600 hours total in game, 550 of those were this last factory. It’s done!

scrubbles, 10 dni temu

Don’t worry, they’re going to raise those prices too

scrubbles, 14 dni temu

Thanks for letting me know, I’ve been paying just for some spare OneDrive space but I think I’ll cut it if they’re raising the price

scrubbles, 14 dni temu

It’s something we don’t take lightly, and we’re listening to the feedback of players and the community to try to provide them with more of what they’re asking for.

God they will never understand that we see right through their bullshit corpo-speak answers will they. Everything they just said is nothing. They don’t take it lightly. They are listening. They will try. There is nothing concrete in that wet paper towel of an answer.

scrubbles, 14 dni temu

Even though I personally never used it I was astonished at how quickly so many people blindly trusted it. What I’m more astonished with is how quickly Microsoft has managed to destroy that brand trust.

scrubbles, 14 dni temu

You got a love how out of touch these marketers are. They really do think that they understand gamers while sitting in meetings at the Redmond campus.

Oh we had mass cancellations yesterday! War room, what do we do?

Full page ad?

Brilliant! Gamers will obviously see the value and be grateful for it. Maybe now we won’t all be laid off by papa Satya

scrubbles, 15 dni temu

Here’s how Microsoft’s Co-pilot worded it:

This Game Pass overhaul is a masterclass in anti-consumer design. First, they removed the $1 trial and now they’re pushing a $29.99/month Ultimate tier that bundles third-party services like Fortnite Crew and Ubisoft+—whether you want them or not. You’re paying for extras you might never use. Second, cloud gaming is now locked behind Premium and Ultimate, meaning if you’re on the cheaper Essential tier, you lose one of the core features that made Game Pass revolutionary. Third, the loyalty rewards system is just gamified spending—play more, spend more, get points to spend more. It’s behavioral manipulation dressed up as perks. And let’s not forget: none of this gives you ownership. You’re renting access to games that can disappear at any time. Microsoft is turning Game Pass into a monetization funnel, not a player-first service.

scrubbles, 15 dni temu

Yeah breaking down $360/year, that’s 6 $60 dollar games per year. So it only makes sense if you would spend more than that on games (all included in gamepass, remember no outsider games) in that time. That comparison also treats it like you’ll never ever play that game again, which the 6 $60 dollar games you still get to play the next year*.

The only people who “should” be subscribing now are parents who are too financially illiterate to see what a scam it is, or who are such inattentive parents that they don’t care.

scrubbles, 17 dni temu

Oh man, this is hilarious from the outside because I’ve worked for private equity before. They are the biggest hype bros that exist. They are in their own reality every time. They can see something as small as a random tweet and think that it’s the truth. There’s no way this goes well for them.

2 examples. Long story but if you want to hear how smart “Private equity” is in tech, here are my two anecdotal experiences:

First, I was an engineer on a project that we were wrapping up a major “V2” rewrite of. We were weeks from finishing this now year long project. They came and asked “How long until released” and I said a month until clients can start using the beta. (Padding a week or so just in case). They didn’t just come back and say “You have a 2-3 weeks”, they came back and said “You have 1 week because we have signed contracts saying that it’ll be ready by then”. What. I was the head engineer. On whose authority did they do that? Who told them it would be ready? Of course no one, they just said it should be done, engineers lazy, they super smart. The project isn’t done in time of course, clients pissed, and they fired the dev team. I hear a year later the entire org had shuttered. They pissed away the entire investment.

Second, again working leading up a major project, a whole new idea in the fintech space. Team is jazzed. We push for 9 months and we release - zero bugs, not a cent lost, we test scaling and we should be able to handle millions of users - we’re ready. We release to… zero fanfare. None. We had no idea what was happening, we’re engineers so we’re used to it but no one cared. Turns out we were being acquired! Hooray said the investors! So much money! The other company claims to be doing what we are already… interesting since we had a novel idea. So we merge, and we decide to do a bakeoff (test each product against each others). Ours of course passes. Theirs tips over after 100 users. Ruby on Rails monolith, they’ve never had more than 100 users. Turns out they just slapped some stuff on a postgres database and called it a fintech product. Business investors at the top high five, show off how much money they’re going to make. Same thing, our loyal customers who were excited for our product got pissed and left. They lied to everyone else about the product just like the other place, the lies eventually caught up, and the stock tanked. Now they have two worthless companies. From what I heard they didn’t make a single sale in Q1 or Q2 of this year, and are shuttering the offices and moving engineering to India. Typical big brain business move.

Never work for private equity. If you ever get bought by private equity immediately start planning your exit. This is a card game to them, they’re sitting at the table in Vegas and are doing anything they can to make it look like the company is valuable just long enough to con someone else into buying it. If they make any profit it will go to them, the company will not see a dime of it. Your budgets will be less than shoestring, you will not have bonuses or dinners out, everything goes to them. You immediately are replaceable, with any, and I mean any developer or AI bullshit being able to replace you. Everyone at EA should be looking for new jobs right now.

scrubbles, 17 dni temu

If Bioware wasn’t already dead from the corporate bullshit that was Dragon Age 4 (and that comes from me who still found enjoyment in DA4), then this is. I doubt that Mass Effect 5 game will ever see the light of day.

scrubbles, 17 dni temu

ME4 was Andromeda.

scrubbles, 17 dni temu

We have no official name, the bloggers and media are calling it Mass Effect 5, it’s the fifth Mass Effect game, this is just pedantics now. Until there’s a title, Mass Effect five is perfectly fine.

scrubbles, 17 dni temu

Trust me man, I’ve thought the same thing. The first story? With the contracts signed? If they had just asked me and listened to me it would have been successful. We had clients chomping at the bit wanting the new app, and obviously people ready to sign. We had guaranteed money - but it all failed because they thought they knew better than the head engineer.

The real kicker? You want to know the absolute punchline? This was a educational platform specializing in live video for professors, to aid with virtual students. This story happened in late 2019.

scrubbles, 17 dni temu

It’s such a well known play now, I keep wondering who would possibly think buying from private equity is a good thing

scrubbles, 16 dni temu

Engineers and creatives breed innovation. Capitalism exploits it.

scrubbles, 19 dni temu

Private equity is the death knell to any brand. For example Joanne’s was sold to private equity. I’ve worked for companies owned by private equity, they are there to extract every last cent for themselves while the brand is whittled away. Any cent that would be invested is instead given to the investors so they can buy new Audis and boats.

I’m not saying EA didn’t deserve it, but this is for sure the end of EA as we’ve ever known it

scrubbles, 27 dni temu

Alan has a ton of great videos, if you like trains and are interested in North American rails, he’s 100% worth a follow

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

Okay but if there isn’t a guy living out of a car with three doors, one hauling shopping carts, and an assistant trailer park supervisor/cheeseburger prostitute then I don’t even care.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

I’ve read reports that people can’t get more than 30fps on low settings on 4000 series cards. I’m definitely not one to expect sweet 120fps on ultra on launch day, but a 4000 card not even getting low settings? They failed. Hard.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

Don’t you know that gamers demand hyper realistic graphics? Even when there is a defined art style it doesn’t matter. Realism.

It’s famously why comic books failed to captivate anyone, and cartoons are never successful.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

They’ve released some updates, I’m not surprised if it’s gotten better

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

No, I disagree with that. It’s always been perfectly normal to have ultra graphics a bit out of reach so that the game will look great on future graphics cards, and 120fps is a ridiculously high number that should never be expected even with top of the line graphics cards for a brand new release. (Assuming 2 or 4k)

However, a 1 generation out of date graphics card should be able to easily play most things on High settings at a decent framerate (aiming for 60) on 4k settings, which Borderlands failed at horribly. Medium to low settings on a 4000 series card sounds like a gutpunch to me.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

This is a company that will sue you if you even watch this press release incorrectly, but they’re still coming at the bit

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

I continue to not buy Nintendo devices or software because of their continuing nonsensical litigation like this. Whatever value they think they lost because of these chips I say compare that to their continued tarnishing of their name.

If your drm can be altered with a chip some guy made in his garage then it’s your drm that’s at fault. Financially ruining the guy only hurts the Nintendo brand.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

I’m aware, we aren’t going to make a massive dent. However, for this 2 million dollar settlement, how many people would need to be swayed to not buy a switch 2 to make the settlement more expensive? In other words, how many sales would need to be lost because of us not buying the console to make the settlement moot?

In the case of 2 million, that’s about 4,500 switch 2s, not counting the loss in games bought or accessories.

If just 4500 people were convinced not to buy one because of this settlement, then the cost to their brand being tarnished is worse than the loss of potential sales due to the chip.

There’s a dozen other factors too, legal costs, what drives these potential sales, etc. what I’m trying to say is that if they’re willing to be this litigious over a few thousand console sales, then that means that even small groups like us not buying consoles can actually be noticed. It may be a simple dip in sales on a chart, but they’ll notice. To a greedy corporation willing to go after a single guy in a garage, they’ll notice a couple thousand people not buying consoles.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

You just hold the rev button as you walk up to an enemy. Then Marcus screams and the large body becomes many pieces

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

Red dead is the only game I’ve laughed out loud and literally cried at the screen. It’s a masterpiece.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

Hear me out, we build suburbs that are isolating and far away from people, requiring a car. You can’t drive until you’re 16. Parents now schedule playdates and anything fun. What does this all mean? Kids are now more isolated and alone than ever.

Our parents talk about going out until the streetlights came on but would never allow kids to do that now, and even then kids friends live miles away. We punish kids who do get together with no loitering and calling them hooligans up to no good.

Literally what do these parents expect?

Here in Seattle we made public transit free for kids under 18, and it has honestly transformed the neighborhoods! I see kids out walking, biking, getting bubble teas and ice cream, and they’re all so happy now! I had a girl walk up to me and ask if the bus came in 5 or 15 minutes. They’re absolutely using it, meeting up with their friends, and loving it I overhear conversations of all the places they want to go now to hang out.

Mobility for kids has been a huge benefit for us, I hope other places take notice

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

AI continues to be a solution in search for a problem

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

Freaking YES. Movies need to spoon-feed a bit and so does TV, but you have a whole medium that lets people be as confused or not and that’s a great thing. If a player doesn’t care, there are options to not dive deep, if they do they will. My first playthrough I was confused what the genophage was. I heard bits and pieces but was genuinely confused. You know what I did? I walked over to my crew mate who mentioned it and asked him! Why is that so hard, the unknowns al_are_ the suspense! It’s what keeps me playing.

Compare that to mass effect Andromeda where they introduce it by having two characters explain it at length in front of the player. This event that would be on par with WW2. So natural. “Hey friend, I was just thinking about WW2. You know, that war that involved the acid vs the allies fought between 1939 and 1945 in which we saw a fascist leader march across Europe?”. Jesus hell have some respect for your players, stop fucking spoon feeding us.

scrubbles, miesiąc temu

Fast food simulator is ridiculously fun with friends

scrubbles, 2 miesiące temu

God yes. I would rather have a few popular servers over endless empty matchmaking

scrubbles, 2 miesiące temu

Or, and hear me out, people just enjoy having fun

scrubbles, 2 miesiące temu

Librarian, Didact, people they didn’t even take the time to introduce well and we were supposed to just jump on board with it. Buck was literally the only saving grace for Halo 5 in my opinion - and they introduced him in ODST

scrubbles, 2 miesiące temu

343 could have done something really interesting if they had started with that idea vs just trying to go right for a mainline Chief story

scrubbles, 2 miesiące temu

Agreed. It could have been such an interesting concept if it was literally any other place. Zeta halo could have been so cool, but it felt so detached from the universe