I mean, gaming exploded over the pandemic. Anyone who thought that was going to become some kind of norm was an idiot. Have we shrunk below pre-pandemic levels? Or is this just idiots who thought they could keep skimming free oil off the surface once the leak was fixed?

Also, I disagree with the idea that AAA games are performing poorly. Bad ideas in AAA games and chasing “easy money” in AAA is performing poorly. Helldivers 2 seems to be doing well, whereas Suicide Squad isn’t. Baldir’s Gate 3 killed it while Starfield kind of flopped. Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet expectations, but we know Square Enix regularly sets expectations too high anyway.

Are people tired of the same Call of Duty games over and over? Are people full up on live service games and looter shooters? Yes and yes. But are people crazy excited for the new Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? From the communities I’m in, very much yes. Did Alan Wake 2 release and sell faster than any other game from that studio? Pretty sure I saw that headline recently, yeah.

So when Diablo 4 dies on impact, was that the fault of the gaming landscape? Or was it because Blizzard execs pushed the team to maximize systems and balance they thought would bring in easy money but actually ended up alienating their core audience and reviewers?

I’ve seen this before when working in mobile. Execs want to chase the whales so badly that they don’t allow designers and devs to make the game actually fun to play. Doesn’t matter how “well” you monetize your shitty game if nobody wants to stick around to play it.

Is there a community where a take like this would be considered and welcome? Asking because I would like to follow that community…

The clickbait headline has made me angry enough I don’t even care what feature they’re talking about. They can get in the bin.

For some definitions of “play”, absolutely!

The Twitter experience for me is BETEER now if I’m not logged in. Someone links a tweet, I read it, and no longer get sidetracked by comments and responses. Just the linked tweet, and done. That’s what I always wanted, and now I get it just by not logging in? Sold!

Weirdly, I read this as “Reddit doesn’t think it needs search engines,” and was confused about seeing everyone discussing Google specifically. That’s a bit stupid to try to block only the one search engine.

I have a 2Gbps internet connection, and at my desktop running Firefox, I can’t reliably stream anything fancier than 1080p60. In the next room on my TV with an AndroidTV box attached, 4K60 streams flawlessly.

I never see ads because I pay for Premium, yet they still fuck me over.

My best guess is that they’re being posted by click bait farms to sell ads to people who view their pages… though I don’t know enough about Facebook to know if that would actually be possible.

I don’t want to believe that hundreds of actual people are independently stealing and making variants on this one artist’s work to get fake internet points…

I mean… 2023 is shaping up to be pretty dope so far. FF16, Pikmin 4, Diablo IV, Armored Core (assuming it’s good), Tears of the Kingdom…

The only good outcome of the merger IMO is hopefully getting rid of Bobby Kotick. The fine devs across the company deserve better leadership and a safer working environment than they’ve had over the years under his frat boy reign.

But do I think Microsoft will eternally play fair with the acquisition? Not by a long shot.

Imagine needing institutional knowledge in order to do something in good faith. That sounds a lot like they’re full of dehumanized ethical corruption.

Literally what I thought when I first saw the headline.

I look back fondly on the moments of “where is the phone?!” Because someone took it to their room to have a private conversation but then left it there on accident.

Still happens I guess, but where everyone has their own phone (not one shared for the whole family) it’s less frantic and thus less hilarious to me.

I really need to try them and see how many searches I actually use. Even their higher paid tiers seem like way too few searches to me. But I have no actual idea.

My favorite thing about podcasts is how, at least in the ones I listen to, the ads are generally relevant because they’re added when you download each episode. I HATE the modern YouTube thing of “this video was sponsored by” segments. “The first 100 people to…” on a video from even just 1 or 2 years ago is completely useless, and I hate that they’re forever burned into the videos :(

I’m trying hard to hold out buying a new vehicle until I can move into somewhere I can charge an EV. Sold my last ICE when I moved overseas, and current apartment has no charging places.

I’m so far behind the MCI—like a dozen films and a half dozen series. I’m not watching any new films until I’ve caught up, so…

Also, I only found out this WAS a film a few days before it came out.

Yeah, I also paid for Destiny 2 on launch, and then like a year later they went f2p and archived all the original content I paid for. Really, really shitty.

Haven’t there been some pretty flagrant cases where someone said “we are not doing XYZ” and then like 3 months later there was a big press announcement stating “guess what? We’re doing XYZ, and think you’re going to love it!!”?

It was fairly quickly demonstrated IIRC that Yuzu could emulate TOTK at higher res and 60fps. So it’s entirely possible to me that Yuzu’s Patreon sub soared because users wanted to play their purchased game on better hardware.

I hope the courts find in favor of Yuzu and set the legal precedent that it’s legal to dump secret numbers and purchased software from a device you own.

I became a Nitro subscriber pretty early specifically because I hope it helps them not enshittify their product… :(

I even tried replacing Lightroom, which if you read the recommendations, people love the various FOSS options out there, but they were all garbage at onboarding or finding functionality or just even setting up a simple library with events and albums to group together and edit.

I’ve been working on getting Matrix Synapse running on my NAS, and the CLI hasn’t been my problem. I’m a programmer, and CLI doesn’t scare me; but the other issues you mention are all new to me, and getting a web service set up so people outside my local network can access it but without leaving me open to bad actors is wicked stressful.

The biggest problems end up being that I need to work with the soup of technologies, and there’s no one place to do all the things. I’ve got TWO routers (because my internet comes through one, and I run my LAN and wifi off one I trust better) which means I’m double-NATed, which is apparently the root of all evil; I can use Cloudflare to tunnel to my NAS, but I can’t accept simple (CNAME) redirects from a family member’s domain to one of my subdomains without paying Cloudflare $200/month, so that means I’m back to dealing with the double-NAT, and then I have to learn setting up TLS, which sounds like it’s simple, but still it’s jimmy way another thing to screw around with and another thing I could screw up on accident.

I could pay for a VPS, but that to me defeats a lot of the point of “host your own” federation when some company could be subpoenaed for copies of all their hosted accounts or something. (Yes, I could get subpoenaed for my data just as easily, but it takes more work to subpoena a thousand people than one company for a thousand people’s accounts.)

Anyway, I’d love to see things evolve to where it’s easy for newbies to host their own private instances of everything.

Personally, I’d love a drop-in tool that runs more like a temporary server while it’s running, syncing federated data you missed while your device was off; and only serving your data when it’s on. Likely with some kind of redirect service/NAT punchthrough so other clients can find you…

…but I think we’re a long way off from being able to do that.

If you don’t mind the feeling of having ear plugs or earbuds in your ears, I have found that the Flare Audio “Quiet” earplugs really take the edge off the world. They don’t prevent you from hearing in general, but rather they dramatically reduce frequencies above some pitch (I forget), which my brain often interprets as pain or like I’m being attacked.

Not spending my day under constant “assault” by the sound of fans or my young child’s high-pitch excited voice REALLY helps me to not get overwhelmed so easily.

I had several days in a row recently where I’ve gotten really panicked and close to snapping because of feeling overwhelmed, and I started wearing these again and it made it much, much easier to come down from that feeling.

This headlines reads like it was AI generated.

Now I’m wondering if part of why DJs talked over songs was specifically so we COULDN’T get clean recordings on cassette…

FYI, this is not about free GPUs. “GeForce NOW” is a streaming service.

Headline would’ve been less confusing if it had the service name in quotes or something. I can see how people might read that and assume it means free, ad-supported GPUs. It does not.

If that’s the case… I kind of hope it gets leaked. But mostly I don’t because it'd be too easy for the execs to pin someone for it and cripple them financially for life.

Wait, there are parts of the world where you can pay for online subscriptions via BANK TRANSFER?!

My 7yo was upset the other night because I’d been playing FF7R (wanted to finish before the new one hits) instead of joining him in Minecraft or Fortnite or Parkitect or whatever.

He literally thought that FF7R didn’t have an ending because I guess in his mind all games are just live service/hobby things. Even I guess the ones that are story things.

I could see Xbox becoming just a Windows PC preconfigured to launch essentially a Big Picture mode version of the Xbox app or something. And then maybe Sony goes ahead and makes their own store/launcher to sell a PS6 or PS7 that’s just a PC as well. But if you have your own PC, that’s fine too.

With them releasing more of their library to PC, this wouldn’t surprise me.

Gosh, if they’d offered this 10 years ago, I’d have been MUCH more interested. As-is, I haven’t really used Facebook in a year or two because of the awful timeline, not the ads. So cool idea, but too little (well, too much cost, I guess) and too late for me to care.

I was really sad the day I completed the last Picross S game on Switch. I had run out. I was playing in bed to unwind my brain at the end of the day. Found a clown on Steam that’s decent, but my Steam Deck is too big to play lying down in bed comfortably. 😥

Is here on Beehaw get the features enabled on Beehaw, regardless if the poster’s instance has ones not enabled here. So you wouldn’t get downvotes over on here. But lemmy.ml has then it seems. You may even have downvotes over there that you wouldn’t know about here! Fedi is weird sometimes…

The fact that popular free apps in the EU are subject to fees unless they come up with their own app store is bullshit and clearly Apple trying to punish developers over there. Like, “if you don’t want to owe us money, then make it so the only people who can find your app are those who already know about it”?

I’m about a week off coming back to Windows from Linux.

Some things that chased me off:

• Alan Wake 2 used too new of GPU features
• Once after playing a game, my cursor was just gone—not invisible, just not there. Only keyboard.
• A few times after quitting games, something was broken about the desktop experience and I had to reboot the machine to get things working again
• Discord crashed any time the machine went to sleep (or woke up? Hard to tell which)
• Several games only worked if I manually put in Proton launch options
• No support for DLSS framegen
• Cyberpunk had to be given a fake driver version to support ray reconstruction
• No support for GamePass games still, which is how I’d been playing Starfield and Lies if P, and planning on Cities: Skylines 2.
• No native support for middle-click scrolling without pasting (I don’t count editing low-level X config files)
• [edit] Also Lords if the Fallen thought I was using a modified game and wouldn’t let me online—solo play only, thanks to EAC

I keep feeling like Linux is just a year or two away from being good enough for common folks to switch over, and I guess if all you need if Firefox, it’s probably there. But the experience is just so subtly, but consistently, bad year after year.

For reference, I was on Pop!_OS (whatever their latest stable was, I think based on Ubuntu 22?). I had read that Pop!_OS was one of the better distorts for games.

Hey, thanks! I’ve now found them!

Would maybe be funny if a law were passed saying that you could only charge people for access to your AI content if you can prove that their own content wasn’t used to help train the AI…

Might’ve meant “material” progress, like “tangible” or progress that’s real and meaningful? “Materialistic” I think usually just means thinking about things you own rather than the quality of your life and relationships? Though saying it out now, I guess that works kind of… But I’ve only ever heard “materialistic” referring to people who only care about what someone owns rather than being a good person; never about video games or the kind of progress I think you’re wanting.

Anyway, lots of good suggestions here. I can’t add anything that meets all your qualifications; but if you are willing to dramatically break your install size requirement, I’ve been having a lot of fun lately with the Forza Horizon games (4 and 5) which are open-world racing/challenge games; but literally everything you do contributes to experience points and money you can use to upgrade and purchase new cars, and there are a lot of challenges which aren’t just races, there’s speed trials (how fast can you hit this one stretch of road), trick trials (how many jumps can you pull if in a minute) and so on.

But the install is like 65GB for FH4, and 150+GB for FH5… hundreds of high detail cars and massive open worlds, I guess… :(

Dwarf Fortress, for me. Even the graphical one on Steam, I needed to watch YouTube videos to really start digging in to it.