It kinda makes a lot of sense I feel that they’d fit together. You have a form of transportation that is dangerous enough that requiring government licensing is generally agreed to be desirable, meaning that if its the primary option, a government can effectively take away a person’s ability to participate in public life or make a living, and easily justify it on safety grounds. Cars are expensive, so a government can both funnel money to its partners in private industry by promoting them, and subsidize them for the populations it considers “desirable” as a means to seem like it has created abundance and luxury (see how how the VW bug came to be for example). And, a society built around cars is one that tends towards physical separation and isolation between people (because of space inefficient infrastructure and relatively quick travel outside of densely built areas), which promotes distrust of others. Thats not to say that cars are inherently fascist or that most people that promote them do so to benefit that sort of ideology, but that if I was some kind of fascist dictator seeking to control a population, Id probably want to push them into buying and relying on cars.

Aesthetics wise, I used to think it kind of looked cool… when it was just a computer rendering with no exposure to conditions of the real world. In person all the flat and shiny but not like mirror-like surfaces mean that even the tiniest warp and defect is visible when the sun shines on it. Someone in my area has one ive seen a few times painted a somewhat matte black, which makes it even worse in that Ive been able to see fingerprints on it from across the street, and from a distance the colors of the windows and body blend together to look like some kind of featureless black monolith.

To be fair, the european space agency isn’t NASA

Possibly my favorite game, “From the Depths” got me like this. It’s a vehicle builder that gives you a lot more stuff to design, both in functionality and in letting you make something look how you want, than most others I’ve seen… But the learning curve is like a brick wall and I just didn’t get what I was supposed to do the first time around.

Honestly I actually liked BZ more than the original, but it’s difficult for me to figure out why exactly. I play those games a bit differently from the proper way, I basically ignore the plot beyond what is needed to get the tools and location I want and mostly just play them to build and decorate bases in a pretty environment with survival elements to make the base feel like it has design requirements and resource constraints, like Minecraft almost, but I’m not going to say that BZ has prettier environments for that either. Might be the creature design, my favorite subnautica critters are mostly in BZ, though not all, and they feel like they fit together more tightly than the ones in the first game, if that makes sense, like one can look at certain features and get a greater sense of them all seeming to descend from a few common ancestors.

after years and many billions of dollars of technological development, we have finally invented a machine that can be scammed

I think the reasoning is something like this: these companies employ such call center employees for a reason, either they legally have to for one reason or another or they’ve determined that in some way, it is more profitable to have the capacity for people to call them than not. If the call centers are swamped, then they still cost the company money, but their benefit to the company is reduced, because the “real” calls can’t get through in a timely fashion. As such, it’s in the company’s interest to avoid having people spam them, and if the policy those people want changed won’t really cost the company anything to change, then just doing that might be the most profitable option for them.

It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it’s position by doing. I didn’t want to just say “be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want”, because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .

I don’t think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don’t really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.

I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they’re important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.

Honestly this whole situation seems fishy to me (no pun intended) on all sides.

On the one hand, I get where the sentiment I’ve seen all over that this is just the publishers attempting to screw the devs over to avoid bonus payouts comes from, and it may even be true, there’s basically no reason to trust a big company and the ones in the entertainment industry are notorious for trying to avoid paying the people that actually make the stuff they sell.

On the other hand, the 250 million number I see thrown around is a huge amount of money, even if distributed evenly, and if not distributed evenly, would be a huge amount especially for the people at the top (which sound like the people that were fired for the most part?). I could easily see that creating a strong incentive for those in charge of the studio to release something even if it wasn’t ready. And it wouldn’t really surprise me if it isn’t, just given that virtually every major release of late across the industry seems to arrive both after delays and in a seemingly unready state, even the ones releasing in early access. Were that the case, then the move the company made to delay the game and remove people at the top pushing against that would make sense.

The trouble I have is, both these notions (that the publishing company might be delaying the game without need out of financial motivation, thus screwing over the devs, and that the leadership of the development company might be resisting a necessary delay out of financial motivation, which would presumably screw over the customer) seem self-consistent and plausible to me. The publishers claims are probably a bit more suspect given that from what I hear they have a history with scandal like this, but that isn’t really enough to make me feel confident that they have to be the ones being untruthful here, so jumping on a bandwagon feels premature until we have some information that rules out one of the two sides claims.

I’d make some statement about how this whole incident demonstrates the pitfalls of combining capitalist profit seeking with art, but between how many times the gaming industry has been burned by that already and how anti-capitalist lemmy tends to be, I suspect everyone here probably would be familiar with that anyway.

To be fair, while paradox games like Stellaris or the crusader kings games you mentioned, certainly have a lot of replayability (I don’t really care much for CK myself but have over 1000 hours on both Stellaris and EU4), they’re not great examples for where cheaper games by smaller companies offer more than expensive ones from bigger ones. Partly because paradox is fairly sizable and well known these days, but mostly because those games are quite expensive, just split into numerous expansions that come out over time. One can opt out of getting them, sure, but they’re where a lot of the different options that bring the replayability come from.

well no, there just arent any wind turbines as far as I remember. No solar either

I mean, theres geothermal

Satisfactory is a weird game where coal and oil are renewable, but trees, as far as I’m aware, are not.

Sweden in general seems to have way more good game dev companies than most countries, especially most of similar size. I kinda wonder why.

And that’d be reasonable for you to do. However, having a network choose to remove something, or cut ties with servers in the network that don’t in an attempt to persuade them to remove that thing, isn’t exactly the same as a government ordering a thing be removed. The former doesn’t give much avenue for a malicious actor to suppress something that isn’t in their interest, because they can hardly control the collective actions of users on the network, but the latter does by creating a single point of decision making on the network’s content from the outside. Not that the motivations in wanting that video gone were bad, but there is an element of risk to making it possible for a government entity to remove something from a social network, even if the thing they want gone this time is something that really shouldn’t be there.

Doesnt really tell you what it is tho, beyond something very vague. Its not like promising some feature, getting hyped over it, then finding it isnt as much as what was hyped up

I’ve honestly kinda come to appreciate how NMS doesn’t really publicize their updates much beforehand. It’s not super hyped up for a month where one hardly feels like playing the game cause it will have more later, and it’s hard to be let down over something you didn’t anticipate being different before. It’s just “oh cool, they added more stuff to the game again”

Default search engine on their browser?