Maybe I’m wrong, but I would imagine tons of bot accounts being spun up just to wait for a bit would also be suspicious, right? But in that case they could be pruned before they did anything. I’m not a moderator, so don’t take anything I say as fact.

I think account age would be more useful than karma. Karma is just a game-able system, but I could see a very short age requirement being useful eventually if a lot of spam starts to happen. I don’t think we’re there yet, though.

Best we can do is put another one somewhere else

Absolutely, and I’m about ready to start identifying as that over American 🫠.

I usually think of BC being part of it, too, cause we’re so similar culturally, and we hang out on each other’s side of the made up invisible line all the time.

One can dream!

Washingtonian here, I’ve been saying this should happen for like 8 years now lmao

The marriage isn’t working. Let it go.

I use an instant pot and it works really well. I use it for other things too but honestly rice is probably what it gets used for the most.

You won’t regret it. They’re such a nice thing to have and there are totally decent ones for pretty cheap.

Helldivers PSN account requirement incoming

Don’t worry, it will. I’m a designer and the one thing you can count is all of us designers get bored every few years and flip things around. That’s how buttons keep shifting from rounded corners to square corners every few years.

This article is really badly written…

For some reason doing it that way sounds extra fancy to us. At least it does to me. More formal I guess?

I can’t say it matters to me that much what order it’s in, but that’s just the same order we say it in when fully written out. March 23, 2025. 03/23/2025.

Wasn’t there an article on here just the other day saying it had been sold to someone else? Glad to hear they’re indie either way. We need more of that in all forms of journalism these days.

It was the “so others find you interesting” part I was reacting to. It sounds like that’s not what you meant, so don’t worry about it.

People worry far too much about what others think of them and what mold they should fit into.

Become proficient in one or more things so others find you interesting.

No offense, cause I think your message is good overall, but you contradict yourself in the same paragraph.

Trying to learn things so others will like you more isn’t a great way to do it. I know because I tried that. My self-love became conditional with that mindset, and there was always something else I could come up with I had to learn or change about myself before I could be lovable.

My old therapist called me out on it. He said there’s nothing wrong with pushing yourself to improve, but if you don’t balance that with unconditional self love it will simply lead to depression.

I’m happy to see someone else pushing back against the inevitability line I see so much around this tech. It’s still incredibly new and there’s no guarantee it will continue to improve. Could it? Sure, but I think it’s equally likely it could start to degrade instead due to ai inbreeding or power consumption becoming too big of an issue with larger adoption. No one actually knows the future and it’s hardly inevitable.

Good correction, thanks! I didn’t know about that. I suppose the key there are google play points. Do you know if you could do it separately from that?

Not in google play or iOS I don’t think. Someone else may know more, though.

Store credit is not necessarily simple. There are tons of laws about that kind of thing that differ country to country and in the US state to state. For example in my state, gift certificates can’t expire, so once you give one away as the dev you have to track that on your books forever, even if no one ever uses it. In your free example it’s even worse, because the company has to write that money off as real money, because it can never expire. It’s basically the same as giving away real money from a bookkeeping perspective (at least in my state). Someone with more bookkeeping knowledge can probably give a better answer but that’s my limited understanding of that as a sole proprietor who does my own books.

I would also question if store credit is actually any less predatory than a premium currency. If the premium currency is transparent and easy to understand it’s basically the same thing, no? Hypothetically, if I’m a scummy developer, I could sell $5 in store credit, and then make all the items on the store cost $8. That’s the same result for the player as bad monetization schemes with premium currency. I know in your example you’re saying give it away, but somewhere in there the developer is going to need to make money. They can’t give credit away for in-game currency and hope to stay afloat as a business for long without some deeply predatory stuff going on like in roblox.

At the end of the day I think everything you’re saying is probably feasible in some form for a AAA dev, but not for small devs. Personally I’m also thinking about small devs without an army of compliance specialists and lawyers. I’d like indies to also be able to make money, not just the conglomerates.

For example, saying a system could be worked out to localize an in-game economy is a hand wave. Every game works differently under the hood and in how it paces things, and this would be a huge undertaking to implement and maintain (probably a nonstarter for a small team). It involves more than simple conversion.

Does someone from a weak currency country get different rewards by playing the game than someone from a strong currency? How does that work if that reward is a whole item, not a bit of currency? Do we really want capitalistic shenanigans to extend into the gameplay directly? Personally I prefer that stuff to be cordoned off in the in-game shop.

That’s my take on all that. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t work for a AAA dev, so take this stuff with a grain of salt. My experience comes from having to tackle all these issues as a tiny indie dev.

Can you give me an example of one you’ve seen?

The original poster was saying paid currency shouldn’t exist, so I think in that scenario, you could only have vouchers for a whole in-game item. So for example if an item costed $5, then yes you could give away codes to redeem that item.

There’s also an operational overhead to doing it that way compared to in-game currency though, because setting up products in google play/iOS can be kind of a pain compared to adding them to your own systems. Generally the dev wants as much to be under their control as possible because they have more flexibility that way compared to making products in the app stores.

Also worth noting that iOS will block your app if you provide ways to get products (meaning things that cost real money) through ways other than the app store. So that means the dev wouldn’t be able to ever give you something in the game itself if that thing can also be bought. They could only give coupon codes (these are manually generated) for products to use in the app store interface.

I’d be interested to hear an example of one you’ve seen because it might be a way to approach it that I’m not thinking about.