Fair, but given the degradation of gaming these days I think a lot of people who aren’t paying attention have an outdated and understated view of just how bad things are. A parent might be thinking: wow had a subscription, so this game with micro transactions isn’t all that bad, not recognizing just how tuned modern predatory gaming has become at extracting money and addicting its users.

WoW mostly addicted people to playing (consuming their time), you can go hours and hours of gameplay without inputting more money. But mobile games maximize extracting maximal profit for minimal gameplay. There’s no functional difference between a gacha pull and a slot machine pull. It’s an endless, mindless set of pretty lights where you just hit the buy button over and over and over. If you sat people down and made them watch (with a running cost total) most people would immediately see the resemblance to a casino.

I think it’s helpful to break things down into more granular levels of predation, just to help clarify how bad it’s getting, even if all of it is problematic.

I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.

Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.

I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.

It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.

I how you’re doing better, but also this sounds like the start to a fun romantic comedy or bro movie. Two strangers doing research on the best bridge to jump off of becoming unlikely friends.

Honestly the last decade plus does feel like the lead up paragraph in a history textbook to some major paradigm shift. But it could still be years and years away. But it does feel inevitable.

That would be great. The only time I’m ever adjusting the slider is the dimmest 5%. The top 50% of the slider really doesn’t matter to me. It’s annoying trying to hit exactly the right pixel on the low end though

Discord is great as chat program. It should’ve only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should’ve had very little value to any decent organization.

Every single small game I play has effectively the entirety of their support, community and forums run through discord. Instead of easy to search and discover forums, I have to use crappy infinite chat logs. It sucks.

And you can absolutely trust that tons of executives will definitely not understand this distinction and will use AI even in areas where it’s actively harmful.

Agreed. I keep waffling on my feelings about it. It definitely doesn’t feel like our laws properly handle the scale that LLMs can take advantage of ‘fair use’. It also feels like yet another way to centralize and consolidate wealth, this time not money, but rather art and literary wealth in the hands of a few.

I already see artists that used to get commissions now replaced by endless AI pictures generated via a Lora specifically aping their style. If it was a human copying you, they’d still be limited by the amount they could produce. But an AI can spit out millions of images all in the style you perfected. Which feels wrong.

Google says no, you don’t need one.

Also no golden parachute to pay out

It’s weird how they can take the long view on some things and yet they will happily run a company into the ground for a 1% higher quarterly return.

Feasible for a non-profit however

Or the beginner gear makes the hobby super tedious and difficult. Who knows if you would’ve liked it with proper tools instead of trying to make it work with a shitty, poorly working set up.

Both sides are twisting words. Pirating truly isn’t stealing, but rather closer to unauthorized use. The word ‘steal’ is used because they want to imply that it’s the same thing as taking a physical thing that can be lost. It engenders a certain feeling that they’re wanting to invoke. Stealing sounds worse than unauthorized use. Doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to do, but it isn’t the sort of wrong that they’re implying.

My introduction was the old Call to Power game. Still waiting for a Civ-like game that has a near-future age of gameplay. That was always the coolest part to me.

Feels like most of the similar games today are either historical/current or purely scifi. I like the transition point. To play out possible ways of advancing forward. How do we get from today to entering the stars? Those were fun scenarios to play out.

There’s a couple of mods for civ that covers this I know, but they’re all abandoned and somewhat buggy these days. Plus this sort of thing works best if the game is balanced around it to begin with.

Things I need a storefront/launcher to provide me:

• Reviews
• Wish list
• Beta/Alternate build installations
• Friend list, chat, game invite functions
• Mod browser
• Refund policy
• Excellent search and discovery tools

Nice to have:

• Forum for guides/support
• Game sharing
• Ability to move game files

If all you want is to launch a game, why keep the ‘launcher’ at all? Games used to just… start. No separate program needed.

Binge drinking in celebration of first female president. Then binge drinking because Trump became president instead?