Pohl @ Pohl @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I had this conversation a thousand times in 2003. Felt like talking into the void. Everybody in this country just wanted to watch the bombs go off.

Modern games cost WAY too much to make and the industry has come up with the worst possible way to solve that problem. If you want to make a single player game with modern graphics that sells for 70$ and has a few 30$ dlcs, it HAS to be a huge hit or your going out of business. There are very few studios left with the guts and confidence to make that sort of wild “all-in” bet.

The worst part is that games production costs are almost all labor cost so making games cheaper means making games with less people. There is no worker friendly future for games but free to play cash grab skinner boxes.

Making art with 100s of millions in budget requires a hell of a patron. There is no market way to get the Sistine Chapel.

Sorry my friend this is a lemmy comment section. You have to quickly interpret anything you see as a sign of capitalist collapse.

It’s like hanging out with a lefty version of your crazy trump uncle. There is only one topic of conversation. There is only one thing going on in the world. All things tie back to the favored topic.

Try these example conversations:

Cloudy today… “sad that we live in a world we’re a working person can’t even see the sun”

Fuck man, I have this hangnail… “fucking healthcare costs! This country is a fucking joke!”

I love you… “Massive corporate profits, Joe fucking Biden… wages… billionaire…”

The political vibes here aren’t out of step with me, but the anger and hyper fixation are tiring.

AA is just about big and dense enough that it should be getting very serious about public transport. They can spend the next five years widening highways and adding more car traffic but if anybody with a brain is involved they will spend that time planning and building transit infrastructure. The tax base is going to explode given what’s happening to housing prices. They can afford to go big right now and set them selves up for a prosperous future… or they can expand highways.

You never know how other people value their money. Some people buy a $3500 AR headset. Some people buy a truck that costs more than they make in a year. Some people pay 30USD to make the portals a different color.

I have NEVER bough a cosmetic item in a game, I truly do not understand people who do. But, people love that shit so who am I to say it shouldn’t be available to them?

It sounds like they solved some problems with mixed reality stuff that nobody else has been able to solve. Getting pass through to be perfect is a pretty big deal if you care about this stuff. It also sounds like the UI they designed is very good.

The price is completely outrageous, this thing is not going anywhere if they cannot get it down to 1k ish. And let’s be real, nobody really wants to be in a headset. And the culture is not going to accept people in headsets they way they did phones.

I guess hats off to them for making the best headset device on the market. But, I still think the headset market is a dead end.

The business has changed so much since the 80s when all these ideas were conceived. So much of what fans consider “good business” is all outdated nonsense. When all this started, the software was cheap and the r&d on the hardware was the big investment you had to pay off.

Now, the hardware is a loss leader (or at least a wash) for the first half of the generation. The big first party exclusive games are loss leaders. The only way you make money is off services, and third party game sales.

Sony is trying desperately to figure out how to make its big cinematic 3rd person action games cheaper because they are killing them. PC releases are part of the solution. But the business is still unsustainable. They made a huge bet on live service gaming at perhaps the worst possible time.

MS on the other hand has a huge “shipping games” problem. Game pass needs at least one big deal release a month to keep growing and they just don’t have it. Game pass revenue probably can’t cover buying those games in from 3rd parties every month, so they have to make their own and they haven’t been able to make hits. So, they make what they can, buy studios, and ship retail versions on any platform they can to help offset the cost.

Jeff Gerstmann’s take seemed about right to me MS isn’t only competing with Sony, they (and Sony and Nintendo) are competing with Netflix and Disney plus and every other entertainment service out there. Sony isn’t their enemy, they are a potential retail partner, just like steam.

These big single player tentpoles are an endangered species if nobody figures this out. Platform exclusivity is very bad business but it is taking the suits a few years to break out of the old culture, and the consumers even longer.

I mean my first house was a two bed, 1 bath 900sq ft cape code in a much cheaper market. I paid 100k for it in 2005.

Honestly that seems like a pretty good deal for a first home. If you can come up with 10% down you’ll be paying ~1500 a month. Refi when rates go down and you could be close to 1k/mo.

Yeah, I graduated with my BS in zoology over 20yrs ago and my professors wouldn’t have talked about genetics as a blueprint even back then. My focus was evolutionary biology and the one sentence in the article on the topic made me cringe. I would guess that people who focused in molecular bio probably cringed through the rest of it.

I know that software developers want to be called engineers. But honestly it is a horrible analogue

Software is honestly almost more of a scientific discipline. Sure it’s applied (things are built to a specific function), but the actual work proceeds much more like a rolling series of compounding experiments.

Computer scientist is a great piece of language that I think software developers should wear with pride.

Also, without a PE role who has legal responsibility for the design, you just can’t call it engineering in my mind. I make my living validating software that other people make. It’s gotten better but 20yrs ago we were expected to release test drugs on instruments running toy grade software. If an engineer designed a bridge with flaws equivalent to lab software that can’t do a linear regression properly they would end up in jail.

Well… a tablespoon is 3 teaspoons and a cup is 48 teaspoons. You did get the 16Tbsp per cup right though.

This was a good try!

When I first read your comment I wanted to say that managing with these units isn’t really all that difficult. But, then I remembered that I have a magnet on my fridge that converts teaspoons to cups to quarts etc. I don’t know anyone who keeps that info in memory. Doubling or halving an American recipe can be an exciting math project

It’s fun to see what metric conversions an American has memorized. If a person can quickly convert miles to Kilometers, they are probably a runner. If you ask a group of colleagues how many grams are in an ounce, the dude who quickly say “28.3 give or take” is a pothead.

He has don’t tons of very popular shit. Most people ignore it. I’m not like a Biden super fan or anything. He’s fine.

Regarding support for Isreal, I agree. it’s a huge trap though. He could get on the tv tomorrow and demand an end to this. Then when Isreal ignores him, he has shown his whole ass to the world. He isn’t in control but there is a persistent impression that he should be. Helluva trap. Both Hamas (proxy for Iran and Russia) and Likud (ultra right wing theocrats), benefit hugely for the awkward spot this war puts left leaning leaders in Europe and the US. They will continue to fight and the losses of innocent civilians will pile up because it serves the belligerents geopolitical goals.

I think it’s slightly weirder than that. MSM has been running stories about how weak Biden is as a candidate all year. But when it comes time to vote, turns out it was all bullshit to get attention and clicks.

Now, to them, Biden lambasting the other “serious” candidates is a big story. The media has to pretend it is a surprise since they invented an idea that it might not happen this way.

Like some sort of reverse judo move on yourself.

Why? The party has members there. Why on earth would a national political party only let members in some states choose candidates for national positions.

The SC dem party is predominantly black. Since the civil rights era, black voters have been the heart and soul of this party, I (and the party) want the hear their voices. Don’t you?

The real charlatans were the “the technology has promise” people. No, the technology was dumb.

Platform exclusive software isn’t my favorite thing in the world but it seems unavoidable. Nobody is out here calling for legal action against Nintendo for not selling a pc copy of Mario. It’s the same thing. Why does iMessage exclusivity make people so angry?

The darfuri people in Sudan and the uyghur people in china were what I had in mind. But honestly, war that disproportionately impacts one ethnic group or another is a fairly common sort of war.

It’s really an incredible data point. I am the king of the youth vote skeptics but, 2022 was a great year for young voters. I am cautiously optimistic that a generation of regular voters is coming of age. Most of what is wrong with our democracy can be helped greatly by broader engagement and participation. So much of the bullshit only works because nobody can be bothered to show up to vote for any office other than the president.

What cheating?? What state was not allowed to elect convention delegates? What delegates defected from their candidate on the first ballot? I know you want to believe that there is a big progressive majority that wanted to chose sanders but it isn’t true.

Alas, talking a stranger out of conspiracy theories is not how I intend to spend my day. Good luck out their friend. You lived in a media bubble where it seemed inevitable. Outside your bubble, it was a long shot.