lvxferre

@lvxferre@mander.xyz

The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East (www.gamedeveloper.com)

At DICE and GDC this year I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine: “deprofessionalization.” As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios...

lvxferre,

as Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is […]

  • The older games are not “overperforming”. The newer games are underperforming.
  • Large studios are “struggling to drive sales” because customers take cost and benefit into account.
  • The success of those solo devs and small teams is not “outsized”, it’s deserved because they get it right.

What’s happening is that small devs release reasonably priced games with fun gameplay. In the meantime larger studios be like “needz moar grafix”, and pricing their games way above people are willing to pay.

More than “deprofessionalisation”, what’s primarily happening is the de-large-studio-isation: the independence of professionals, migrating to their own endeavours.

Also: “deprofessionalisation” implies that people leaving large studios stop being professionals, as if small/solo devs must be necessarily amateurs. That is not the case.

Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor

And he “conveniently” omits the fact that most of that value wouldn’t reach the workers on first place. It’s retained by whoever owns those big gaming companies.

And people know it. That’s yet another reason why they’d rather buy a game from a random nobody than some big company.

As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it […]

Rigney offered some extra nuance on his “deprofessionalization” theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be “the first” on the chopping block, followed by “roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they’re not).”

Emphasis mine. Now it’s easy to get why he’s so worried about this process: large studios rely on marketing to oversell their games, while small devs mostly reach you by word-of-mouth.

Something must be said about marketing. Marketing is fine and dandy when it’s informing people about the existence of the goods to be bought; sadly 90% of marketing is not that, it’s to convince you that orange is purple.

My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.

Unlike marketing teams, I’m genuinely worried about those people. I hope that they find their way into small dev teams.

lvxferre,

I played Factorio a fair bit, the fluid system was hell. But based on some LPs it seems Space Age fixed it rather nicely.

lvxferre, (edited )

And because this sort of big business often focuses obsessively on what can be measured, ignoring what cannot be. Even if the later might be more important.

You can measure the number of vertices in a model, the total resolution, the expected gameplay length, the number of dev hours that went into a project. But you cannot reasonably measure the fun value of your game; at most you can rank it in comparison with other games. So fun value takes a backseat, even if it’s bread and butter.

In the meantime those small devs look holistically at their games. “This shit isn’t fun, I’m reworking it” here, “wow this mechanic actually works! I’ll expand it further” there.

lvxferre,

And by a modder turned dev, so, professionalisation? :)

Yup - Kovarex is a great example of how the indie scene is actually professionalising people, not the opposite.

lvxferre,

Proposal to change Ursa Major and Ursa Minor to Chonky Bear and Smol Bear.

lvxferre,

I feel like I’ve been using this metaphor a bit too often, but: Nintendo is shitting its pants to make Pocketpair (PalWorld dev) smell. So far, the results of the litigation have been slightly bad for Pocketpair, but really bad for Nintendo - just the sheer amount of negative publicity is likely costing Nintendo more money than it could ever get from this turf war.

lvxferre,

69%? N… … …nevermind. 🫢

Serious now, I wouldn’t be surprised if USA’s video game industry was suddenly gone - because for countries not directly caught in the tariffs war, businesses outside USA (like Sony and Nintendo) will get another competitive advantage.

lvxferre, (edited )

For context, it’s somewhat common here in Latin America to name markets after the owner’s name; doubly so in smaller cities. (The city where this happened has 9k inhabitants)

It’s also common to name supermarkets “Super [something]”, to highlight that it sells general goods instead of just produce.

With that out of the way: seriously? Nintendo going after a mum-and-dad market in a small city in North America??? This only highlights that the current trademark and intellectual property laws across the world are toilet paper - they aren’t there to defend “healthy competition” or crap like that, but to ensure megacorps get their way. Screw this shit and screw Nintendo - might as well rename their company to Ninjigoku/任地獄, bloody hell.

lvxferre,

In other words the Fediverse Canvas 2024 was a gathering of murderers. So many violent symbols like this: ████ █▒▒▒ ██▒▒▒ █████ ████ █ █

…on a more serious note. Can’t they simply that USA’s healthcare system is so fucked up that people are taking the matters into their own hands?

lvxferre,

As of now the site is already back.

The core of the problem is that there’s absolutely nothing effectively preventing companies from abusing IP claims to harass whoever they want.

At least you’d expect claims to be automatically dropped when coming from an assumptive/disingenuous party. Something like “you issued 100 wrong claims so we won’t listen to your 101st one, sod off”. But nah.

As such, “your violating muh inrelactual properry, remove you’re conrent now!!!” has zero cost, and a thousand benefits. Of course they’d abuse it.

The role of AI in this situation is simply to provide those companies a tool to issue more and faster claims, at the expense of an already low accuracy.

lvxferre,

[Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor from any country following Saxon tribal law like USA. Take what I say with a grain of salt.]

As far as I know, in theory the victim of the bogus DMCA could sue the copyright troll for damages, including attorney fees and all that stuff. In practice, it would be the same as nothing, megacorp who hired the copyright troll would make sure that the victim knows its place.

lvxferre,

The problem is that defending against a copyright troll in the court is an expensive headache, and the copyright troll has a whole army of lawyers to prove for sure that the Moon is made of green cheese. As such, even if the target knows that it’s a bogus claim, they still comply with the troll to avoid the court.

Sending a takedown notice under DMCA that’s knowingly false is perjury, which would presumably come up at the court hearing.

In theory, yes. In practice, good luck proving that the copyright troll knew it and acted maliciously.

lvxferre,

The site that you’ve linked blocked me for some reason, and cost/benefit in Malta is bound to be different from the one here in LatAm, but I’ve recently built a midrange-ish computer, so might as well list what I bought for reference.

  • CPU - Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Good cost/benefit ratio, and rather good performance. I had to buy a third party cooler as the CPU doesn’t come with one, so keep that in mind. I considered the Ryzen 5 5600 for budget reasons, too; it might be an option if you want to make the build cheaper.
  • Mobo - Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite. If coupled with the above you need to Q-Flash update the BIOS, but that was relatively painless. So far it’s working great, can’t complain about it.
  • RAM - I went for 2*16GB instead, mostly to future-proof my build. The brand is Apacer Nox, I didn’t find people complaining about it and it had a reasonable price.
  • SSD - Adata 480GB.
  • PSU - Gamdias Cyclops M1-750B, 750W. Frankly my method to look for a PSU was to look for 700~800W ones in a local forum, with the word “porcaria” (rubbish, shit) alongside it so I could see complains, then I found people actually praising this one.

If I convert my overall costs from reals to euros it was around €500, but keep in mind that I didn’t buy a new HDD or a new GPU. GPUs in special are relatively expensive here, I’m hoping that the prices go down next year.

lvxferre,

All I know is I don’t know how to pick parts and what is compatable with ehat

In addition to the site linked by the other user, you can also websearch “is [part1] compatible with [part2]?” and check the results, they’re often useful.

lvxferre,

Yeah, bullshit machine would be awful for that. The way that it works it’s simply too prone to invent parts that don’t exist, or claim that two pieces are compatible when they aren’t [or vice versa].

lvxferre,

A good definition of witch hunting would be “to publicly label one or more individuals as belonging to an undesired group, with little to no regard to accuracy”. It fits really well what the article claims those users to be doing.

lvxferre,

Claiming “multiple patent rights” without mentioning smells like kafkatrapping.

I think that Nintendo’s delayed reaction was to gauge how much money it could get from bullying Pocketpair to accept some unfavourable settlement outside the court; if too little the costs would be too high to bother, considering the risk, but now that Palworld sold a bazillion it’s more profitable to do so. It might actually backfire if Palworld decides to go through the whole thing, I don’t know how Japanese law works in this regard but if Nintendo loses this certainly won’t look good for them, and even if they win it might be a pyrrhic victory.

lvxferre,

Good catch - you’re right.

lvxferre,

Nor the whole idea of capturing opponents to raise them and make them fight for you. That’s from 1987 already, from the Shin Megami Tensei series; it predates Pokemon by a fair bit.

lvxferre,

I gave it a check. If Pocketpair plays it smart they can make Nintendo look like a herd of muppets in the court, and even potentially acting on bad faith. Pocketpair might also simply change a few elements of its own game through an update, much like PvZ replacing Michael Jackson zombie with a disco zombie.

I’m not even sure how much patents apply to games.

lvxferre,

The axis of evil

I’m genuinely unsure if you’re trolling or being serious. Poe’s Law, I guess.

lvxferre,

You got it wrong - the poster above is not trying to prove the astronomical phenomenon through a show, the poster is saying that the show itself (called Big Bang) is real. It’s simply a joke.

lvxferre,

Yeah. I’m half-drunk but the first thing that I thought was, “I could use some gyros. Preferably with a buttload of tzatziki”. (The video is about gyroscopes though. Also cool. But not edible.)

lvxferre,

With two exceptions*, the names are from Roman mythology. So I’d expect the new planet to get a definitive name from the same template. (Please be Janus. It’s the gate of the solar system!)

*Uranus is from Greek mythology, with no good Latin equivalent. Terra is trickier; you could argue that it fits the template for Latin and the Romance languages, but most others simply use local words for soil, without a connection to the goddess. That is also called Tellus to add confusion.

lvxferre,

It would, indeed. I wouldn’t mind if it was the scientific/“proper” name for Earth.

lvxferre,

How do you pronounce the company name? For reference, Latin “Tellus” would be /tɛllu:s/; the nearest English equivalent would be “TELL loos”, I guess.

lvxferre,

This is going to be interesting. I’m already thinking on how it would impact my gameplay.

The main concern for me is sci packs spoiling. Ideally they should be consumed in situ, so I’d consider moving the research to Gleba and ship other sci packs to it. This way, if something does spoil at least the spoilage is near where I can use it. Probably easier said than done - odds are that other planets have “perks” that would make centralising science there more convenient.

You’ll also probably want to speed up the production of the machines as much as possible, since the products inherit spoilage from the ingredients. Direct insertion, speed modules, upgrading machines ASAP will be essential there - you want to minimise the time between the fruit being harvested and outputting something that doesn’t spoil (like plastic or science).

Fruits outputting pulp and seeds also hint me an oil-like problem, as you need to get rid of byproducts that you might not be using. Use only the seeds and you’re left with the pulp; use only the pulp and you’re left with the seeds. The FFF hints that you can burn stuff, but that feels wasteful.

A New Deep Learning Algorithm Can Find Earth 2.0 (www.universetoday.com)

…using data from the radial velocity (RV) detection method. This study holds the potential to help astronomers develop more efficient methods in detecting Earth-like exoplanets, which are traditionally difficult to identify within RV data due to intense stellar activity from the host star.

lvxferre,

This is what machine learning is useful for. Not to try to convince you that oranges are active and potatoes are passive, or to give you a thumbs up with 7~8 fingers. But to detect patterns and allow automation of repetitive tasks.

lvxferre,

I wouldn’t expect any different from Colossal Order, given its close ties with Paradox Interactive: they don’t care about making good games, they care about milking the players.

lvxferre,

Three decades, two astronomy degrees, 5 years operating a planetarium, and 5 years as a guide at the local observatory later, and I’m fully prepared.

Me, watching a total eclipse 30 years ago: “MUUUUUM! WHERE’S THE OLD CAMERA FILM? I WANT TO MAKE ECLIPSE GLASSES!” Then I was fully prepared!

It was exciting. (I hope that those folks in MX/US/CA have fun.)

lvxferre,

If your instance is any indication of location: there’s an eclipse visible in most Oceania and SE Asian islands in 2028. For a good chunk of Australia and NZ, it’ll be a total eclipse. For further info, check it here.

For me (South America) there’s one already in October, but it’ll suck from my region (14% coverage). And another in 2027 (~75% coverage).

18+ lvxferre,

That's beautiful. I love how even the ship and killbox became part of the design.

18+ lvxferre,

That fucking rocks. I love how the caves are part of the aesthetics, they look like coming out from a tentacled abomination.

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