Ottomateeverything

Some of the responses here dance around the truth, but none of them hit the nail on the head. This is a bit of an artifact of how the mobile industry works and the success rate vs profitability vs the way ads work on mobile.

Yes, hands down, this is not an effective advertising strategy. Many of these game companies are very successful so it's not because they're stupid. It's because these ads aren't advertising campaigns.

These ads are market research. The point isn't to get you to download their game. At all. The point is to figure out what people will engage with.

These ads are all game ideas. Mobile game ideas are a dime a dozen million. They're easy to come up with, cost a lot to build, and many don't monetize well and therefore aren't profitable. Because of that, it's very expensive and unsustainable to build games and test them and see what succeeds.

Instead, companies come up with ideas, build a simple video demonstrating the idea, and put up ads with those videos. They then see how many people engage with the ads to determine how many people would even visit the download page for that game. Building a quick video is much much much cheaper than building a game. This is the first step in fast failing their ideas and weeding out bad ones.

Essentially the companies have lots of ideas, build lots of simple videos, advertise them all, and see which ones get enough engagement to be worth pursuing further, while the rest get dropped entirely.

But those ads need to link somewhere. So they link to the companies existing games. Because they're already paying for it. So why not.

But building a whole new game is also expensive. Dynamics in mobile gaming are very odd because of the way "the algorithm" works. It is actually extremely expensive to get advertising in front of enough people that enough download it that you have any meaningfully large player base to analyze at all.

So the next trick is these companies will take the successful videos, build "mini games" of those ads as a prototype, and then put that in their existing game. This means they can leverage their existing user base to test how much people will engage with the game, and more importantly, eventually test how well it monetizes. Their existing users have already accepted permissions, likely already get push notifications, and often already have their payment info linked to the app. It also means they don't have to pay for and build up a new store presence to get eyeballs on it. Many of the hurdles of the mobile space have already been crossed by their existing players, and the new ones who clicked the ads have demonstrated interest in the test subject. This is why many of the ads link to seemingly different games that have a small snippet of what you actually clicked on.

If these mini games then become successful enough, they will be made into their own standalone game. But this is extremely rare in mobile. The way the store algorithms and ads work make it pretty fucking expensive to get new games moving, so they really have to prove it to be worthwhile in the long run.

So yeah, most people look at this the wrong way - it does actually go against common sense advertising, but that's because it's not actually advertising. It's essentially the cheapest way for companies to get feedback from people that actually play mobile games about what kinds of games they would play.

It's not advertising. It's market analysis.

This whole thread is a whole lot of hullabaloo about complaining about legality about the way YouTube is running ad block detection, and framing it as though it makes the entire concept of ad block detection illegal.

As much as you may hate YouTube and/or their ad block policies, this whole take is a dead end. Even if by the weird stretch he's making, the current system is illegal, there are plenty of ways for Google to detect and act on this without going anywhere remotely near that law. The best case scenario here is Google rewrites the way they're doing it and redeploys the same thing.

This might cost them like weeks of development time. But it doesn't stop Google from refusing to serve you video until you watch ads. This whole argument is receiving way more weight than it deserves because he's repeatedly flaunting credentials that don't change the reality of what Google could do here even if this argument held water.

Provided that a Third Party User is followed by or following a Threads account, Meta will ingest these pieces of data specifically:

Username

Profile Picture

IP Address

Name of Third Party Service

Posts from profile

Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)

So if you follow a threads user or even if a threads user just follows you, they pull all this data?

IMO this seems like reason to defederate across the board. Someone else can leak your info to Meta.

or other expensive setups

As much as I lost trust in his bullshittery a long time ago, his need to mention the cost of critical safety systems is what stuck out to me the most here. That's how you know the priorities are backwards.

TL;DR: Employees say his actions led to a lot of direction changing that forced management to scramble, and the lower workers had to bear the brunt of this. They also complained that OW2 needed more work or would be review bombed on Steam and his leadership refused. Shareholders are still happy to fellate him though because he made them a lot of money.

So, no actual news here.

This is the most asinine approach IMO.

"Let's release a worse product. Hey, no one likes it. Okay, let's spend money on games so THEY can essentially force people to use our software. Hey, still, no one really likes it. Okay, let's try to give away stuff for free. Hey, people use our thing for the free stuff but still no one likes it for any other reason."

They just keep spending money to up their numbers and their product is still missing features and inferior to competition. They spend big money on exclusivity, but that is only temporary - if that's how you're getting your customers, you're going to have to keep doing it forever to retain them. If people only use you for free stuff, you're just going to have to keep giving stuff away at a loss to retain them.

This model is not sustainable. You're not doing anything that aligns value with your customers besides just throwing free stuff at them. That's not a business.

What's especially sad to me is they could literally have just spent that same money to improve their launcher and have an actual product. Instead they've invested in temporary stats. They're essentially bankrolling other devs on games with temporary popularity instead of in their lifelong product.

Using other games exclusivity as sway into your ecosystem only works when you have a good product the person would be interested in but they haven't seen it yet. EGS is currently something people are essentially coerced into using but no one really gets any real value out of it other than "well I couldn't buy this game anywhere else"

I bet if such a law existed in less than a month all those AI developers would very quickly abandon the "oh no you see it's impossible to completely avoid hallucinations for you see the math is just too complex tee hee" and would actually fix this.

Nah, this problem is actually too hard to solve with LLMs. They don't have any structure or understanding of what they're saying so there's no way to write better guardrails.... Unless you build some other system that tries to make sense of what the LLM says, but that approaches the difficulty of just building an intelligent agent in the first place.

So no, if this law came into effect, people would just stop using AI. It's too cavalier. And imo, they probably should stop for cases like this unless it has direct human oversight of everything coming out of it. Which also, probably just wouldn't happen.

Same shit in my area. I've asked landlords why they're increasing rents and they say things like "well based on local prices and value of the property...." I've asked multiple what makes them think that and it's always "we have software that estimates what our units are worth". So now any landlord raises rent and they all raise rent in unison. No renovations or new perks to the property. It's just "well someone else hiked rent this year so now your new lease does too".

I don't know if this makes me "a redditor" somehow or what, but....

As a dev, I am deeply troubled by the gaming industry so calmly walking into kernel anti cheats. It's insane and being tossed around like it's nothing.

Helldivers especially, since they picked one of the sketchiest ones and it's a game that entirely doesn't need it.

I have no idea if Reddit has suddenly picked up on this, but I've been pissed since at least Valorants release, but have seen more YT videos talking about it recently.

Musk said he made the decision fearing that Moscow would retaliate with nuclear weapons.

I feel like this part is even worse. His opinion sucks and is fucking stupid, but he's literally saying he's making decisions (which have an impact on thousands of lives) because of his speculation on the Russian response.

He's not a fucking general, this shit shouldn't be his decision. He is not informed or educated on these decisions and he's playing with people's literal lives. He's literally trying to play god with his space toys.

I'm a software dev and have worked with some of these companies. It's kind of sad because I liked the idea of mobile games and working with them was a bit like seeing the devil behind the curtains. I dreamt of making cool little games based on fun and unique ideas and quickly learned it's all a huge well oiled machine chugging through market data to find the most effective money extracting methods they can come up with.

For every bit you think these companies are grimey money chasers, I promise you it's at least 5 times worse.

ITC: Someone not understanding the difference between not understanding and not agreeing.

Yeah I don't understand how there's a whole article of "no one is using it" and the author then states "it's OK, there's nothing wrong with it".

If there's nothing wrong with it, why is no one using it?

Maybe because 11 is fucking awful. Maybe it's the ads. Maybe it's removing fuck tons of features for no apparent reason. Maybe it's the fucking awful design choices.

But no, the author just says "every decision has haters, people just hate it because it's different"

Yeah... How the fuck is Google action here "monopolistic" and Apple literally refusing to let anyone in at all somehow isn't? What a joke.

To make sure millenials can't read your password, 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓲𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮.

How would this mess with millennials? I think you mean gen z.

I could see an argument about medical devices, HVAC, and vehicles... But I don't think I'd agree with them. Except maybe medical.

Consoles and toothbrushes though? What the fuck?

This is entirely fabricated and opinionated bullshit from Forbes. There is no evidence that this is actually happening and the headline is extremely clickbait. Many other sites have covered this and I can't find any other than Forbes that take it this way. This is an opinion piece based on a response from a fucking chat bot despite that response semi conflicting with Google's official outline of the feature.

Google has announced an AI chat bot function for Bard. You can open a new conversation directly with Bard and in that conversation data is not encrypted and will be sent to Google. There is no evidence of it "reading through your history" or that future chats you have with actual humans are going to be collected or unencrypted.

If you read past all the "breaks" and such, the author themself even falls back on this:

For its part, Bard says “Google has assured that all Bard analysis would happen on your device, meaning your messages wouldn't be sent to any servers. Additionally, you would have complete control over what data Bard analyzes and how it uses it.”

Let me rephrase that. The author is quoting a fucking response from the BARD CHATBOT and then further extrapolating what the fucking chat bot said. This is not Google. This is A CHAT BOT.

All of the privacy changes posted by Google themselves do not outline anything more than your conversations with Bard being uploaded. But the author tries to then argue about bards own response he got.

But I suspect we’ll see that on-device assurance watered down in practice. It will make sense to provide a more seamless interface between a smartphone and the cloud.

The author is saying he's scared. And that Google will dance around a loophole its chat bot mentioned. But this is his own opinion about what he thinks will happen because of a response he got from an AI.

This is fucking ludicrous fear mongering.

Why not just sort me out of the Mailing-list?

Because that would cost their time instead of yours

Clarifying "Android" here feels misleading. Sure, they're all Android devices, but they're not what people think of when they think of Android devices. And they're also unlikely to be the ones most people buy.

You could also say "cheap Chinese TV boxes" and it'd still be accurate, and the devices people would think of would be more closely related to the actual devices in question.

This has basically nothing to do with Android. You might as well say "plastic TV boxes" at that point.

He repeatedly is stumbling into the same fucking roadblocks tech companies have struggled with for a decade or more, and he's walking through even worse thought processes when there's mountains of data and analysis and proof on what does and doesn't work.

It's like rewatching a train wreck in slow mo, but for some reason there's extra explosions added in.

How people thought, let alone still think, he's some sort of tech genius is absolutely beyond me.

No no no, you're missing the important piece

On April 1, 2023, three undercover agents met with Faye... Faye asked if the undercover agents were federal law enforcement.

They didn't have to say yes, because it was April fool's day!

I don't know about any of the others, but at least Rocket League and Fall Guys are great examples here.

Both games already existed and were extremely successful on Steam.

Both games got bought by Epic and we were told they were going to get continued support.

Both games were then REMOVED from Steam.

Both games then started suddenly having objectively worse monetization. Both communities grew a pretty negative opinion of the changes.

Both games are objectively less popular now, though at least some of this is just age/fads.

But both games are just objectively in a worse spot than they were before. All Epic did was make them objectively worse.

I really don't understand how people still hang on to defending EGS. It's been shit since release, it's still missing basic features years later, and it's been found doing tons of shady shit.

I'm all for more competition in these spaces, because, you know, competition pushes the companies to one up each other and build compelling features. But EGS is just blatantly missing shit and is explicitly user-hostile by buying exclusivity to their vastly inferior platform. Steam hasn't had to react at all because they're still so far ahead, and Epic is just fucking trolling users by forcing them onto their platform without working cloud saves or even non-buggy installs.

The irony that they flag-wave "user choice" while doing this just totally baffles me.

The requirement to create an account to view replies/threads is a show stopper for me and it has somehow made Twitter even more useless. It barely had value when it was freely legible but it's not worth sharing data with them to get festering garbage in return.

Yet he thinks people are going to pay for it?

We live in a world where social media and communication are commoditized as fuck and people refuse to pay premiums for shit they can do for free elsewhere. How is Twitter going to compete with Instagram, Threads, Mastodon, Reddit, and Facebook when it's arguably the worst choice, objectively the least feature rich, yet the only one that costs money?

I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments "because I like clean code. If it's not in the git log, it's not a comment."

Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn't understand "clean" code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.

Yeah, this makes me so fucking mad as a player but like.... It actually works super well so I can't blame them.

Mobile gaming is full of shitty elevator pitches and super high failure rates so it just kinda.... Makes sense.

But I still hate it.

I'm actually shocked to find how many people agree with the OPs sentiment, but maybe there's something about the demographics of who's using a FOSS Reddit alternative or something. I'm not saying everyone is wrong or has something wrong with them or whatever, but I entirely agree with people finding this valuable, so maybe I can answer the OPs question here.

I've been working remotely long since before the pandemic. I've worked remotely for multiple companies and in different environments. I am extremely introverted and arguably anti social. I tend to want to hang out with many of my friends online over in person. But that doesn't mean I think there's no advantage at all. To be honest, when I first started remote work, I thought the in person thing was total bullshit. After a few meetings my opinions drastically changed.

I've pushed (with other employees, of course) to get remote employees flown in at least a few times a year at multiple companies. There are vastly different social dynamics in person than over video. Honestly, I don't understand how people feel otherwise, especially if they've experienced it. I've worked with many remote employees over the years and asked about this, and most people have agreed with me. Many of these people are also introverted.

I think one of the big things here is people harping on the "face" thing. Humans communicate in large part through body language - it's not just faces. There's also a lot of communication in microexpressions that aren't always captured by compressed, badly lit video. So much of communication just isn't captured in video.

Secondly, in my experience, online meetings are extremely transactional. You meet at the scheduled time, you talk about the thing, then you close the meeting and move on. In person, people slowly mosy over to meetings. And after the meeting ends, they tend to hang around a bit and chat. When you're working in an office, you tend to grab lunch with people. Or bump into them by the kitchen. There's a TON more socializing happening in person where you actually bump into other people and talk them as people and not just cogs in the machine to get your work done.

I find in person interactions drastically change my relationships with people. Some people come off entirely different online and it's not until meeting them in person that I really feel like I know them. And then I understand their issues and blockers or miscommunications better and feel more understanding of their experiences.

Maybe things are different if you work jobs with less interdepencies or are more solo. I've always worked jobs that take a lot of cooperation between multiple different people in different roles. And those relationships are just way more functional with people I've met and have a real relationship with. And that comes from things that just don't happen online.

Im honestly really curious how anyone could feel differently. The other comments just seem mad at being required to and stating the same stuff happens online, but it just doesn't. I do wonder if maybe it has to do with being younger and entering the workplace more online or something. But I've worked with hundreds of remote employees and never heard a single one say the in person stuff to be useless. And I've heard many say exactly the opposite.

It's a dogwhistle for jigaboo

Unironically, yeah, this is the nail in the coffin for me.

There's no one single answer to this. Some have been mentioned in other comments, but it's a combination of a few different things:

• Control: They have much more control over your experience as a native app than a web app.
• Ad revenue: It's significantly harder to block ads coming through the built in web views, and/or they can just build them in natively which is even harder.
• Integration: it's easier to do IAPs or subscriptions through native controls, which means less resistance, which means people are more likely to end up doing it.
• Data: it's easier to hoover up user data via native APIs than through the browser. There's way more accessible, especially if you can ask for a bunch of permissions and people don't notice/care. This makes any user tracking they do way more effective and any data they sell way more valuable.
• Notifications: Recently browsers have started adding support for this but it's not as effective. Push notifications are a huge boon to user engagement and this is a huge money maker. Having native notifications is a huge sell in this equation.
• Persistence: If you have your app on a user's phone, it ends up in the list of apps, meaning they pass by it very frequently. It's basically free advertising and living in their head without them even noticing. This is especially true on iOS where basically all of your apps are in your face all of the time.
• Performance: Native apps run way better and can look way better than web sites. If you just use web views this is mostly moot but still may make a small difference.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few but you get the idea.

Websites are basically just inferior versions of native apps, and even if you use a hybrid/web view approach, you get many of the benefits and have the option to "upgrade" to a real native app later.

That being said, I fucking hate this shit. I don't agree that companies should do this, but it hands down does make financial sense. In a society entirely driven by capital and profit, it makes sense, but from a consumer perspective, it fucking sucks. I don't want to have to install the Facebook app to see some small businesses "web site" that's really just a Facebook page. I don't want to install reddits shitty native app to read more than 2 comments off a post about a solution to my problem.

It's legitimately consumer hostile, but company profits are more important than people in our society.

This shit is so much harder to read. I don't understand how this is getting approved. Even driving navigation feels like a torrential horde of vomit with all the high contrast streets sliding by.

Sure, it might make for prettier screenshots, but it's actually functionally harder to read, as the important/highlighted elements just don't stand out as much when literally everything "stands out". I feel like this has been a continued trend from Google Maps and this might be the final straw for me... I've already noticed having a harder time distinguishing turns.

Yeah, the scary part of this is that as much as I absolutely would never go near this shit with a ten foot pole when it's clearly still woefully inadequate and over hyped.... They very frequently drive withing ten feet of me because for some reason it's legal to put this shit on roads with unwilling participants.

1. It's bland and boring. Why would you ever want all the apps on your phone to be the same color? I understand some amount of consistent theming and styling so you know what things are buttons, where to find certain settings, etc. But Material You pushes them all to use the same exact color theme. This makes it harder to distinguish between Messages, Chat, and every other messaging app that takes on the the Material You coloring. They're all text, in the same font and color, on blobs that are the same color, with buttons that are all the same icon sets..... Can I figure it out? Sure. But it all blends together. It's bland. And soulless. It's in a way "commoditizing" design and making everything samey. This is especially drastic after Material Pre-You was extremely heavy on color. Go look at all the old Material design stuff. Everything is vibrantly showing brand colors.

2. It's dull. Holo was really dull. Material brought bright and saturated colors. Material You pushes back faded, low saturation, mushy, dull colors. Everything feels "dead", especially in contrast.

3. Everything is the same squishy shapes. Android has a long history of things like app icons having distinct shapes and emphasis on outlines and sillouhettes. This is shoving back even harder on "everythijg is a circle or a squircle"

4. Pixel has absolutely butchered features and customization options in order to make way for.... Pick a color?

5. Everything is fat and chunky. Buttons and margins are obscenely large. It feels childish. Material was sleek and efficient. You seems to take space for sake of taking space. It's wasteful and dysfunctional. More stuff in the notification shade (like brightness) was pushed behind another swipe because they just don't have space with all the quick settings having gobbled more space despite showing fewer shortcuts. This is just one example, but these things are everywhere.

6. Google does not take authoritarian control over app design of every app in their store. As such, devs take more time to update their apps. And so many apps just don't bother for a while. This means every change comes at the cost of fragmentation. And Material You is explicitly pushing for further unification. So it's inception is actively hurting its purpose. Case in point, skim through Googles own apps - they're in varying states of migrated, so Googles own first party apps aren't even consistent.

I understand this design could be appealing on paper, especially if you look at it in a vacuum. Objectively, it's a pretty good design language. But Android's previous design language was measurably better. It was objectively more efficient. So the people who have been using it blatantly are shown all the shortcomings. If you buy a new device with it, there's no context and it seems decent. If you upgrade, tons of the things you use just disappear . Instantly. Which shows its problems much faster.

Google has literally walked backwards here. In many ways. And it's half done, has problems, is bland, and blatantly less exciting and efficient than the thing it's replacing.

Libre Office is a good replacement for Office/Word, but it is much heavier than WordPad.

IANAL, and not that it really makes this bullshit any better but...

It's unlikely that agreeing to terms of service that claim you waive rights to any class action lawsuit would actually hold up as legally binding in court. Many of these agreements aren't reply binding are already legally gray... Plus, universally vaguely signing your legal rights away in any contract doesn't hold any water either.

I highly doubt you'd actually lose any rights to a check box that's bound to "you can't ever sue us".

Google Assistant is definitely getting worse and worse all the time. When the Google Homes first released they were actually pretty useful and handy. I was willing to pick a few up and they served a good purpose. They ran CIRCLES around Alexa and all those.

Now many years later, the devices don't hear questions correctly, have to ask them four different times, they can't even pick up my wife's prompt words anymore, don't even give reasonable answers when they do get the question right... It's made hundreds of dollars worth of devices infuriating and useless.

I bought a product that worked. It no longer works because it's been "updated".

The IRS should be calculating what we owe.

They do. That's why you occasionally get bills saying "hey you miscalculated by 70 bucks." They already do the work, they just still make us do it too for.... Reasons.

Unfortunately this is one of those things that you can't significantly develop/test on closed private streets.

Even if we hold this to be true (and I disagree in large part), the point is that Tesla's systems aren't at that stage yet. Failing to recognize lights correctly during live demos and such are absolutely things you can test and develop on closed streets or in a lab. Tesla's shouldn't be allowed on roads until they're actually at a point where there are no glaring flaws. And then they should be allowed in smaller numbers.

Hey at least photos worked....

Video playback doesn't work half the time, and the other half the time it insists on 140p playback and then freezes.

They're doubling down on something they've been failing at for years.

It's 2023 and Nintendo is still churning out the same minimum effort bullshit Pokemon and Mario games, and they still haven't figured out online multiplayer.

True

The max resolution of the Switch is 1080p 30 FPS. Nintendo is a joke and a shell of it's former self.

Yeah, I wouldn't go anywhere near that far. The N64 is the only console that was ever really top of its class in raw specs. That's never been Nintendo's game, and they've never even tried. And, the FTC leaks have shown Xbox is considered 3rd behind the Switch.

Arguably the GameCube was the most complacent and behind the times console they've ever released and it did extremely well.

The Wii started a huge "motion controls" revolution, and even if it didn't stick around, it was fresh and everyone and their mother was trying to buy a Wii.

The Wii U was probably their biggest failure. They tried to do something new and misread the market.

The Switch also brought something entirely new to the market that has redefined the portable. It sold out like crazy and has done extremely well. I know people who own switches that have never purchased any console or handheld.

The Switch isn't trying to compete with Xbox / PS. It's competing with Gameboy and PSP but also allows you to play Mario Kart with the boys. And it has built an entire new device segment with Steam Deck and a million spin offs at this point.

Local couch gameplay has always been Nintendos bread and butter. They're not aiming for hardcore gamers. And they're still succeeding at exactly that.