Lurker > adjl

BoomerKuwanger posted...

Indie games are pretty much entirely reliant on word of mouth unless they want to spend marketing money too. But there are hundreds to thousands of them released each year and most of them suck. They aren't a monolith, they can't all get word of mouth or marketing money en masse

Indeed. That said, there are countless youtube channels, streamers, and journalists that make an effort to find and highlight promising new/upcoming indie games. For all its faults, Steam's discovery queue is also pretty good for raising awareness of games you might otherwise have missed, plus things like Nintendo Directs often mention a bunch of indie games (though the eShop is exceptionally bad for aimlessly browsing and there's virtually zero chance you'll find anything worthwhile because of the glut of shovelware and minimal curation options). Some gems are still going to end up flying under the radar no matter what you do to try and find them, but so long as you put some effort in (and, for that matter, let social media algorithms figure out what kind of games you'd like to be shown), you'll find out about plenty of good indie games, no differently from how picking up a magazine or two each month helped you find out about interesting sub-AAA games.

Dikitain posted...

Nintendo re-releasing their entire WiiU catalog on Switch

That one, I can understand because of how poorly the WiiU sold, but for a more relevant example there were quite a few games released on the Wii VC that were subsequently released on the WiiU VC at a higher price (supposedly, because the WiiU VC offered a few more bells and whistles). For people who already owned the Wii version, they did offer a discounted upgrade (like I think instead of $8 for a SNES game they charged $2 to upgrade from the $6 Wii version) that let you play them on the WiiU with the extra engine features, but I don't think that was a very popular option. And then the Switch got rid of the option to own retro games altogether.

They honestly don't need to make many concessions at all. So long as no viable alternative exists, the vast majority of gamers - no matter where they sit on the digital vs. physical debate - would rather buy a digital-only system than give up buying new games altogether, and the savings from never having to worry about physical distribution would more than make up for the handful of people that actually go through with their promise to boycott.

The big thing holding them back is that if an alternative does exist, they're screwed. Because they can't guarantee that their competitors will take the same step at the same time, they hesitate.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I don't trust anything the media is saying about this situation tbh, they've been reporting false claims from hamas and it's hard to tell what is the truth and what is the media trying to push the narrative from an actual terrorist organization.

The specific numbers may be a little fuzzy, but it's not really in question that Israel is killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians in their retaliation. It's also not surprising, since they've been doing that for decades. This is just a major escalation of that.

BlueFlameBat posted...

What about "didn't" though?

That's needed to indicate the negative.

funkyfritter posted...

I don't think the switch to digital-only will come until consoles can figure out how to reliably carry over your purchases from one console generation to the next. Backwards compatibility would be a huge technical challenge, so I expect streaming games to be the breakthrough that leads to them pulling the trigger.

Why would they worry about backwards compatibility when they could just make you buy the same games again?

It's just "used to." "Did" is redundant in that case.

BucketCat posted...

basically what I'm saying is that, I hope that indie games go from niche with outliers finding mainstream success, to how I'd find out about games 10-20 years ago, where it was just some random person suggesting it or a magazine.

That's less a function of AAA being a money grab, though, and more a matter of the industry being so much larger and there being so much more media covering it. We're never going back to a paradigm of having like four different magazines you can read and that being the main way you find out about games, simply because there are so many better ways to get a game out there than that and far, far too many "hidden gems" for a small number of media outlets to cover all of them.

BoomerKuwanger posted...

If you have to go through MS/Sony/Nintendo to get a game published anyway, then what exactly would stop them from jacking up the prices now, and Walmart going "sure, as long as we still get our cut"?

See: "MSRP is $70 now deal with it."

hockey7318 posted...

I tried to talk my wife and girls into adopting older dogs/cats because they're often super nice and just need someone to love on them in their golden years. Makes me sad seeing older pets at the pound.

The hardest thing about adopting older pets from shelters is how many other, equally deserving older pets you have to leave behind because you can't actually take home 14 senior cats at once. Heck, my sister just adopted a cat and had it down to choosing between a 16-year-old and a 3-year-old, and when she ended up picking the 3-year-old because she just wasn't able to handle the medical needs of the senior (which is fair. Old cats are expensive), I had to consciously tell myself that adopting the 16-year-old myself when I already had two senior cats was a bad idea. Fortunately, the shelter subsequently shared an update that Sir Winston (which is a fantastic name) got adopted, so he did end up with a home.

https://imgur.com/HDBfNeq

Lokarin posted...

ya, they should be paying US to watch the ads since it's OUR time they're wasting

Ostensibly, they're "paying" you with the videos: The time spent watching the ads is the price you pay to use the service, with advertisers paying them based on ad views and clickthroughs to compensate them for providing it.

In practice, of course, they also make money from the data they collect from us and the viewership statistics that they use to sell themselves to advertisers, plus ads are getting worse and worse (to the point where it's actually dangerous not to block them, thanks to a lack of accountability), so I really don't care what their business model expects of me.

Paired with their anti-adblock campaign, it wouldn't surprise me if they've stepped up their ads in an effort to push Premium. Fortunately, their anti-adblock campaign seems to have ended the same way all such campaigns end, with me having had to wait maybe an hour before ublock updated because I was unlucky enough to catch one of the longer periods during which Youtube was winning the fight.

potdnewb posted...

he could take the money buy a better house or rent an apartment or travel the world

So...

Option 1: Boyfriend owns paid-off house, receives insurance payout reduced by remaining cost of house

Option 2: Boyfriend receives full insurance payout, then has to use some of it to secure housing

If he wants to move, owning the house means he can sell it (likely for more than the remaining mortgage, given how housing prices have been trending) and still have the same amount of money as if he took option 2 (probably actually more), plus he gets to do it on his own terms instead of having to hope that Jen actually makes it into the ground before the bank evicts him. The only possible issue with option 1 is that if the interest rate is low enough on the mortgage, it may be better to leave it unpaid and invest the money elsewhere for a better return than he'd see by paying it off immediately, but either way this idea of leaving the mortgage unpaid is very obviously terrible.

WizardofHoth posted...

Back in 1998 where there was no frikkin messageboard . Thats the old gamefaqs i want

Why? The existence of the message boards hasn't affected the guide/tips side of things. It's really only enhanced them by allowing people to ask specific questions if a guide doesn't cover them (since, realistically, nobody's going to write a whole guide just to cover a handful of questions that aren't covered by existing ones). If you don't want to engage with the boards, all you have to do is not click on them.

BucketCat posted...

all I want is for AAA to fall off so that indies can finally take over.

If indies "take over," they'll be just as bad as AAA. The evils of the AAA market are inherent to high-budget projects; the things we like about indie games are a function of them being smaller projects that people can take risks on without having investors to answer to.

LinkPizza posted...

I mean, it wouldnt be the first time Ive avoided games due to space

It stands to reason that if anyone does go digital as the only option, they'll include enough storage space and/or make expansion easy enough for that to not be a major issue. Storage space is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the system.

LinkPizza posted...

Also, I said Id cut down on buying games Not playing them I can still play the same amount I just wouldnt buy as much

If your only option is to replay old games, you'll likely end up playing quite a bit less. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't be buying new games now.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

i never understood the point

My understanding is that the point is the taste of the smoke. It's like a scented candle for trust fund kids.

Don't you know? You can just not pay for your house and your boyfriend can keep living there. That's totally how mortgages work.

LinkPizza posted...

While I wouldnt stop completely, Id definitely slow way down Probably buying 5%-10% of what I buy these days

Honestly, I doubt that. I don't doubt that you believe it, but bear in mind that you're actually saying that you'd cut down on your gaming by 90-95% long-term (short-term, it's believable, because backlogs). That means instead of spending an average 5-10 hours a week playing, you'd be spending 20-40 minutes. You can sub in whatever numbers more accurately describe your habits than me making some up, but whatever the actual figures it's a very substantial lifestyle change you're proposing that would take gaming from being a major hobby to a very minor one. You have touched on one thing that would change, which is impulsively buying something you weren't planning on getting to bundle with something you were specifically looking for in a BOGO sale (or the like), but even without that I expect you'd keep buying games digitally and just put up with having to plan your downloads ahead of when you want to play.

LinkPizza posted...

The other two are already halfway there It would probably be Microsoft first, then Sony

If Nintendo doesn't blaze the trail for them (in which case, they'll both follow suit), I expect it'll be whichever one is in the lead at the time the decision is made. They both have a history of getting cocky when they're winning: The PS3's exorbitant price point and esoteric architecture after the PS2's success, the aggressive always-online DRM of the Xbone (which they walked back after the disastrous first impression, but they never fully recovered), Sony rejecting cross-play opportunities now that they're in the lead (flipping things around from the PSWii60 era when Sony liked cross-play and Microsoft turned it down)... It's going to be an unpopular decision regardless of who makes it or when, so it's most likely going to be somebody that's in a strong enough position to feel confident that they can't lose.

With that in mind, Sony's winning now (not counting Nintendo, but Nintendo's mostly doing their own thing), but they're a little nervous with Microsoft buying up so many major third party studios, so I doubt they'll take any major strides like that any time soon. Microsoft's losing, so I doubt they'll take the plunge and risk burning whatever good will any new exclusivity deals can cultivate. As such, it'll be a while before either of them tries it.

A few people who were subsequently quite successful on Youtube and other platforms got their start there (or on similar sites), like EgoRaptor, but that was definitely a secondary thing.

Yeah, and those could potentially take off where Youtube is such a horrible place to be a creator right now. I don't believe Newgrounds ever compensated anyone, though, so that's obviously a disadvantage compared to Youtube et al (and a major reason why it's not exactly a popular content platform anymore).

A modern-day Newgrounds would be... interesting, to say the least. I doubt it would actually take off, though. Most of the crappy and/or wildly offensive games people uploaded there would just be put on an actual digital storefront now so they could make a few bucks off of them.

LinkPizza posted...

I think doing this would be the best since it allows everyone to still get what they want.

The thing is, "best" for consumers isn't necessarily what manufacturers/publishers are interested in. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people who still buy most/all of their games physically wouldn't actually stop buying games if they went digital-only, no matter how ardently they protest against going digital-only. At this moment, ditching physical media entirely would piss off enough people that it's uncertain whether it would actually be more profitable in the long run, but there will come a point in the not-too-distant future where that's no longer a question.

Of course, the biggest thing that I think is holding them back is that nobody wants to be the first to do it, simply because all of those physical holdouts will jump ship to competitors instead of just putting up with a digital-only system. To that end, I won't actually be surprised if Nintendo's the first one to do it, given that they have such a robust exclusive library that people won't be able to get the same experience by buying a physical-ready alternative. But then Nintendo's generally been behind the curve as far as sketchy corporate shenanigans go, so who knows?

agesboy posted...

Imo there's almost absolutely going to be at least one digital-only option for one of the consoles that's significantly cheaper

Isn't that already true for the PS5/Xbox whateverit'scallednow? Maybe not "significantly cheaper," but I believe there are digital-only options for them.

Regardless of what you're asking this question about, if they minded the flaws you're pointing out, they wouldn't be fans in the first place. Axiomatically, people become fans of something because they're able to overlook the flaws to enough of an extent that they can enjoy the good aspects.

The real question is why you're trying to convince people not to like a piece of entertainment. The purpose of consuming entertainment is to be entertained. If somebody has succeeded at that goal, trying to undermine that success by pointing out why they shouldn't be having fun is just being a dick for no reason. Unless they're hurting others, let people enjoy things.

Lil_Bit83 posted...

Physical isn't going away.

I'll be very surprised if it doesn't. There will always be demand for it, and as such I expect there will always end up being something satisfying that demand, but it's very likely that major console manufacturers will go all-digital eventually, given the potential for cost cutting and increased control over how consumers use their games (particularly cutting out the resale option). It's not likely to be next generation, though. That'd just be too much of a PR disaster right now.

https://imgur.com/g6bYa4o

RVallant posted...

I don't even know what the title even means and I'm amazed anyone does, but hey... O_O

Pretend the word "in" is "if," and maybe imagine an "a" before "domestic partnership" (though that one's not strictly necessary). Toss in the first post for a bit of context, and it's pretty easy to figure out the full picture.

EvilResident posted...

Still doesnt make sense to me. Given the constant factor of lets say you never move out of that house, you dont think youll ever finish paying it off completely?

Presumably, this is a matter of being prepared for unexpectedly dying. If she dies peacefully in her sleep of old age at 90, it's not really an issue because those debts will have long since been paid off. If she dies in a car accident tomorrow, not so much.

EvilResident posted...

Sometimes you actually have to

What's really annoying is that most of the times I've had to go to IT, I know what the problem is and how to fix it, but I simply haven't been allowed to because our computers are locked down such that regular users are very limited in what they can do. But then given how technically competent many of the regular users are, that's probably for the best.

https://imgur.com/Uhwq3dN

VampireCoyote posted...

Everyone lies. All the time. Wake up.

But that would mean you're lying, which means it's not true that everyone lies, which in turn means that you're not lying, but that means that it's true that everyone lies, which would mean you're lying...

PK_Spam posted...

I remember someone once telling me Youre smart up until you finish schooling. Once youre in your 20s and in the professional world, you need to find something else to be.

Fortunately, turning "smart" into "knowledgeable" or "versatile" or other variants of "helpful" isn't overly difficult. Mental agility and a strong memory are very useful assets in many jobs, you just have to make an effort to apply your intelligence instead of expecting people to be impressed by the cool math tricks you can do.

Indeed not. Sucks to be your mom.

Makes sense. I haven't done any such things with my girlfriend, but I also know that neither my mom nor my sisters would ever think of denying her involvement in my medical care or insist on taking any of my assets that she wanted, so I'm more or less covered in that regard. You haven't been so lucky in your parentage, so you kind of need to change your next of kin from the default to make sure things go the way you want.

Jen0125 posted...

Idk he could say no and I'd understand. It's a contract with the government. Neither of us want to get married because we don't want our relationship to be a contract with the government. So I could understand if he said no.

True. I still just find it kind of entertaining to imagine it that way. It is indeed a formal commitment to the relationship that not everyone would be fine with, and that's not necessarily something that reflect badly on that person.

It probably doesn't help that with the walk-back of the fee structure to something infinitely less insane that doesn't get applied retroactively (not that that would ever have actually stood up in court), there's little to no further market for converting existing Unity projects into another engine. A ton of people have still dropped Unity for other engines because they've burned any trust people had in them, but by and large past and current projects are fine to continue existing as they always have and there's no need to cut Unity out of them like a tumour.

I dabbled in a bit when I was like 12-14ish. It was reasonably entertaining, but I ended up losing interest.

Jen0125 posted...

He said yes

I think it'd be kind of rude not to.

"Do you want to make it so you can visit me in the hospital if I end up in a coma?"
"No."

LinkPizza posted...

Though, in stores, I usually see the buy 2 get 1 free sales or the buy 1 get one half off sales often enough

Those are functionally 33% off and 25% off, respectively, just with the prerequisite of buying a certain number to take advantage of the sales. Sales like that are less common digitally (though I have seen a few cases where you choose how many games you want in a bundle and that dictates how much of a discount you get, which is conceptually similar), but equivalent discounts happen often enough. I expect that sales like that are more common in physical stores because they help cycle inventory, particularly getting people to buy games other than the one(s) they were planning to get so less popular stuff gets taken off the shelves.

wwinterj25 posted...

Yeah but she wasn't and maybe still isn't in the right place to have a kid.

By the sounds of things, she was okay with the idea and Timberlake pressured her into the abortion because he didn't want a kid, but admittedly I haven't paid any real attention to the situation beyond a passing glance.

BADoglick posted...

If anything go back to all physical.

There's absolutely zero chance of that ever happening. Even beyond publishers preferring digital because it costs them less (while they charge the same amount), there are many, many games that would never have been published if they couldn't be published digitally, particularly in the indie sphere where distribution costs frequently make enough of a difference to dictate whether or not a game is viable. Digital has its drawbacks, absolutely, but it also has some very significant benefits that I don't think should ever go away.

LinkPizza posted...

Im not sure this definitely means that much. Like one of the articles said, it includes mobile

The 72/28 split is specific to consoles, but that's the revenue split, and a huge portion of console revenue has come from games like Fortnite that - by virtue of being F2P online games - aren't going to get a physical release (ignoring that Fortnite did have a physical release before PUBG's success prompted them to pivot into being a F2P battle royale). I'm not sure how sales themselves break down, though I have little difficulty believing that digital is dominating direct sales revenue as well. The convenience factor plays a non-trivial role in purchasing decisions, particularly when it comes to sales and impulse buys (physical games are inherently more effort to find sales for and buy, so there's more opportunity for a prospective customer to change their mind).

It's not impossible. Assuming Nintendo's next system is roughly a year out, I don't think now would be a good time for them to take that step, since there's quite a bit of resentment around shutting down servers for the WiiU/3DS next ~April (and therefore locking people out of being able to download digital content they've already purchased) and a digital-only system would suffer for that, but it really is mostly a few hold-outs that insist on continuing to buy physical media, and publishers would much rather digital.

Sahuagin posted...

Odyssey was I think the single worst Mario game I've played (not including spinoffs I guess many of which are terrible), so I'm not particularly enthused to play another one

Wonder is pretty much nothing like Odyssey. 2D and 3D Mario are very different games.

Metalsonic66 posted...

I've never heard of replacing a mouse button

Yeah, that's pretty unusual. Unless the button has physically broken and you've got a bunch of identical dead mice around that you can steal a replacement button from, odds are it's going to be quicker and cheaper to just buy a new mouse than to troubleshoot what exact part has failed and replace that. That one sounds like he's trying to secure his job by recommending things management doesn't have the technical knowledge needed to shoot down.

A combination of most of the people they help actually being morons, a lot of the specialized knowledge they have being relatively uncommon outside of their field, and IT being a field that people with more robust social skills tend to be less interested in such that those who do end up in it are often a little impaired in that regard. That said, I've never had issues with my IT team, but I'm also significantly more technically competent than the vast majority of people they deal with.

Most of the changes that were made were made with the intent of modernizing the forum layout in an effort to stop losing users to more modern forums. In practice, most of them were half-measures that weren't enough to achieve that goal while forcing existing users who were mostly happy with the old format to adapt to something new (which in some cases actually hurt functionality, especially for people that used addons that got broken), but that was at least the goal.

The whole Throwback Mode thing was bullshit, though. Particularly the way they slowly and quietly forced people off of it (personally, I lost it after going away for a weekend because that meant I spent 2-3 days without being active on an account with it enabled), then killed it because "only 1% of users were still using it" as though that was a choice on their part.

hockey7318 posted...

I think 300 lbs is more the force exerted by it. The actual unit is about 50-70 pounds or something. It's used to vibrate a salter and keep the salt from clumping so it flows at a consistent rate. If someone used that on a sybian I've got a feeling it might do a bit of damage...

That makes sense.

The real answer is that if they added all three at once, they'd have to come up with more new ideas for subsequent updates to keep people engaged with the game. By adding only one at a time, they can stretch out their ideas while still doing enough to hold people's interest. Minecraft has very little genuine competition (aside from the competition all games face in the form of players only having so many hours in a day), so they don't actually have to work that hard to keep it on top of the genre.

I love that "says they won't stop the entire government from doing its job whenever they don't get their way" has been explicitly identified as a requirement for the job.

hockey7318 posted...

One of my favorite line items on an invoice for me is 300 lb vibrator. I kind of wished I got an email from someone above me asking a question about those.

...300 lb? I know there are some large ones out there, but that seems excessive.

Dikitain posted...

The whole "Disable ad block or GTFO" is stupid. Like, if you tell me that, 99 times out of 100 I am going to GTFO, then what are you gaining? You aren't even getting people who will share your content with others who might not have ad blockers. It is literally lose-lose. Either accept that a large amount of people are going to be viewing your site with an ad blocker, or offer a premium service that does more than just disable ads and actually makes people want to use it.

In the case of something like Youtube where service delivery is such a major part of their costs, they do gain the fact that they're no longer having bandwidth used by someone who isn't paying for it, which isn't nothing. For sites with relatively low bandwidth needs, though, it indeed doesn't make much sense.

ConfusedTorchic posted...

pretty sure most people do now, since places are dumping tons of money into trying to prevent them

they didn't really do that when there actually wasn't that many people using them

Across the economy, we're also hitting a point where a lot of corporations in the entertainment business are trying to recapture the explosive growth they saw during peak Covid so they can keep shareholders happy. This is why so many streaming services are adding ads, or jacking up their prices, or cracking down on account sharing: They want to keep hitting those record-breaking revenue numbers and are grasping at whatever straws they can to do so. I expect cracking down on adblocking is in the same vein in that they're hoping the crackdown will convince enough people to stop blocking to squeeze some more revenue out of them. It's pretty short-sighted, though, since that desperate scrabbling for extra revenue also includes making the ads more intrusive, which is going to prompt more people to block them. When this ultimately fails, I expect layoffs, which are the classic fall-back strategy for pumping financial numbers.

I've been expecting this for a while, really. Sites insist on making ads more intrusive to make up for views lost to adblock, which in turn makes more people want to block them. They're short-term gains that end up costing more in the long run, and the end result is going to be the collapse of ad-funded Internet content.