funny how the article does not mention lemmy or kbin, but put in disclosure that their parent company have stakes in reddit. And the best the author can do is

If users have invested significant time in a community, it’s going to be a pain to find something amid the sea of federated upstarts that all claim to be the next best thing.

The mentioned article by Rory Mir actually mentioned lemmy and kbin, cause it's EFF. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

it's viral game what do you expect?

Look at the steps we have to go through? Firefox container tabs just for google products, have to switch to DDG as default after every update, have to keep the browser extensions updated, have to use vpn, tried to not use google open auth when register on 3rd party sites, have to clean the cookies regularly, have to click through those cookie settings visiting a site. Oh, and have to go around the amp link when trying to share a searched image/page result.

so similar to say, a redditor trying to sound smart by googling and debating another while both has no qualification on that topic, got it.

cause commercial rental is a commitment, if you can't find another company to take over your lease, chances are you have to pay the majority of left over amount + penalty + restoration. Licensor commitments are similar but probably on tech/software licensing, ie. server rentals, Maya/Speedtree licensing agreement for the site, whatever cloud service they use for backup and share stuff, etc. Those at bigger scale aren't paid year to year like your regular indie studio just subscribe to Adobe/Autodesk for app uses per seat.

Suddenly not interested in the article itself when it detect my ad-blocker.

It's because Nintendo still haven't implement server client networking and host their own dedicated servers. It's why people paid Nintendo Online to play multiplayer Nintendo games are getting scammed.(even Capcom or EA/Epic did batter job on switch then Nintendo.)

That's why you get no real online plays, blame Nintendo's internal policy, not networking complexity.

Let's not forget bot/AI generated websites that just copy paste some irrelevant content template but fits your search terms, and then feeds you tons of ads when you thought you found answers to your questions.

I have trying to find the poll by following link and found nothing but this.

According to a new Harris Poll shared exclusively with Fast Company

So there is no actual source, no ways to check if the poll actually exist or not, no way to check if poll's question phrased in a way to get certain response, how many actually responded to the poll, etc. And, compare to most big news published poll result, a confidence and margin of error.

There for, I simply view this as click bait article to generate engagement, which it did.

Mark my word, once Gabe pass it's gonna be very very different. We have very different things to worried about, like climate change, but on software side and tech we shouldn't rely on monopolies. Valve was kept in that state because all the competition didn't actually put up a fight worth extra investment. The windows store pushed valve to develop SteamOS and Proton, they also back off on some revenue split policy because of EGS's deals. (Let's be honest, not all players care about which launcher they use, as long as they get better deals and can play the game they want.)

And to my experience, Steam's recent years' updates to store/client are not something I like as well.

• I don't like the gamification of sales event etc.
• I don't like the new unlimited scroll type, they backed off a bit and become like 3 pages long until you hit the top/popular/sales part.
• I also don't like some of the UI changes(ie the downloads/library mixed together and not separate item)
• I hated the auto start live streaming thing, if there is option to turn off that please let me know.

For EGS,

• their search sucks
• library page sucks, you can't really organize your free games/purchased games etc.
• auto updates are pretty on par so that's okay.
• their friends/etc also sucks.(not that I care much but at least it's far worse than steam one.)
• I like that they adopted Nintendo's gold coin reward type to encourage consumer to purchase there.
• games from other big publisher usually do require install their clients as well, which sucks. (it's similar on steam as well.)

The common stance against DRM is not the "entitled" part, but to be able to keep playing it even if the companies involved are gone. For games with Denuvo or other DRM there are things like these to consider:

• the Denuvo company's server shuts off(whatever reason, blackout, maintenance,etc), your DRM now can't verify if you have legit copy or not.
• the game company shuts off, no one left to patch out DRM, your game is in limbo. (cause they have to pay Denuvo to keep the licensing/verification. )
• your internet went off.(this part depends on game and how often they need to refresh the "valid" token)

With games that have no DRM you have none of the above concerns.

After reading all the comments, I'm just gonna say that if you don't allow kids to tinker and do their thing, they will learn a lot slower and your "investment" will be left mostly unused. (age range proper hardware/OS of course.) The school policy is not doing the kids a favor, it's a waste of time and tax money that you cultivate a generation of people get used to chrome book and google apps. That's the ultimate purpose for school license being cheaper.

Master as in the production term like gold master. He stolen the first prints before it hits the shelf, thus a "master" thief.

I didn't watch, someone please give a TLDW. Cause I highly suspect this is gonna just be wasting time.

very typical for people that never even run or host their own server from data center or even cloud service.

live streaming is worse in bandwidth consumption compare to youtube with same resolution input to output. Like youtube can do whatever they like to keep the outgoing low even if you encode according to spec. But streaming with the demand of like 4~6s delay their 2nd pass to try lower the output bitrate is just not gonna be as good as youtube. That's why twitch still don't have 4k stream, they have new beta programs thanks to newer codec on newer GPU, as otherwise their data center is gonna get crushed hard.

Repost my comment why gaming laptop is a scam(can't copy comment link cause the link failed for me):

gaming laptops are pretty much scam anyway, as person "once" fall for such scam.

• they are really heavy, not really good with travel.
• they are also power hungry, might be less than your actual tower rig, but significantly more than common "business laptop"
• the battery won't last with degradation where you constantly plug it in.( to gain the boosted frequency where you can play games at higher settings/frame rate)
• your upgrade path is very limited and they won't have the parts after like 2~3 years.(so anything broken you have to try find it on ebay/amazon/aliexpress)

for portable gaming during travel, your best choice is consoles. So switch, steamdeck, heck, even PS4 slim is better than gaming laptop.(hopefully PS5 pro/slim is made into form for easier box/travel format.)

Well, I switched to DDG after last time someone said it's doing a much better job then Google's now. So I've switched all my defaults to DDG. On the contrary, users don't mind which search engine, as long as they give proper results efficiently.

Google's search result is honestly worse atm.

The source interview section to the time stamp: https://youtu.be/4b_o5ueZRF0?si=IZzMan9sVQOV4Qq6&t=4797

Main short comings(for the parts I know and working with):

• There are many inter-connected features that works best if you use them together, so for example, if you want to use Lumen but don't want to use Nanite you can, but the performance would be worse since the virtual texture part of rendering lumen scene is a lot more efficient when you use Nanite geo. Similar with VSM.
• If you upgrade project from old UE4, there is A LOT you need to touch on. It's like a ticket generator if you upgrade.(but yeah, do a cross gen engine upgrade would do that for you.)
• TSR(their temporal super resolution upscaler) still not really working out of the box and most I know just use FSR/DLSS/XeSS
• many features are moving target BUT was talking point during recent releases. ie. PCG, Substrate, Smart Object, World Partition(specifically the Data Layer part), even VSM just out of beta since 5.2(most current released UE5 games using version <= 5.1, Immortals of Aveum would be the first to upgrade to 5.2 as far as I know.)
• because of the above point, the CVars to control features can be changed/deprecated when a new release goes out. So you can't "decide" your quality presets if you are still banking on upgrades.

Let me talk about the 2 things you mentioned:

• networking, this part is actually the "better" side, it's a bit harder cause since UE4.26 it gets a lot of Fortnite's improvement into UE-main. So if you are doing shooter even with a lot of players it's actually better than most other engine on the market. But if you want to do things like say, fighting game or decouple input/game thread for lower latency, or if you have your own "space ship battle" with custom physics body not a humanoid capsule. Then you have to implement your stuff.(by ref how CharacterMovementComponent is implemented.)
• Physics, many people talk shit about ChaosPhysics, while it might not be as good as some other current industry standards for single player game, it will change the landscape of multiplayer game once it's performance is up to par. The reason is ChaosPhysics is designed with networking in mind. So, yeah, if your game is player interact destruction heavy(ie. big enough debris don't disappear), you need a more expensive server to run. There are less physics based multiplayer game cause the old implementations are all "bad". (just see what Battlefield or Halo has done for the past 2 decades, the slight desync and player/vehicle fly to the moon is staple of bad implementation.)

With how games work these days, having just the disk is pretty much useless if the publisher decides to delist or discontinue the game from platform, because:

• patches and updates don't come with disk form anymore.

• many games that requires online authentication to play won't be available to keep playing if their account service is down.

• games go on sale with steady rate most of the time(except nintendo), for bargain bin deals you would probably find the game on humble bundle or gog.

• you often have the good games that release "better" remake version over and over anyway. Note, I know people sometimes prefer the original version, but not everyone is on the same page and it hugely depending on the dev/publisher for the newer version.

Now let's describe the cons:

• in many countries, breaking DRM is illegal. So even if all you want to do archive, you can't make a decrypted copy. That's why homebrew etc provides the key/dumper for you to do such at your own risk. IMO, it's safer(INAL) to download pirated iso/rom compare to doing your own dump. And, archiver actually tried to keep a post patch version before store is closed down(see wiiu store close example), the disk version is not a viable option anymore for archiver.

• storage up keep, physical things require storage space. I still have like 3 large shipping box for my older gen(ps3/GC/Wii/X360 games) I will probably donate them to library or something and keep the only ones I wanted to keep.

• console part cost, the BD drives are often first point of failure, then HDMI connectors. Cause well, moving parts are easier to break and harder to QA. PS5's 2 versions gives a good example how the disk affects the look, weight, etc. Not to mention, they are a lot slower then SSD and you are required to install all that anyway.

• developer/publisher/platform see nothing for used game sales. It sounds like huge shill talk but let's be honest, they want to make a living, if you are not supporting your favorite developer they will have to offset the cost by doing shit you all won't like. ie, mtx, subscription service, selling analytic data, selling the studio to shit publisher that push worth practice, platform raise price to meet target projection. Buy/sell used game only helps that service owner(gamestop/ebgame/bestbuy, not the community.)

• did I mention switching disc just to play game is a PITA, and if your case is the modern garbage version, remember those plastic break down more easily and you would have to buy new case to hold your disc.

• environment waste for all the manufacturing, packaging and shipping. It's honestly not worth that in modern era if you give a fuck about how future generation will live.

10 non-skippable ads before you play? and stop in middle of boss fight to sell you continues?

I bought the game for science cause it was the only game so far using all major features of UE5 and is a good reference to see how they manage asset, etc to keep the game running at 60fps with provided spec.

I think it does have potential, the mechanic is tight enough(the kbm default binding is not good, needs some rebind to make the combat flow more fluid), frame pacing is smooth majority of time(you have jitter mostly when it switch between cutscenes<->game), pretty much checked all the boxes and doesn't feel lacking when playing the game.

BUT, it does have poor marketing plan and kinda bad luck in releasing window. It's a good "alt shooter game" IMO.

do we even need to prove this? Like anyone study a bit how generative AI works know it's not intelligent.

I just cancelled my discord nitro(whatever the previous highest tier annual plans) in May because as a paying subscriber, I still get those intrusive ads that pops above your user corner and won't go away. You are only given options to "try it" "maybe later" and no "not interested", also no button to close it.

The ad client probably pay then significant amount of money that it's worth the risk to piss off paying users.

I sent my support ticket and got lead around the hoops and need to send the request to sort of their internal voting board, which at that point I just gave up and cancel my subscription. If I got spammed more I will probably just go back to web interface and use ublock to start blocking elements. And if I can't I probably just gonna say bye. (the campaign was over, there are no newer spams, but they lost my annual sub pretty much forever as I don't think discord is gonna "be better". )

Ubisoft does not have enough new games releasing that's in good enough state to justify 7.99 per month let along 17.99 per month. I bet there are terms and trickery if people tried to do 17.99 and play games like new Prince of Persia and Avatar and then unsub. (that's my cynical side coming out, but it's ubisoft. )

Or, for ubisoft, you wait a couple month and then boom, big sale for the game released 1~2 months ago.

Most of time, it's the juggle of time and resource available to you, but there is still a hard limit otherwise how about demand BG3 to also run on my antique knockoff NES? Cause they are too lazy to accommodate the hardware limitation? How about my smart watch? Or someone else's smart fridge?

Don't get me wrong, what you said in some cases but most likely the devs are told to push it out instead of make the game run better(on the target platforms.) There are no secret sauce to otherwise fit a game like BG3 to previous gen consoles.

Last, if you are really good at this optimization thing the whole industry will pay good money for your skill set.

the day this combo no longer works is the day I don't visit youtube. Honestly if there are some alternative front end/extension that's better please let me know. I visit youtube for times like game award announcement(so trailers and official release), search for review benchmark while I want to buy PC stuff, and the rest mostly just game educational stuff from Digital Foundry and channel like PBS Space Time. I am doing the upkeeping(so tagging channel as not interested or straight blocking them), but recent generated clips are flooding Youtube like crazy. I want to have a page/frontend that only my subscribed channels and whitelist keywords to show up.

t doesn’t say more people overall use ad blockers. It says people that were already using them are now switching between different extensions. Let’s wait and see if this increases Firefox’s market share. This could be the real good outcome of all this.

That's literally the first thing after I install any new system.

• get firefox on a stick so I don't have to open deprecated explorer or have to download Edge
• install firefox, get ad blocker extension
• then remove/turn off all the recommended shit that are now embedded to your start menu and task bar and lock screen. (I wish there is a github FOSS script that does this for new windows builds. )

I will abandon windows when the games can all be played on Linux properly.

did anyone expect it to explode after 48 hours past? Like even 1% of reddit user says fuck this I am out going to other format, that's enough to sustain a healthy alternative. (oh, and don't forget these are actual human account migrate as well, not bots.)

This would be a game that can survive really well if it was ported to PC and supports user server.(to host their collection of dream projects.) Instead, it probably not gonna last for very long following similar treatment to PS3's little big planet when player count taper out.

You have to remember one thing, writing or speaking of a language is not a fixed scientific law or math formula that will stay true through out history. A living language is always moving and evolving in most of its components, be a vocabulary, grammar, or even meaning of words/phrases. We are just entering an era where AI generated content someone might feel appealing and follow that style, compare to copy a contemporary popular writer.

Chat disabled for 3 seconds!

Then don't link, write your own. Cause most of time it's just reports that either:

• copy existing stuff on internet and add journalist's or editorial's opinions. Often they lag about 1~2 days.
• reporting what different level of government agencies' press releases, these you can find on gov's press release site.
• other useless stuff, I mean the celebrity, sports stuff, etc that any "fan" probably already follow their own fan outlet. Any one here goes to news website to search for computer hardware reviews? I don't think so.
• scam/marketing articles( embedded marketing pretending to report something but actually is a sales campaign )
• ads

Nay, not going to accept those cookie policy to just read the content. Bad site design.

Whenever there is a thing like this, you can always pointing back to a couple obvious curlprits cause it's almost always that case.

• There is that decision making group think it is fine and just push through instead of listening to their own people.(look at unity runtime fee a while ago.)
• There is simply enough time to trim it cause the trimming part keep getting pushed back because priority.(by the same group above)
• You'd be surprised that efficiency didn't really scale up with amount of people involved in a project, nor how experienced the people has been in the industry. Because the tech is a moving target every year.
• The brain bleeding from inadequate pay or inadequate management is astonishing even for fairly well managed company. Your can have people doing literal jack shit and only pay lip service that like to put their finger into stuff to justify their cost, and when people actually couldn't give another fuck and decides to leave now you have some muddy place/project to work with.
• C-suites looking for getting acquired/spring board higher rather than making actual good stuff. Their performance evaluation aren't tie to the quality of product.

Gaming industry are not that special where the whole group of people can just go to work and scroll all day.

did you think of the possibility that even Larian's low settings still can't run on series S? Given the amount of assets I saw it's actually quite possible that vram requirement are pretty high and that's why PS5 have delay as well so they can figure out ways to consolidate textures used etc. Like they can't even manage to let me stack rope or water bottle properly in inventory(maybe some asset id not cleaned up during development), so having excessive vram usage is fairly easy/common for content heavy games.

Yeah, CDProjekt should teach many players a lesson by now. Past success does not guarantee future works.

But I do have a slight soft spot for Swen as I backed most of Larian's kickstarter projects.(except the card game since I don't play card games. ) If some day he no longer have majority in terms of stock holding for Larian, then it's the time I will be more careful about their games.

It was the "traditional" pipeline and to be honest only good for the "publisher" and some big enough studio, but really aren't that good for those job hunting game devs(and part of the churn and burn culture, can't and won't trying to form union if your turn over is high.)

It is how you get broken games every new release cause the guys that sticks around as supervisor didn't actually code the previous games or know the actual workflow/pipeline that makes the last game(their last touching code/software might be like 10+ years ago), the middle leads etc might have burned out during last crunch and go to next company after their vacation because fuck this crunch thing I have a family, then then newbies wearing shiny shipped game under their belt move to next company for a better position/pay. So no one or very few actually knows how last time things were done and may or may not have a voice during decision making. Every game, you build the team almost ground up and thus, make similar and more mistakes with ever increasing pressure from schedule and scale.

It's not an healthy cycle, it is something that creative industry should break away from.

ffmpeg is actually a bad example in this case, it's evolved so much and including way more stuff than what it was originally set out to do. Like sure it doesn't come with UI but commercial/FOSS software all use it one way or another.

So in this sense, no I did not actually played star citizen, but as initial backer I wonder if I should even try it? Since you played for years, could you mind sharing the following things? (so I can see to get some entertainment out of my backing dollars. )

• how much real world currency affects the gameplay? From early backing new release your ship can break needs maintenance and insurance, how's the currently implemented in game?
• what's the game structured like? is it more quest driven with some story? Or really open ended MMO community driven(more EVE like)? If it's something else please give a description.
• what's the fun part when playing the game?
• how resource intensive the game is, computer spec and storage?
• is it always online or you can play offline? Does it have subscription based stuff?

Automation, procedural, visual programming. Or just world building game.

One example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/92800/SpaceChem/

Pretty much any game from that developer is procedural/automation related.