Not really… This isn’t people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out

I’m not sure customers are falling for it - this is why voting with your wallet doesn’t work. People rage against games that launch in an unfinished state, particularly when they’re full price. Steam reviews often incorporate price point - statements like “don’t buy this at full price” or “this might have been worth it at $20, but this is not a $70 game” come up a lot

Sales for AAA games are way down, we just saw the biggest failure in gaming history. Casual reading of steam reviews show people clearly have different expectations based on price, Twitter sometimes explodes with anger at specific moves (like Helldivers requiring PSN) and they back off (temporarily), but they always go back to the bullshit

The feedback mechanism of “voting with your wallet” doesn’t communicate this message. Metrics show purchases, refunds, and active users… That’s what fits on a spreadsheet. They see a game failing, but that doesn’t mean they’ve understood why

AAA studios don’t want to understand what makes a game succeed or fail - they just want a formula to min-max ROI. They want strong numbers at launch, but they also want to minimize production costs, and they treat costs (like developers) as line items - they learn the wrong lessons, because they aren’t concerned with the creative part of game design. They want to be the next Madden or assassin’s creed, they want to figure out how to get players to pay $70 + micro transactions (or better yet a subscription too), but they also want their employees to be interchangeable cogs they can push to burn out then replace

AAA gaming is dying from this, but it’s an oligarchy at this point - large corporations are unable to understand nuance or truly innovate - these are things people do when they have autonomy. They don’t do team building or R&D anymore - that’s a gamble that sometimes pays off big, but not in a quarter or two. They aquire then kill off what made the team work in the first place - any individual can tell you that’s a recipe for failure, but by nature they keep the decision making far removed from the people actually doing the work

But then someone will see a spreadsheet and calculate the “missed” revenue, and whoever made that decision either gets replaced or given strict orders next time

Even if they manage to dig their heels in, it will come up again and again. It looks like a money shaped hole, and so organizationally they’ll keep coming back to it

It is a great way to make games, many indie games do this. A team can do this, but a corporation can’t - subtlety doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet

That’s the thing - AI isn’t about size, it’s about categorizing the state of the world. If you can understand an action in context and possible responses, a Markov chain can learn and respond appropriately with the processing of a calculator - it really doesn’t take much

I think an individual opinion can matter, even k the face of commercial success

But here’s the thing - “I don’t like it” doesn’t cut it. If you can’t tell me why you don’t like the beetles, your opinion is less than worthless

Personally, I think the beetles were great, and I think rush of rain was too. It was the first rouglike platformer shooter I’ve ever heard of… The beetles consistently pushed boundaries, doing it once doesn’t put you on their level

On the other hand, the beetles were able to to that because no one was there to tell them no. I agree with the sentiment - games are art. I’d happily overlook a dozen failures for each success

They’re trying to hedge their bets. Nintendo effectively dropped out of the home console market, Microsoft has transitioned away from the console, so Sony is dipping a toe in

Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job

You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture

You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through

Just to put this in context:

There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason

I wouldn’t…I like the struggle. It’s only fun to dominate when it feels earned, I want to feel like I’m playing at my best more than anything

Language is an evolving thing. Doctorow coined the word to specifically apply to marketplaces who control the link between consumers and producers (or multiple such relationships when you add in advertising and/or selling data)

It quickly was expanded to generally refer to user/customer hostile practices we see in late stage capitalism

I think he even spoke about it in an interview with Adam Hanover, once you put a word out there it takes on a life of its own

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

Ideas have both quality and value, and they interconnect to make the backbone of interactive experiences

That’s it exactly. The way the ideas interconnect and the way they’re presented to the player is everything. That’s execution, that’s everything - the ideas are just what’s in your head

Ideas are nothing. Everyone has a million daydreams, the most special and creative idea in the world is worthless if you can’t express it.

Execution is everything. Hell, you don’t even need an idea - you can draw random design elements out of a bag and come up with something great

Because they’re using hacktivist groups as a proxy. They just deny all involvement, and probably keep it all isolated from the fancy military grade tools and techniques

Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet

Seriously… The closer to three edge we get, the faster enshitification goes. No one is writing algorithms with users in mind… Not for a paycheck anyways

We’re getting to the point where we all need to carve out bubbles of curated Internet for our friends and family

I had the original with the expansion, I used to play Tony hawk online

There was no psn back then though, you just plugged in and were good to go

I’d personally love an ev bike, but it’d be wasted on me right now. I really want an electric car because you could run the AC all night and power a computer - I want a little hotel on wheels

Ultimately, do they care? Most shareholders are in it for the stock price, this kind of thing might affect it slightly but I doubt it’d shift the needle much

But the switch isn’t just an underpowered console… It’s a handheld with an HDMI port