sp3ctr4l

I’ve hated him since before Trump’s first election, correctly realizing he is a fradulent try hard con man megalomaniac, and have had to endure a decade of people mocking me ‘oh yeah like you are smarter than the richest man on earth yeah right fuck off’.

Yep. I am smarter than him. So were half the people hurling those insults at me, actually.

Elon is actually quite stupid at everything other than conning people.

Much like Trump.

Hehe sounds about right.

Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…

And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.

I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.

But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.

We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.

This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.

Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.

It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.

It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.

But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.

Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.

Exactly.

In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.

You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.

Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.

… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.

-.-

In the last minutes of the stream, Musk made a hardcore difficulty character he named Kekius Maximus, a 4chan-esque meme name he’s used as his display name on X. But Kekius Maximus was not long for the world. Musk died to one of the game’s tutorial bosses due to a bad connection, which subsequently concluded the stream, ending another sad, weird data point in the Elon Musk fake gamer saga.

The guy who claimed he was a top tier Quake player… who in actuality, was only scoring well in online matches, because he played on the T1 high speed, stupid expensive business line at his Zip2 business in the 90s… and performed terribly at LANs…

Well here he is 30 years later, now dying to a tutorial boss, partially due to the shitty connection of his own ISP.

Amazing.

No problem!

Wonderful username btw, haha.

In case people missed or are unaware of the context:

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/doj-google-must-divest-chrome-possibly-android-google-fires-back

https://www.howtogeek.com/united-states-doj-google-android-chrome-split/

The DoJ recently (before Trump got elected) won an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and the lawsuit is currently in the stage of haggling over the extent of the penalty actions taken against Google as a result.

One of the things the DoJ is pushing for is breaking off not only Chrome but also Android from Google to just leave Google with its search stuff.

This is like splitting up Bell from decades ago.

What Google is doing right now is strategic positioning to be able to argue that Android can’t be split off from Google without causing them too much pain, and by making Android more and more dependent on, and nonfunctional without being under the same corporate ownership.

This is a powerplay to try to not be broken up so hard by the anti-trust lawsuit they already lost.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)

The actual penalty ruling is expected to come down by August 2025… unless the Trump admin fucks with it, somehow they… haven’t seemed to yet notice or care that this lawsuit is going on, despite Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, having a literal front row seat at Trump’s inauguration.

Fucking called it.

This shit isn’t hard to predict, yet huge numbers of people treat you like a delusional conspiracy theorist when you say that a tech service provided by a company/org that converts into a public corp and plans to do an IPO… is now fully shifting into ‘make everything shitty and squeeze as much money out of it as possible’ mode.

Star Citizen is certainly a gigantic ongoing delusion/scam of development hell…

But it doesn’t really meet the sort of ‘internal corporate contagion’ criteria, it won’t directly tank non Star Citizen teams or games.

While they have contracted out development work at various points… its not a giant conglomerate of different studios working on different projects.

If it finally liquidates and goes tits up, it only kills Star Citizen, and maybe Chris has to sell his yacht or w/e.

Star Citizen is its own special kind of nonsense.

Since Ubisoft introduced us to the term AAAA game with Skull and Bones, my attempt at giving an actual, solid definition to differentiate a AAA game from a AAAA game has had this as a fundamental aspect:

The game gets stuck in development hell, analagous to a movie that keeps needing reshoots and rewrites, and ends up requiring so much money thrown at chasing the sunk cost fallacy that it negatively impacts not only its own development, but impacts the development of other games by the same studio/publisher, and/or the overall financial solvency / employment headcount of the overarching parent company.

Basically, what a AAAA game actually is, is analagous to a bank or large corporation that is Too Big To Fail… but video game companies largely are not going to be bailed out by the government.

So, by that metric, we’ve got:

Skull and Bones

Concord

Suicide Squad

If you go back further in gaming history, you could probably find more games that fit typical AAA criteria (Large-Huge numbers of actual developers, aiming at a high level of graphical fidelity, financed by a large corporate publisher that controls a plethora of studios, all these measured relative to the timeframe of development)…

… and then also hits the AAAA criteria, that the development drags on forever, a sunk cost fallacy mindset sets in amongst management, management then gets high on its own supply, and the game draws in so many manpower and financial resources that it endangers entire other projects and teams not directly connected to this particular game’s development if this Too Big To Fail game does actually fail.

This is basically completely unrelated to CoD… but…

Halo Infinite released some Juneteenth (a holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US/ themed cosmetics a year or two back.

The color scheme for armor was named ‘Bonobo’ somewhere in the filename or metadata… which is a monkey.

Oops.

https://kotaku.com/halo-infinite-juneteenth-bonobo-freedom-emblem-nameplat-1849065291

… MegaCorps are not your friend, they’re just doing performative marketing.

Hours watched != Hours stored.

Any number of either is going to be huge for Twitch… but this is a no brainer, if a huge chunk of your costs don’t even generate a significant amount of views, muchless actual revenue… yeah it makes sense to stop making storing them.

You’ve probably got something that looks like the US income distrobution chart, probably evennmore extreme, for # of videos vs # view time, ie:

Replace the x axis with ‘videos by watchtime percentile’ and the y axis with ‘actual watchtime’.

So, you draw a horizontal line, everything that doesn’t get above about $150k on this chart is not being watched by enough people to be worth hosting (hosting realtime access to videos for tens of millions of people is very expensive).

Then, work backwards to figure out a cap for storage that applies to everyone, to be more fair than just outright de-listing videos by low recent view count, which will result in roughly the same amount of no longer provided storage, and allow 2 months for people to save off platform whatever they want, and choose how to trim down their hosted videos on their own.

The people complaining about this in the article are largely hysterical and delusional.

Perfect embodiment of ‘always online’ brain.

They genuinely believe Twitch is some kind of public good, some kind of default level of infrastructure like plumbing, that just works, forever, with no problems, because magic.

Hosting videos almost no one watches is a waste of money, and deleting them is among the least worst things Twitch can do to keep the lights on.

Twitch is a massive loss leader in a hyperprofit oriented conglomerate megacorp, in a shit-tier economy thats primed to become a burning-dumpster-of-shit-tier economy very soon.

Amazon is giving people months of warning.

But people are freaking out.

…

If you want to save some videos… go buy a 1 or 2 or 4 TB HDD, internal or external, and start saving shit to it. 4 TB HDDs look like they’re going for between roughly $80 to $150, or about 4 to 8 chipotle burritos delivered via personal chauffeur.

The vast majority of Twitch streams and thus highlights are in 1080p, 60fps, 6K bitrate.

Thats roughly 4.5 GB per hour, and thats rounding up.

These people complaining about ‘oh it’d be a full time job to save 5,000 of footage’…

Come on.

Thats 6 of those 4 TB HDDs, for 5000 hours.

https://github.com/ihabunek/twitch-dl

This has been around since 2018, and there are batch downloader clis that people have built off of it.

You wanna save 5000 hours of your shit?

Buy some HDDs, learn how to run some python.

…

The level of entitlement is … just comical, basically.

The alternatives Twitch would be looking at, instead of reducing cost by axing tons of videos almost no one watches, would be things like:

Making watching streaming in higher resolutions/frame rates a premium tier cost for viewers,

Dramatically amping up the presence of unskippable advertisements,

Dramatically altering the revenue splits from ad revenue and how much of a streamer subscribers payment actually goes to the streamer,

Or keeping that split the same but jacking up viewer subscription/bit costs.

No, come on man…!

What we need…

Is another… open world survival pvp crafting game.

Preferably with zombies.

And season passes.

And 83939583 in game cosmetics.

…

About a month ago, as a joke, I said that like the most frustrating, evil game I could imagine would be basically a game that is nothing but shitty NPC escort quests, through an active warzone with other players in PvP, where the NPC is fragile, annoying and whiney and pretentious as possible, moves slower than you run but faster than you walk…

…and every time they get wounded or just scared or drop something or trip or see a butterfly, you go into a bethesda death stare with them where you have to get through a 10+ step dialogue tree that is different everytime and only has a single success state, all others result in you having to retry…

… and its all still an active real time combat zone while you are locked into this, you and idiot NPC still vulnerable to other players.

The state of video gaming is such that within minutes, someone said this would actually be a game they’d want to play, that its an actually novel idea, sounds fun.

When I read that, my mouth dropped, in a dazed stupor.

EDIT: Fuck, all you’d have to do is call it Puppy Girl Escort Quest, and make the person you’re escorting be varying kinds of kawaii waifus, surprise, the game is actually a harem anime.

Like did my original comment give you the impression that I didn’t know people rule 34 every goddamn thing possible?

In the context of the reply you were replying to, basically yes.

I read what you said as hyperbolic, but generally dismissive of the idea that characters in media have sex appeal and/or vicarious romance appeal, often generally, and often to such an extent that it drives people to make and share their own erotic spin offs.

I think it is silly to not realize how much a popularity of a show these days can be reinforced and strengthened by appealing to the fanfic crowd, to not realize that many network execs have realized that they have a better shot at cultivating a… well, cult like fanbase, if they make their show in a way that appeals to that kind of crowd.

Maybe I’m really old but you suggesting that anime is the reason we stuff sex into shit is just so funny to me. I once heard someone say “every generation is the first generation to think they invented sex.”

I didn’t suggest anime was the reason we stuff sex shit into more western media for more broad audiences.

I said that doing that, stuffing overtly sexual and will-they-won’t-they, romantic tension type material into media, is called ‘fan-service’ within the realm of anime, and an analagous or similar thing is happening outside of anime.

The comment I replied to was like why romance if porn exist which was also funny

I think the unstated thing that I could have said, but did not, because I assumed it was common knowledge, would basically be:

For quite a long time, men have been the main consumers of video and still image pornography.

And women have been the primary consumers of erotic novels, in the US at least.

The American media approach to attempting to make the viewer feel aroused thus differs based on the sex they are appealing to:

Straight men, as a market demo, generally go for visual sex appeal and sex acts, overt or covert lewd gestures, tight fitting or revealing clothes etc.

Straight women, as a market demo, generally go for on screen romance, for the build up to and moments of dramatic sexual tension, will they won’t they scenarios, the context around a relationship that builds up to the actual sex, etc.

In general, for men, sex appeal is direct, physical, literal, and for women, it is more cerebral, more about mental framing and constructing scenarios that feature, or could potentially feature wish fulfilment, being desired by a person with preferred character traits, etc.

These are of course not absolute truths with no exceptions, there are many exceptions, and yes I am aware that creating the media environment in this way reinforces the norms themselves.

Nonetheless, this is still quite true in general, in aggregate, when you run the numbers.

So… thats why it makes sense to conflate sex and romance from the perspective of a media exec designing a show.

Sex sells, you just package it differently if you’re appealing to men or women.

To most media execs:

Men want the sex.

Women want the story about why the sex is happening.

… Have you not heard of Tumblr? DeviantArt?

Gooning or swooning to shipping fanfiction and fan made eroge / nsfw art has been a huge component of many fandoms, of all kinds, for at least two decades.

The reaction from a whole lot of more modern media is to just capture a lot more of that in the official media itself.

In anime in particular, this is called ‘fan-service.’

Porn is absolutely a giant competitor in the ‘digital media consumption / attention’ market, and it completely makes sense that for people who believe in making every digital media product with as broad an appeal as possible, that there’s been a trend toward an analog of fan-service outside of anime.

Maybe one day, someone in charge of making video games will figure out remember that compelling, unique, decently challenging and rewarding gameplay is the actual fundamental component of a video game, and that everything else is important, but ultimately secondary to that.

I mean…

There absolutely still are widespread, massive shortages.

https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5090/

https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5080/

https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5070ti/

https://www.nowinstock.net/computers/videocards/nvidia/rtx5070/

As of the time I post this, all models of all RTX 50 series cards are completely out of stock at every large online retailer, other than resellers/scalpers on Ebay.

BestBuy, B&H, NewEgg, Amazon… literally 0 available stock.

Yes, they did also raise their prices, but there is still a massive stock shortage.

99% sure MicroCenter is also effectively completely out of stock for any online purchaser as well, as they basically only ship if you’re within a one to two hour drive of one of their physical store locations, and they don’t actually have very many locations…

Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here.

I agree with the sentiment of this… MTX/lootbox shenanigans are a bad, harmful practice that should be much more heavily restrained…

But that has nothing to do with being a monopoly.

At this point, its a widespread industry problem.

You’d address that with regulation, but not on the basis of Steam being a de facto monopoly, instead based on some kind of consumer protection regulation.

… But Trump and Elon are blowing all of that up, so, probably not gonna happen anytime soon.

Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard.

10 - 30 % really isn’t that unreasonable compared to a lot of existing comptetitors… though I guess we’ll see how their ongoing lawsuit around that ends up.

Either way, this also doesn’t make or not make them a monopoly, unless you or the ongoing lawsuit can prove that a 30% is functionally an outsized monopoly rent, wildly out of step with the rest of the industry.

If this is instead roughly in line with the rest of the industry, you’d again need to address this with some other legislation that spans the whole industry, not specifically targeting Steam as a monopoly.

The word for a market dominated by only a few very large players is oligopoly, not… polyopoly.

Not saying you’re saying that, just saying.

…

As to the etymology…

Its derives from Greek.

A monopoly has one (mono) influential seller for many (poly) consumers.

An oligopoly has a few, wealthy (oligo, as in oligarch, oligarchy) sellers for many (poly) consumers.

Importantly, in Greek, poly is closely related to polis, meaning basically ‘all of the people/citizens’.

This is also where English gets ‘Politics’ from.

…

Also, I wrote a whole other comment, but the mere existence of any competitors, no matter how small… doesn’t mean you aren’t a monopoly.

Its just means you aren’t a perfect monopoly, which basically never exists in real life, outside of public utilities.

If the rubric for ‘is it a monopoly?’ was ‘do any competitors exist?’, then basically no company that’s ever been broken up or regulated for being a monopoly was actually a monopoly.

A lot of people seem to think that a monopoly has a much, much more direct and literal definition than it actually does.

The definition the FTC uses is:

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.

That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.

Courts look at the firm’s market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area.

Some courts have required much higher percentages.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined

I have a bachelor’s in Econ.

The people that run and advise the FTC have PhDs.

(Well, at least untill Elon and Trump put the fucking Shark Tank guy in charge, or something like that.)

Generally speaking, a monopolist is a single entity that has captured a huge chunk of an otherwise varying and well differentiated market, if your market is closer to the theoretical (ie, not real) idea of perfect competition, or if you’re talking about a consolidated market with only a few major players, the monopolist has at least 50% of the market, though, depending on other factors, that line may be drawn at up to 75% ish.

Different specific situations, regions, laws, etc. establish differing specific criteria… but the idea is not that a monopolist is defined by being literally 100% of the market.

That situation would specifically be referred to as a ‘perfect monopoly’, and like ‘perfect competition’, is basically theoretical only, or a situation where you’re looking at something like a local public utility or some kind of government/state entity.

In actual mainstream academic and legal usage though, a monopoly is a single entity in the market has a very outsized market share when compared to any other market participant, such that its actions alone can very significantly affect all other market participants.

…

Now… when it comes to Steam… a whole lot of the arguement is ‘what is and is not the market, what constitutes its boundaries?’

If you define it as just ‘PC video games’, then sure Steam likely is an effective monopoly.

But if you define it as ‘all digital games’, then no, not even close, the Google Play Store and Apple Store are responsible for far more digital game downloads than Steam, way waaay more games are mobile games than PC games, if you go by yearly or monthly downloads, or market share.

It gets even more complicated with cross platform games.

Ultimately, it would be up to a lawsuit, lawyers, judges, industry experts, to argue all of the specifics of exactly whether or not its legally valid to formally classify Steam as a monopoly that would need to be broken up or penalized or regulated in some way, and a huge part of that legal battle would be based around differing definitions of what exactly Steam is a monopoly if, and whether those precise definitions are valid.

…

‘Other options exist for consumers’ or ‘they don’t have a perfect monopoly’ is not a valid arguement against Steam being a monopoly if Steam facilitates 85% of PC game sales, and the other 15% is split up between 10 or so other digital store fronts.

If that is your rubric for ‘what is the market’, then yeah, Steam is a monopoly.

But, if your rubric is ‘all digital games’, then no, Steam is just a large player in a market with other larger players, other slightly smaller players, and many other very small players.

…

Beyond that, a huge part of legally being determined to be a monopoly is unethical/illegal behavior of the ‘monopolist’ being used to obtain or maintain their monopoly.

In Steam’s case… I think that would be pretty hard to substantiate, its more so just that Steam had the idea first, expanded upon it quite a lot, and no one really bothered to try to compete with them on the same level untill basically the Epic store, fairly recently.