MudMan

Hah. The machine I’d burn down is social media, in case it wasn’t clear.

Also, don’t fret for… I don’t know, my immortal soul, I have to guess from the severity of the warning? I am confident I’m not in some corporate body horror thing where I gradually transform into some weird yuppie werewolf, but I appreciate the concern.

I would counter that not recognizing the humanity in the… “dystopian slide engineers” would make me more worried about slippery slopes. My stance on corpo middle management and their output has remained neither slippery not sloped for many, many years.

See, but that’s the thing, it is not.

You’re making it out to be a binary. If I agree, why would I caveat it, or call out any nuance, or minimize it.

But it’s not a binary. The truth is, yeah, this guy made a bad, out of touch post on his corporate bullshit social media you’re pretty much mandated to have if you’re in the games industry because you may lose your job at any point and need to be ready to go in making yourself visible and available for a new one at all times.

I would recommend not engaging with it at all, myself, but this guy tried to have a presence and was bad at it for a bit and stepped on a landmine. Sucks for everyone involved and I don’t have that much schadenfreude or indignation to add to the situation.

I don’t know the guy, this was bad but not that big of a deal and hey, at least I’m glad that he’s savvy enough to have shut down every single angle of exposure he has to the Internet before checking if it was gonna get out of control.

Yes. We have, in fact, agreed on this. To reiterate my first post:

This guy is painfully out of touch

I’m not excusing the guy, this was a pretty dumb post,

See, it’s one thing to demand that I acknowledge that this guy’s post is tone deaf. It’s another to demand that I only acknowledge that, presumably to give ourselves the license to go drag the guy with zero limitations.

For the record, he does not specifically shill Microsoft AI, although he does include it as “LLM tools (like ChatGPT or Copilot)”. The transparent attempt to de-brand his suggestion while still including his current employer is probably part of the remarkably tasty ragebait at play here. Social media sucks, corporate social media sucks even more.

All of those things can be true at the same time. I don’t need to take absolute, unequivocal sides down arbitrary party lines.

I mean, sure… it’s just that GloboCorp builds a whole lot of stuff and this guy is upper-middle management on one of the less pizza-heavy parts of it. Looking at his resume he’s been a producer in the publishing trenches for quite a while. These aren’t the corporate overlords you’re looking for.

Jumping into LinkedIn with “here’s some how-to-get-hired tips” in general is an extremely dystopian, funhouse mirror thing that people in corporate jobs tend to do. I know those guys, some are super earnest and kind (and most are more self-aware than this guy), but it’s all the same blob of online posturing in the alternate reality of corporate social media.

I don’t know that I see much of a difference between the dissociative tone-deafness of the original post and the performative outrage of the reaction. It’s all the same dystopian mess of fake, dehumanized pretense. And man, is it horrifying when that mess decides to become pin-sharp and target the one idiot.

I’d burn it all down at this point, honestly. It’s not worth it.

I do appreciate LinkedIn because it helps surface how social bubbles distort perception.

That includes Fedi/Lemmy. This guy is painfully out of touch, but so is everyone else. That’s the entire problem of the unmoored, atomized media and interaction landscape we’ve built for ourselves this century.

I mean, I’m not excusing the guy, this was a pretty dumb post, but my first reaction to these is to wonder what dumb, unhinged assumptions my personal reality filters are inflicting on me that won’t make headlines, you know?

They already had a FPS counter on Windows, but they’ve expanded that with CPU/GPU/RAM usage, a frametime graph and that separate FPS/DLSS frame counter. No battery stats, surprisingly, even on handhelds.

I don’t know what they’re wrapping on Windows, but they definitely have decent access, and yeah, the Nvidia overlay sometimes loses the FPS counter where Steam keeps it on Windows. Don’t ask me how that works.

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

It’s about time they ported their Deck performance viewer back to other platforms. It’s still a bit touch and go whether it picks up some things. No GPU readout under Linux, for example, as far as I can tell, at least with an Nvidia GPU.

The DLSS stuff is interesting, but it wasn’t much of a secret before. They took the way they present it from the generally amazing Lossless Scaling and, if anything, I like that you can now compare their solution to DLSS apples-to-apples. I’m a bit confused about their graph display, though. I’m guessing the red line is supposed to be native frames and green is all frames? That’s a bit weird, since the color coding on the text is backwards from that.

As a side note, it’s weird and has always been weird that Steam’s performance monitor has a way better time picking up apps than Nvidia’s on Windows. You’d think owning the drivers would give you the edge, but nope.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

OK, let me fix that for you permanently.

This is Retroachievements.org.

Not only does it do what it says on the tin, but it’s, for my money, the best discoverability tool out there for old games. The most obvious way to use it for that is to check the new games they’ve added achievements to, but they also have book club-style events (they’re revisiting F1 games this month to go with the movie currently in theatres), challenges, seasonal achievements, leaderboards and all sorts of the types of metagaming stats tools you’ve seen in modern platforms to point you in the rigth direction.

You can start by selecting “all games” and sorting them all by players to see what’s popular. Or, hell, reverse sort by players and see what weird crap is in there. Once you start down that rabbit hole you’re more likely to have too much in your retro backlog than you are to ask this question again.

I don’t pretend to know what people mean by “AAA” these days. I’m going to assume if AAA doesn’t matter, then consoles being less performant than PCs doesn’t matter, either, so the end result is pretty much the same.

I guess “every new game” is more accurate. I don’t know if they are in much of a hurry to go back to the old catalogue. Also, pretty sure by now that there’s a bunch of contract blockers in the FromSoft deal preventing the ports. That’s not to say they won’t eventually sort them out, but that’s clearly not a Sony-only thing. For the same reason I wonder if they can get Astro Bot out of the PS5, given all the third party IP thrown all around that game. We’ll see, I guess.

I think it’s telling that you’re still thinking back to ME2 when this comes up. It’s such a stale debate, but people who got into PC gaming in the aughts seem to be a bit stuck in a talking point that never made sense in the first place. It’s even weirder these days, given how much everybody is struggling with accessing high end GPUs and feeding absolutely insane high refresh/high res monitors with the stuff that’s available and with maximum settings going all the way to real time path-tracing. Not only are consoles not holding back the high end of PC, the high end of PC is apparently not holding back the high end of PC, and it kinda sucks.

Every game is Crysis now and nobody will praise me when I go “I told you so”. It kinda sucks.

And right there you’ve shown a better understanding of the incentive system driving the Internet than most of these executives ever have.

I guess mining endless nerdrage for useful content it is.

Thanks for the encouragement, though. Like, sincerely. No snark in that one.

Hah. I feel extremely attacked.

I was going to say I wouldn’t do that if you paid me, but… no, yeah, I’ll do it if you pay me.

Certainly not for free, though. It’s mind-numbing in the worst possible way.

They are putting everything on PC and they claim they will keep doing that, so… ideal outcome it is, I suppose.

I do think that’s better news. PC master race bros typically say consoles are holding PC gaming back, but this is the opposite of reality. PC gaming has benefitted a lot from having a set target hardware spec inherited from consoles. From controller standardization to performance optimizations, PC gaming would be much worse off without a console fixed target.

In unexpected ways, too. If you remember the bad old days of PC exclusive games they either targeted unattainable hardware as a tech demo or they aimed at the garbage tier lowest common denominator, which is how you ended up with games looking like World of Warcraft and The Sims for decades.

I love PC handhelds, but I certainly would hate for every PC release to be built primarily for those and laptops with mediocre iGPUs.

No, it is not!

Helldivers is fun enough, and I agree with you that the base game content is solid enough to sustain the experience.

That doesn’t make it any more valuable or engaging to spend money on more cape textures through a battlepass grind.

I would much rather pay for actual content than hope that whales and subscriptions subsidize it. Granted, I also see next to no appeal on grinding Helldivers’ missions and volatile metagame progression, so the entire design is not for me.

But for as long as you can make increasingly cheaper content to keep extracting ten bucks a month from people you will get companies trying to extract a hundred. You’re… you know, ruining it for the rest of us, please stop.

I would much rather pay 90 bucks for Donkey Kong than 45 for Helldivers 2 on account on a subset of whales subsidizing the rest of the package.

My one exception is fighting games, where I find paying for more characters down the line is flexible enough and has enough connection between meaningful content and investment that it supports a very long additional content tail. But pure cosmetics in a battlepass? Yeah, no, I’d rather not.

Man, I’m always surprised by the crap ragebait peddlers latch on to with these boring-ass investor presentations.

And I always feel the need to correct the record, which only pisses me off further.

So, for anybody interested, this is an investor scripted thing, they mostly are deflecting questions from investors that they don’t have answers to. At one point they say the Switch 2 won’t eat into their business because they have a different controller. It’s all filler nonsense.

The quote is somewhat out of context, in that they say there was an overly competitive market, but also that Concord didn’t stand out enough to compete. As much of a non-statement as that is, it’s not wrong.

Surprisingly, the ragemongers gloss over much more worrying stuff in there, like the confirmation that despite increasing subscription prices they are seeing more people buy into the expensive tier, not less (and you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop). And they imply they will keep increasing prices, too.

They also point out that more than 50 percent of Helldivers’ revenue came from microtransactions now. Again, you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop. They also confirm they will conitnue to milk that and “maximize revenue”.

On better news, they pretty much confirm they are making a PS6 when somebody suggests they should go PC and cloud only, so there’s that. They also confirm they want to keep making at least one big single player game per year and that they are actively looking into new IP.

If you read between the lines of investor presentation, they also kind of acknowledge that Marathon got bad feedback from playtesting and they’re trying to salvage it. Although, of course, they never say that outright.

This article sucks, and it made me listen to half an hour of investor executive nonsense and that makes whoever linked it is not my friend, either. On this, too, you’re ruining it for the rest of us. Please stop.

I guess it depends on how much you do your homework. I just spent a while listening to Satya Nadella regurgitate self-congratulatory CEO-speak just to verify that yes, indeed, this link is gargbage. I feel entitled to at least a bit of resentment for that.

Ironically, the time I spent doing this was much shorter because the podcast that originates the blatant misquote has an AI-generated searchable transcript.