mindbleach

mindbleach, rok temu

Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.

Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.

PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.

mindbleach, rok temu

No platform earns an entire third of developers’ revenue.

mindbleach, rok temu

The cut, genius. The cut you said is “well earned.” That is what’s horseshit, here.

And on consoles.

And on phones.

mindbleach, rok temu

“It makes money so it can’t be wrong.”

“It’s commonplace so it must be fine.”

Y’all have no idea what criticism even looks like.

mindbleach, rok temu

Beyond discussion! What a mind-job.

Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.

Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?

mindbleach, rok temu

Neat.

A third off the top is still obscene.

The fact ‘everyone does it’ is worse.

mindbleach, rok temu

There is no point humoring abusive word salad.

Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.

The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.

The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.

mindbleach, rok temu

Yeeeesh. They really did start working on this right after Skyrim.

Does Epic still have a patent on “detail textures” from Unreal? Like, the first one?

mindbleach, rok temu

Seriously, it’s a four-player game. Not some MMO clusterfuck. Not an arena shooter bragging about 128 codblops on a single map, like it’s Stand On Nuketown. You need matchmaking - you want anticheat - you’ll do some DRM bullshit. Other than that you should want to offload bandwidth and latency to your players. They’re all on the same team!

mindbleach, rok temu

In other words, they fucked with it while nobody was looking. Totally innocent!

mindbleach, rok temu

Dolphin now includes mGBA as a sort of controller. The wiki has a note about network settings but is otherwise full-steam-ahead.

mindbleach, rok temu

… wait, the Gamecubes are just used for GBA I/O? Sheesh.

mindbleach, rok temu

I remain flabbergasted there’s no simpler way to get ten buttons of input and 240p of output on a generic 32-bit ARM device with a zillion official and unofficial add-ons. Especially when you look at the unholy chain of adapters necessary for input.

Especially once you swap the console playing the game for an early-model Wii, which has been hacked to hell and back, and has Gamecube, Bluetooth, and technically USB inputs.

mindbleach, rok temu

It is nonetheless an absolute mountain of hardware to modernize a setup that could nearly fit in the pocket of period blue jeans.

mindbleach, rok temu

I’m impressed that you can but I’m not sure you should.

mindbleach, rok temu

They so desperately want to be Fortnite.

Alucard from the manga series Hellsing

… oh, there is a scenario less appropriate than Superman in a fighting game.

mindbleach, rok temu

Every platform takes a third off the top.

A third.

I have no love for this company whatsoever. Most of the their revenue streams should frankly be illegal. But I’m not exactly thrilled about every glorified software repository taking a pound of flesh off all revenue, licit or otherwise.

mindbleach, rok temu

Only legislation will fix this.

mindbleach, rok temu

I like the concept. I don’t like Nvidia making up neat gimmicks as anti-competitive behavior.

mindbleach, rok temu

Sent to the COD mines.

mindbleach, rok temu

Shatter this corporation.

mindbleach, rok temu

Especially since Oblivion seems to work fine on modern Xboxen. Back on reddit, all the Morrowind first-timers were using OpenMW, and all the Oblivion first-timers were playing on console somehow.

mindbleach, rok temu

Big air quotes on “choose.”

mindbleach, rok temu

Second-biggest chunk of the console market, effectively necessary for the PC market, gobbling up studios and publishers like fucking Galactus, and these empty suits still treat “making less money than the number we pulled from our asses” as losing money.

mindbleach, rok temu

“Sold out” doesn’t mean anything. For the last four generations, Sony has deliberately underproduced consoles at launch, specifically to claim ‘It’s flying off shelves! We can’t keep it stocked!’ This free publicity stunt even worked for the PS3… which struggled for years.

That said, yeah, apparently the Xbox whatever-it’s-called sells about half as many units per year, compared to either the PS5 or Switch. Rough.

Still making money hand over first.

mindbleach, rok temu

Only legislation will fix this.

mindbleach, rok temu

Wait, they rehashed a Super Nintendo game from thirty years ago, and didn’t even launch with all of its dozen levels? The original weighed less than a megabyte! Opening day should’ve been every track from all two of the 2D F-Zero games Nintendo ever made.

mindbleach, rok temu

Weirdly, I have to defend against the idea they killed F-Zero. They did exactly what they intended with it, from the get-go: they showed off new hardware with a previously-impossible sense of speed. Once for SNES planecasting, once for N64 z-buffering, once for GBA planecasting, and once for Gamecube fillrate.

Every other F-Zero game is third-party.

Nintendo is a toy company. If a product is not novel, they are not interested. That’s why every Mario Kart has some stupid gimmick. Even in the first one, splitscreen multiplayer was the stupid gimmick. They shipped F-Zero and realized the SNES had a second controller… but no two-player games. Shrinking the courses to a static tilemap required smaller scale and lower speed, hence tiny karts. Really take a moment to consider that: even by 1992, F-Zero was not fit for purpose. It no longer achieved what Nintendo makes games for. Doing it again would not be impressive. Doing it again would not be novel. And the fact it’s easy to cram endless bullshit into Mario Kart is why that franchise keeps getting releases, while F-Zero collected dust - until they picked this online clusterfuck gimmick.

But the fact this retro game-as-a-service (ptoo!) couldn’t be arsed to include even one game’s whole level set, when each track must take less space than this comment, is baffling.

mindbleach, rok temu

Mainframes are a dead end because local hardware is so cheap and powerful. This has been the case since… basically the invention of home computing. For all the promise of cheap dumb devices that roll with generational upgrades, Google can’t even keep Chromebooks up-to-date, and it’s not like old cell phones were actively supported by PS Now. It’s asking a subscription fee that people are already paying, but instead of them also buying and powering your hardware, you have to buy and power your hardware.

All so you can… what? Fuck developers out of even more of their money? You take a third of their revenue, straight off the top. The one feature every customer says they want is a buffet system, like streaming video, where they just play whatever. But Hollywood’s currently dead stopped over the clever business model of not paying people who make all their content. The games industry has been looong overdue for a similar unionization push, and nothing would hasten that like announcing these multi-year projects for gigantic publishers would be paid at some first party’s leisure. Like it’s not enough to have appropriate compensation and future employment dangled on the basis of sales figures pulled from the marketing department’s collective fantasy. Who’s gonna put up with a model where fraudulent accounting can claim every title “lost money?” At least the cartoonists indentured to toy departments can track a dollar figure for whether their wildly popular series is allowed to continue.

It’s absolutely going to cost more per-month.

It’s unfuckinglikely to cost less per-game.

How much cheaper does this have to be, up-front, before people say fuck that and build a PC? Or just go to mobile games, which are happy to suck out their brains and their wallets? The - I still can’t believe this is the actual name - Xbox Series S only costs $300. Like a Wii. It’s an impressive feat, and it underlines how much infrastructure can be brushed aside for a small investment by consumers. The kind that locks them into buying games from your pound-of-flesh storefront, and keeps that precious third of revenue away from Sony or Valve. Which you want, even if we super don’t.

Because whatever you’ve heard about the streaming market, I guarantee it has not praised consumers for brand loyalty.

mindbleach, rok temu

It’s economical for distribution.

Part of why Sony nowadays is a game company with a movie hobby is that discs were dirrrt cheap compared to cartridges. They’d fund any stupid bullshit people wanted to make, get finished cases on shelves, and know whether consumers loved it, before N64 developers had finished negotiating a production run. Their cost per disc was measured in cents and their manufacturing turnaround was measured in days. One of the slowest and riskiest aspects of game publishing suddenly cost next to nothing.

Digital distribution isn’t necessarily cheaper per-gigabyte… but there’s no mastering. There’s no lead time. There’s not even the concept of a production run, anymore. Developers can ship whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, essentially for free.

mindbleach, rok temu

Shatter this corporation.

mindbleach, rok temu

Anti-competitive exclusivity is the only thing propping up the facade of console platforms.

mindbleach, rok temu

Yeah hey that game you bought? Fuck you, jump through hoops.

mindbleach, rok temu

Fuck that stupid word game.

mindbleach, rok temu

Especially to Asus.

There’s a reason gigantic boring car companies wear a mask to make fancy luxury cars.

mindbleach, rok temu

In undue fairness, a mod to downgrade nudity or vulgarity would kinda make sense, if someone personally didn’t want to see that. (Or if they were concerned about it for streaming. Or they had kids in the room.) For example, there’s some racial slur graffiti in Bioshock Infinite that is used for highly effective shock value and characterization, and I could see someone wanting to tone it down.

The root issue is what’s being removed: the abstract possibility of characters being called “him” or “her” independent of their appearance. To people who won’t use the feature, it is literally nothing. It simply does not exist beyond a checkbox they’ll scroll clean past. The game part of the game will work exactly as they expect, from start to finish.

They’re whining about censorship because the real purpose of this mod is to signal that they’re against anyone else having that option.

They are performatively upset by this trivial separation of character model and branch condition. Because they hate trans people. There is no other possible motivation, because this pointless change is simple and direct.

This removal is a website telling those bigoted trolls: poop in someone else’s yard.

mindbleach, rok temu

I did. This whole conservative theory-of-everything has been pinging around my brain for years, as many answers to ‘what the fuck are they doing’ became undeniably incomplete.

The hardest aspect to deal with is that this worldview is not fragile. There’s no ‘are we the baddies?’ moment where someone snaps out of it. If it was just a reverse cargo cult, there’d be more people who reject the invitation. So we can’t tell ourselves these people secretly know we’re right. This is not an act or a strategy. It has to be some internally consistent way of filtering events… and it has to look like what we’re doing, from the outside. Because in exactly the same way we tell ourselves everyone’s trying to be reasonable - they tell themselves we’re just performing loyalty.

It’s tribalism. Simple as that. It’s humanity’s default us-good-you-bad protect-the-village mindset, expanded from trusting your witch-doctor’s opinion on leeches to trusting your news anchor’s opinion on horse dewormer. I mean, he’s gotta be right. Look how much money he has. His penis must be enormous.

mindbleach, rok temu

It’s almost like people are generally against bigotry, even if it’s allowed to exist. What an apparently complex and confusing experience for you.

mindbleach, rok temu

Most games don’t directly feature bigotry in their content, certainly not TES

Well. Not real-world bigotry.

mindbleach, rok temu

It does nothing but act as a middle finger toward a threatened minority.

mindbleach, rok temu

I mean, ffs, there is a mod that lets you kill children in Skyrim. Is removing pronoun selector really worse than that?

Yes.

The people this bigotry hurts are not in the game. They’re real. And they’re the only possible target of removing a checkbox that most people won’t even notice.

mindbleach, rok temu

Everyone showing up late to go ‘well I don’t see why they removed it!’ –

You are why.

Trolls escalate. They keep pushing until they get smacked down, then cry and scream and pretend they’ve been proven right. Being ignored doesn’t just embolden them, it bores them, and tells them they need to get worse to get attention. No matter what happens - no matter what anyone says to them - they get to use it in their stupid little word game.

The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer.

You have to simply get rid of it, and the sooner, the better.

mindbleach, rok temu

We can play the slippery slope game both ways.

And be wrong.

One way is how trolls always escalate, because their entire fucking deal is pissing people off for attention.

The other is a textbook fallacy that plainly has not happened, since the last time Nexus removed some right-wing bigotry signal. This is not the first time. This won’t be the last time. The line will stay about where it is, because they don’t want to deal with this woe-is-us horseshit unless they have to.

mindbleach, rok temu

Who on earth are you talking about?

Of course this is political - because bigots made trans people’s existence a target of their politics. Defending them against that hatred and abuse is not somehow equally wrong, compared to that hatred… and abuse.

mindbleach, rok temu (edited rok temu)

it is pure speculation.

Horseshit. It targets a feature right-wing cranks are frothing about, and it has exactly the same effect as ignoring the option. Stop feigning ignorance about what diet Nazi trolls openly despise.

Nobody cares about your willful apathy on this topic. If you don’t care, stop talking.

mindbleach, rok temu

Because appeasing the far right in Germany went so well for so many.

The methods in this case are a website saying “no thank you.”

If that’s beyond the pale, what the fuck is left?

mindbleach, rok temu

However, that leads us into a very slippery slope.

Wrong.

Next.

mindbleach, rok temu

The “deep view” link has video - and interactive online demos.

Alpha-blending is easy because, again, it is a set of sorted layers. The only real geometry is some crinkly concentric spheres. I wouldn’t necessarily hand-wave Silent Hill 2 levels of subtlety, with one static moment, but even uniform fog would be sliced-up along with everything else.

Reflections are handled as cutouts with stuff behind them. That part is a natural consequence of their focus on lightfield photography, but it could be faked somewhat directly by rendering. Or you could transmit environment maps and blend between those. Just remember the idea is to be orders of magnitude more efficient than rendering everything normally.

Admittedly you can kinda see the gaps if you go looking.