Reminder that the 30% steam tax is absolutely greed. Gabe is a libertarian and charges it because he can get away with it. It makes games worse by affecting the equation measuring what is profitable to make. Gabe doesn’t care about that, and that should be taken into account when considering if you actually trust him.

It’s for me that car is for me

Shot in the dark, but would anyone be willing to share a deadlock invite?

Typically you pay for a battle pass with some sort of currency that costs real money to acquire. The battle pass isn’t anything on its own, but if you play the game you’ll then unlock experience or whatever with the battle pass, thus unlocking whatever it contains. Often that’s cosmetics for the game, sometimes useable items, and sometimes it’s more of that currency that costs real money.

IMO they suck. Usually they expire at the end of the month, so if something comes up (family emergency, computer died, whatever) you wasted it and paid for nothing. It’s a cheap trick to devalue a player’s purchase, and to try and boost player count in lieu of good gameplay.

But apparently if you completed the battle pass, it would give you enough premium currency to buy the one they out next month. So theoretically you might only have to buy it once if you were diligent in finish the pass before it went away. Now they’ve taken that away because they wanted more money.

\o/

Then this isn’t about them?

“This image was generated anywhere between 3 and 3 million years ago by an AI”

Just like why post at all though? This clearly isn’t for you if you’re driven to insult the game on a post about it’s update.

Right, I recall news from years ago where a bunch of celebrities’ very private photos backed up to iCloud were leaked. They may or may not have known they uploaded those to iCloud, I dunno. But imagine what’s up there if you don’t realize you’re doing a backup. Not just photos, but like scanned documents with vulnerable information. And all that personal info in a centralized server is a big ol honeypot for a malicious actor.

It’s not hard to see why this is a vulnerability, is what I’m getting at.

I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They’re only now really being forced to find profitability.

I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don’t know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I’m skeptical that most of these services are in the green.

What that ultimately says about the future I don’t really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can’t be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they’re getting for the money spent.

(And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)

It comes from the case against Henry Ford after he saw his company was making gobs of cash and decided to give some of that to his employees. Shareholders successfully sued him to stop this on the grounds that he has a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

As with anything legal, there is nuance, but the basic assertion that there is fiduciary duty to shareholders is not wrong.

$7, but you a only spend $10 at a time! It ain’t gonna be 10 quests or 5 quests. It’s gonna be like 3 or six so you’ll be left with $9 in coins and feel like you’re wasting cash if you don’t spend another $10 to buy some other creation club shit.

God I fucking hate the premium currency tactic.

You really can. Right to work, + free speech is only applicable wrt the government.

The fact that it’s legal does not make it moral.

Not the person you responded to, but: left economically is not left socially.

Also, it’s cheap to speak total bullshit, but it takes time, effort, and energy, to dispel it. I can say the moon is made of cheese, you can’t disprove that. And you can go out and look up an article about the samples of moon rock we have and the composition, talk about the atmosphere required to give rise to dairy producing animals and thus cheese.

And I can just come up with some further bullshit that’ll take another 30 minutes to an hour to debunk.

If we gave equal weight to every argument, we’d spend our lives mired in fact-checking hell holes. Sometimes, you can just dismiss someone’s crap.

Ah! Well! I don’t like that!

As with DD1, DD2 is fun and I don’t mean to say it isn’t. The MTX just provides a barrier to entry for folks turned off by it, and I wish it wasn’t there.

Huh. Did it??

https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bktrh3/are_we_forgetting_that_dd1_had_microtransactions/

Here’s someone corroborating you, but it’s impossible to Google at the moment for obvious reasons. I have 0 recollection of any MTX, though. FWIW, it wouldn’t be any less bad if they did it before too.

To be clear though, it didn’t ruin it. I said it “marred” the game. It is a mark that affects how the game is perceived and I hate that. The game itself is fun, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.

Hate it hate it. This game is so good, and it’s like I’m playing my old favorite again. The fact that they marred my baby with MTX like this is just gross. DD1 should be more popular, and what they did to DD2 may keep it from being the powerhouse it could because people will see the “mixed” ratings and second guess. Or they’ll open the store page and see a wall of MTX and get the wrong idea.

But that’s just part of it of course. If this works for them, it’ll explode. And it will work for them. And everyone will get these fucking MTX in their full priced AAA games. And then once sales on MTX aren’t up to snuff – or if they are up to snuff, but in a few quarters when sales are merely consistent rather than continuing to grow – they’ll start pushing it. Just like they did with Shadow of Mordor where the gameplay gave you a nasty grind and a quick “buy your way past it” option.

I’ll never buy the “it doesn’t effect you in a single player game” argument. It will, because the market incentives a worse experience for those less willing to buy in.

I can’t speak for the original commented, but I’m personally quite tired of the thin veneer that’s slapped into these statements. I would prefer a company just be honest and talk about the profit incentives. They want people using the free version to please pay for the expensive one.

For my experience, I still retain the general irritation at product quality going down regardless of how they word it. But now I’m also annoyed that MS isn’t being straightforward about it.

They were never giving it away. They included wordpad with your purchase of windows. They no longer do. I don’t think anyone is saying that windows is not “within their rights”, they’re saying that this degrades the product we already pay for. That is worth complaining about, even if our ultimate recourse primarily ends up being to find an OS that better serves our needs.

Honestly though I’m struggling to understand why you’d think that’s about Microsoft’s rights to begin with??