Microsoft seems to be trying to transition away from consoles to become a distribution platform and publisher. They’re heavily entrenched in the business ecosystem so the os is pretty safe (for now), but they want to leverage consumer pc dominance to kickstart their gaming division transition

I think there’s a point to be made with harm reduction too- valve makes their drm easy to use and seems to be on the less invasive side

I’ve been half joking about it for a while, but it’s been only a matter of time before copyright was stretched so far that criticism of the work becomes a violation

Unfortunately, it seems to be beginning

Sure you can, outside of a few specific carve outs it’s a civil matter… Meaning it takes money to fight money behind it

I keep joining discord rooms because I just want to search for something specific real quick… I don’t want to dig up my real account or join, I just want to take a peek inside and dig up the answer to my question

Almost every time I sign up with a username and get just enough time to start looking for what I need before it decides to kick me out for “suspicious activity”

At this point I just search the project name when it happens… I’m usually there to evaluate a project, and if that’s not enough I just drop it

No, I also made the switch and honestly it’s pretty much worked out of the box for me. I’ve got the integrated graphics with a discrete card too - I was worried initially, but it seems to handle it fine

I’ve had some sound issues, and a few games run worse or need some tweaking to run, but after dual booting for a while I’m considering wiping windows for extra storage

There’s inconveniences, but with windows getting worse and Linux getting better I’m feeling pretty good about the deal

Cyberpunk is basically futuristic GTA in a first person view, saints row 4 was basically GTA with superpowers, spiderman is basically GTA as Spider-Man

Even in this one format, there’s endless room for creativity and innovation. It’s a formula for a fun game…

But where I loved cyberpunk, watchdogs was similar in many ways and I just couldn’t get into it

The problem is that they want to shove slop in proven molds and get a winning game. It’s still slop

Mismanagement. They keep trying to make 9 women deliver a baby in 1 month, and switching out mothers mid pregnancy - some of these games have 20 formerly independent studios churning out content for the same game. That creates a need for a ton of oversight and coordination, and leads to a ton of wasted effort

I believe them when they say their costs have ballooned…I also know the tools have become extremely powerful, and that far smaller studios are creating far better games for a fraction of the cost

The funny thing is, my friend is LGBTQ - it’s not at all a dog whistle for them. It’s very real frustration at beloved games and IP being ruined

But they hear “go woke go broke” so often that they’ve been trained to look for inclusivity to blame. We like talking about topics like this, and each time I have to walk them through it again - “yes, the game is inclusive, yes, the game sucks. Let’s be precise and critique it, why does the game suck? What systems and processes keep causing this?”

I think my friend is doing this on purpose to help process the emotions, because it always ends with the same conclusion

"You think it’s a bad game because it is, you feel like it’s an attack because they went online and said you’re a bigot for thinking it’s bad, and we’re all biased but you’re self aware and this is coming from propaganda and very valid frustration, not hatred.

“Now let’s talk about the mechanisms through which consulting companies ruin everything we hold dear, and brainstorm ways to mitigate or fix these systematic problems. And would you look at that, you’re sounding just a little more like a leftist each time”

Identify the problem, trace it through the system, find the root cause, and brainstorm solutions/work arounds

Right on. The proof is in the pudding even their games I don’t finish, like the gwent one, aren’t bad or not fun, I just lost interest

I used this argument with my friend the other day - cyberpunk lets you play as a trans character, . People got upset when they found that out prelaunch… And then no one cared, the main complaint was bugs

It’s not “go woke and go broke”, it’s “no one wants shit media, and inclusivity is not a substitute for quality”

Inclusivity isn’t the problem, only bigots care if you make something great that happens to be inclusive. It’s observer bias, not correlation - inclusivity is generally good. Gamers don’t mind inclusivity, they’ll get the experience they want and ignore the options they don’t want

The problem is shit writing and gameplay

That’s not what I’m mad about. I’m mad that it won’t ever work - Ubisoft isn’t trying to figure out why their games are failing, they’re trying to figure out how to keep the stock price projections up

Hence this article, which is signaling to wall Street “we’re going to make layoffs and hire cheaper, less experienced people”. They’ll probably do it by closing studios and buying up new ones - that’s pretty much their standard operating procedure. They buy up a studio, take their IP to add to the pile, then turn it into a formula and churn out games until the players lose interest in the IP

What’s the problem? They’re too damn big. What’s the solution? Block them from acquiring more studios and they’ll die without leaving a swath of destruction on the way down. Ideally split them up. Do the same with Microsoft and EA, and we could save the gaming industry overnight (granted, more like over the course of a few years)

Voting with your wallet doesn’t work because to the leadership of a Corp, sales aren’t what matters. Stock price matters, which is only tentatively linked to how profitable the company is, which is only tentatively linked to the quality of their products

It undoubtedly burned out hundreds of game devs who wasted years of their work and improved nothing about the industry

Mission accomplished?

Well I wouldn’t say it’s important, because it doesn’t change anything

I would definitely say it’s a waste of money to buy their bad games. They deserve to fail. I’m not happy about it, because I want good games, not for IP to be stretched so far I no longer care about it

But it’s important to understand that AAA gaming is an oligopoly and not buying their games won’t change that. It will not improve gaming. Ubisoft will close another dozen studios, buy 13 more, and learn all the wrong lessons (see current situation)

“Voting with your wallet” does not give you any control, just like recycling does not save the planet. It’s a myth to redirect our attention

Structural problems can only be solved structurally.

They just ascribe a different metric as to why it failed

Yeah… That’s my point. They will never say “our game failed because it was overly formulaic, unpolished, and our customers are getting sick of our bullshit”

It doesn’t fit on the spreadsheet. They will never come to the correct conclusion. They structurally cannot

Motherfucker… How many times do you you have to fail before you listen to your customers, who are screaming what they want?

This is why voting with your wallet is nonsense. They’ll never learn why they failed, only that they did

Why do you think C is the one true language? It’s a tool.

There’s a single very simple answer to “what tool should I use?”. Use the best tool for the job

The job is the objective - what are you trying to accomplish? What are your priorities? What compromise is best between time, cost, and quality? What are your abilities? What’s in your toolbox right now, and what could you obtain within the time frame?

For you, the best tool might always be C. I don’t know how you’ve specialized or what you do, but C is powerful. Maybe you have an orderly thought process code meticulously, maybe you struggle to learn new languages. Maybe there’s just no better option for the jobs you take on

For me, C is rarely the answer. Not never, but outside of school I can count on one hand how many times I’ve chosen it. I code intuitively and feel how the code fits together, I can pick up languages on the spot and switch even more easily. But I’m not meticulous, it’s against my nature. I make mistakes frequently - but I learn by doing, and I don’t need to understand to start doing

All that said, why do we keep making languages and frameworks? Because as programmers, we build the tools. We can also share them without losing them. The perfect tool for one job won’t be the same for any other job, but a pretty good tool for many jobs is a valuable tool

The trade-off with our tools is between power, versatility, and cost (generally being time). We all want powerful and versatile tools - but our time is limited, and so we can’t afford the cost

Ultimately, I think you’ve correctly spotted a recurring problem but misidentified the cause. The cause isn’t the tools, it’s the fact that the cost is someone else’s time. And the fact we have no way to translate money into their time

A corporation can fund a team to continuously develop a tool they rely on. An individual can’t - we could chip in a few bucks here and there, but we use a lot of tools. We don’t know good tools from bad ones until we use them, we don’t know what tools are used to build the ones we need either.

So everyone and their mom wants to build a service to fund work on their tools. I hate services, I don’t want to give them my data or my money - I want tools that will work on my devices, not because I don’t want to deny them pay for their work, but because I pick up, drop, and modify tools all the time

That’s the real problem - if I could donate x dollars a month to support the tools I use, I would. If I could choose for us all to pay more taxes to support the tools we all use, I would take that deal. Hell, I’d go through the effort to generalize my personal tools

Instead, the only real profit to be had in OSS comes from companies, because they can afford to fund them directly, or services, which individuals tend to hate but companies barely notice. The tools aren’t the problem - the economics are the problem

I don’t agree with that at all - that’s how art works. You take ideas and techniques and copy them, adding your own twist in the process. Art is about more than the aesthetic - the backstory is what gives it value. Stealing that is plagiarism, everything else is artistic inspiration… If you add nothing new you’ve made a cheap knockoff, which is very different from plagiarism

Palworld has its own lore, its own type system, its own battle mechanics, and as far as gameplay it’s nothing like Pokemon. All it has in common is many creatures you capture in a ball, with designs largely based on IRL animals and Japanese folklore. They’ve made something new no matter how you slice it

I loved that the Gameboy was designed to survive a fall from the average shirt pocket. I love that the Wii controllers pushed gyroscopic technology so far that it allowed the explosion of quadcopters. I loved the idea of 3d through rapid aspect switching.

I loved when Nintendo pushed boundaries, not just through hardware but through gameplay. I enjoy and appreciate the Nintendo polish

I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly - good gameplay is much more important than flashy graphics. But the polish was nice - pushing boundaries is what made the difference

Oh, I said that as a programmer all right. And that’s how I’ve approached AI - I ran it locally, and kept poking it until I began to get a feel for it. Until I could see patterns. Until I could put together a methodology

They exist. Word choice matters greatly. Shorter is better. Varied word choice is better. Less “orders” is better. Strange combinations of tokens can convey something in non-obvious ways. They all seem to have a very strong attachment to the name “Luna”

They’re as deterministic as any software is, if you run it in the same state with the same input you’ll get the same result, sometimes with minor wording changes

And software isn’t as deterministic as we pretend it is. Programming doesn’t require it either, luckily. Every program you’ll ever write is interacting with complex systems no one fully understands, and it will sometimes act unpredictably

Programming is about finding patterns in the chaos, then using them to get the result you want. You need consistency - not deterministic outcomes. You can program with anything you can find the patterns in - even human behavior or the physical world. You can program yourself.

You can treat AI like something unknowable, or you can find the patterns and put them in your toolbox

That’s how I look at AI. It will never (in it’s current forms) replace people, but it can turn a passionate creator into a one person army

Using AI is a form of programming - you turn the right words into action. Programming is magic, an AI user is a warlock