Just installed an update to 10 2 days ago to find that it had installed Copilot and put an icon for it on my taskbar. Stuff like this is why 10 will be my last version of Windows.

And yet nobody can ever experience it the way it was originally again since they killed Flash.

It’s like coming back from the war with PTSD and nobody understands what you went through. Except the PTSD is about buckets and dating quadrants.

Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.

I mean, Lemmy definitely runs more techy than most other places, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the average user here knows any better than any Reddit idiot or something lol

And my point wasn’t to peer review your example or anything, just to say that people keep complaining about it because these snake oil salesmen keep getting richer while using the same tired lines about how AI will do everything and anything, and do a handstand while it’s at it.

It’s like all the complaints historians keep finding about that one guy selling shitty copper bars or whatever. Nobody is gonna shut up about it until the bubble finally bursts and these AI companies can’t unload their shitty copper on anyone anymore.

In your example, the thing missing is that the belt sander companies are selling their belt sanders as screw fastening, band saw multitools.

I always say about AI that it’s not the tool but who’s making it and why, and this is especially true for the average person. Your average person isn’t seeing the LLMs that are trained to identify anomalies in MRIs or iterate on chemical formulas to improve drugs in a simulation that takes milliseconds compared to the months of research it would take technicians to replicate the same experiments. So all they can talk about is the AI that is in their face all day, every day, as every company in the world tries to shoehorn it into their product somehow. And so they complain about the belt sanders that the company told them would fasten their screws and cut their 2x4’s.

The only way the complaining is going to stop is when the bubble bursts and these companies have to find a new way to chase the infinite profit pipedream.

I didn’t mean that Ubisoft’s was better than Steam - just better than Epic’s store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.

As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn’t exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.

The big reason I think we don’t see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam’s biggest competitors are the consoles, and that’s largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.

Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).

A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn’t like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn’t offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn’t even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.

B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service’s website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would’ve been more willing to give it a chance.

Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

The worst part of this for me is that I remember when you could build a PC with better specs than a console for the same price. Now we’re coming back full circle to where that might be possible again, but graphics cards never truly came down from their inflated crypto mining prices. So that means consoles are just getting more expensive and everybody is losing.

Better than blaming addicts for being addicted.

As usual, vote local, vote often applies here, but personally, I’m in 100% agreement that the odds of it happening in our lifetime are slim to none.

But when people think “whale,” they think of the rich idiots with more money than sense. They don’t think of the addict being fleeced like kids by cigarette companies. And we need to change that mentality. Because we’re just victim blaming here. You can’t shame a heroin addict into a sober person.

And there are plenty of irresponsible parents. There was a story about 5 years ago I remember of a young kid (like 6 years old) who literally emptied his parents’ bank account on mtx in an iPhone game because they didn’t know it had mtx in it.

And saying that people with mental health issues need to git gud is like saying that people in wheelchairs need to git gud and use stairs. What we need to do is replace the idiots with people who understand how bad this shit is so we can get something done about it.

Unfortunately, the biggest group of people buying mtx are those with mental health issues/addiction issues and kids who have no concept of fiscal responsibility. And as the saying goes, there’s a sucker born every minute.

These companies have literally hired psychologists to tell them how to best exploit the human brain for maximum wallet extraction. They’re doing the equivalent of casinos pumping extra oxygen into the room to keep you more awake and not having any windows so you don’t realize how long you’ve been in there (plus the easy booze to loosen the purse strings).

Nothing’s gonna change until we can hold these companies responsible for their actions. Ironically, I think review bombing on Steam actually helps since it can make people aware of the exploitative practices these companies are doing and make them avoid these games.

Except the big money isn’t coming from the whales. It’s coming from the gamer equivalent of the little old lady at the casino with her bucket of quarters.

So the answer is neither.

Whales are largely a myth created by game companies to create a false class war amongst us rather than holding the truly responsible parties at fault. No different than pitting the middle class against the poor.

Do whales exist? Absolutely. However, the vast majority of mtx money comes from people with addiction problems, mental health issues that make fiscal responsibility difficult, and kids who don’t know any better. Many of whom who are spending money that they can’t afford to spend but can’t help themselves from spending.

These companies quite literally hire psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s own brain chemistry against them to most effectively extract money from their wallets. Epic Games got in trouble because it was believed that they were trying to create a culture in Fornite that shamed kids for having default skins. Everything from daily login bonuses to seasons and battle passes to rotating stores are designed to keep you logging in and playing and therefore paying. They turn logging in into a habit and then hit you with the FOMO and completing your collection needs.

You’re not going to fix this by shaming people any more than you can cure drug, alcohol, and gambling addiction by shaming people.

To remove any residual feces or salmonella that might still be on the shell.

Huh, TIL. I’d always heard that you need to wash eggs before using them.

There are pre-rinsed eggs in the US? I know our rice comes pre-washed, but I’ve never heard of pre-washed eggs.

Well, this is the third time the community has failed to secure the AT mines, so it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game for them to just give them to us anyway.

It was definitely the other way around. When I first checked the planets, there were around 1.5k divers on the mine planet and it was in the 0.x% range, while the children’s planet was around 54% with close to 60k divers on it.