Personally I feel what it gave them - primarily - was the ability to be independent of Microsoft, not beholden to them in any way whatsoever, and not having to pay them any license fees.
The fact that after putting so much work into making Proton and that whole toolchain amazing it actually turned out faster than Windows, well, that’s juat the delicious icing on the cake, from a commercial perspective.
I guess this means Microsoft’s similar recent move with Office worked out for them financially, even though it caused a lot of backlash.
I can see both sides.
The studio is upset that people are leaving negative reviews for what the studio thinks are minor issues and will be fixed by release.
But on the other hand, you can’t expect people to review a game on anything other than the state it is now.
That said, the gamer community is definitely pretty brutal and known to pile on with negative reviews to ‘punish’ the smallest changes they don’t like, and that is especially true for games that get ‘updates’, like live-service games, or in this case, games still in early access. Players hope the bad reviews will make the developers change course, but that’s no good if they go under before they can.
For Early Access, the type of game they picked (something with levelling and upgrades and ‘game meta’) is especially prone to rough feedback too, when compared to other genres like horror or platformers or sandbox games where people are a lot more forgiving.
I imagine they needed to do early access to keep the studio going and maybe to generate funds for the next Ori (fingers crossed?) and I hope that doesn’t end up being the choice that ends them.
They are pursuing “realism” but the pursuit of realism also means that you must sacrifice strong artistic style, because style is - by very definition - deviation from realism.
This is happening because all platforms are optimising for the one single metric that matters most to them - engagement.
When you consider all users as a whole, the way to get engagement is not to have a good UX that lets you tailor what you see, and search for the specific things you are interested in. The way to get it is to shove a constantly changing and brightly coloured stream of “content” right in people’s faces where they don’t have to do any thinking or make any decisions, they just mindlessly click what is offered and consume.
From Netflix’s perspective, they want someone to go from opening the app to watching a video in 10 seconds, and if they don’t achieve that, it’s a failure which they will optimise away.
The platforms have over the years systematically stripped back every control lever you have over what you see, because control means time spent thinking, and time thinking is not time engaging.
Centralisation makes things easy.
If it takes more than 1 minute to onboard to a new service, and especially if you have to overcome any learning barrier (such as what ‘instances’ are and how to choose one) then the vast majority of people will immediately throw that option out and won’t even consider it.
People like bluesky specifically because it gives them something almost identical to what they had before.
They can hardly avoid screwing up, really.
The whole draw of Steam Deck is that it’s a carefully curated experience where everything from the OS upwards is crafted to play nicely together and “Just Work” to bring that console-like experience to PC gaming.
Whatever Microsoft are putting together isn’t going to have that end-to-end consideration. It will be nothing more than a skinned launcher on top of Windows 11, and no matter how shiny that launcher looks you won’t be able to hide from Windows for long. All the normal Windows bloat will be there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you spend as much time messing around in actual Windows as you do playing games.
The UK is about to ban disposable vapes, but I fear it may achieve little.
What the legislation does is to define what “reusable” means, and demand that vapes must meet that.
In reality, I suspect that manufacturers will simply adjust their strategies to produce vapes that are “technically” reusable and rechargeable and meet the law in a bare-minimum way, but really are intended to be used exactly once, just like disposable ones were, and that’s exactly how they will continue to be treated by consumers.
Cost will probably go up 20% to cover it, but that’s all, and in the end even more material will be going in landfill.
In my opinion, what the legislation should have done is to set an absolute minimum price on the cost of a vape pen. That would be very heavy-handed, but it would actually create the strong financial motivation required to force consumers to genuinely treat the vape pen as something they will re-use.
This problem has become more prevalent with AI, but deceptive item listings have been part of the online shopping minefield for a long time.
The same rule applies now as it always has - if it seems too good to be true, then it is.
“72% of that group say real-world rewards are ‘important’ when selecting a new mobile game to download” - says report commissioned by company whose business model is putting real world rewards in mobile games and apps.
Piss off.
I play games to escape the real world a bit and forget it exists, not to slave away doing meaningless tasks for pennies.
Personally, I don’t feel that analogy is a fair comparison.
Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it’s demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.
I don’t think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.
In my opinion, even if you aren’t paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that’s cool, that’s business after all, but they shouldn’t mess around with what they already offered you.
When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that’s a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.
So yeah, it doesn’t matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It’s still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that’s not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.
It’s definitely not a “rouguelike” because it lacks the number one important aspect of either roguelikes (or rogue lites ) which is random generation.
It’s not really bullet hell because while the enemies can shoot the focus is not on dodging bullets but on finding any viable way to manage the hoard, which could involve kiting or tanking, dependant on your build.
So what common elements does the genre have, if we look at games like Vampire Survivors and Brotato?
So maybe:
2D Wave-Survival Autoshooter
That’s just natural. Discord has a huge weight of numbers. People stay where they already are, unless there is significant motivation to move.
Matrix would have to be MUCH better than Discord in terms of features to attract people to move their whole communities and friend groups, not just simply on-par. And that’s pretty tough.
So yes - we’re basically waiting for Discord to continue its slow march into enshittification.
One could argue that Tado should have had more certainty about their business model before they started selling promises they couldn’t keep, but that’s business I suppose.
Presumably Tado anticipated they could capture customers on a free tier and upsell later, but it turns out that when customers have a fully functional basic tier, they generally don’t want to pay money for extras they don’t care about.
And so now, Tado are left with an online service that costs them money to run, but no ongoing revenue. So of course they will try to monetise the subscription.
Of course, part of the problem is that customers have almost been conditioned to expect cloud stuff to be free. And so that’s the price Tado tried to aim for, and now that is causing problems.
Either way though, what they are doing now represents “changing the deal” Darth Vader style - the product previously was a one time purchase and then free after, and they are now trying to make it paid after selling it as free. And that is bad.
Did you genuinely interpret that as a child to mean “If you put something on the Internet will be safe forever”?
As I’m sure you are now aware as an adult, the intended meaning is very much “If you put something on the Internet which is embarrassing to you or damaging to your reputation, then it will be around forever”
It’s a warning that the things you don’t want to stick around could end up being precisely the things which do.
We have all got very accustomed to the notion that we can put content on a website and it will stay there forever, permanently available, as if that site somehow has an obligation to look after it. But they don’t.
It sucks, and there will be a lot of stuff lost, but it’s also good to have a reminder that if there’s data you really care about, you need to look after that data yourself.
It was to figure out if they /really did/ start charging for it, how many people would actually pay.
I hope Tado goes bust because they don’t deserve to survive, treating customers like that.
Revert then.
This is exactly what Microsoft are counting on, that people will simply go “oh well” and just carry on with Windows 11, because any effort needed to move away is too much effort.
Prove them wrong. Stand up for yourself.
Right, and I’m not challenging you on that :)
As someone who games a lot it would be more cost-effective to do it on systems other than the switch (or switch 2) - I agree.
You said what the case is, I was hoping only to add some commentary on why.
Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.
If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)
But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.
This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.
For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*
I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)