Do we really need more hero shooters?

Maybe one guy got a lot

I browse Reddit only for one sub, a country-specific one that is reasonably niche. Right when the API migration happened, there seemed to be a very visible migration of Facebook/Instagram people migrating over to Reddit. Posts asking where to find Instagram/Facebook functionality came in daily, and the overall quality of both comments and posts degraded a lot, suddenly posts had a ton of comments with one word and a ton of emojis.

Why AAA? Come on Sega, you can get it to AAAA, have people pay for time like back in the arcade days! Game starts, you get “Insert coin” and a microtransaction!

Dream big!

Bank spokesman says they are itching to be the sector to fire the most workers, poised to make the economy so much better.

F-Droid could go through it, the thing that is prohibited is for Google to bar them just because they are a competitor.

Russians had flown out singers to Ukraine singing Gruppa Krovi to the soldiers. This shit goes across cultures.

The problem is that ad-driven businesses are price dumping by tricking people into using their services by telling them it’s free, and thus killing the market for everyone else. I am not turning my adblocker off. I do not expect “free” content in perpetuity. I expect the “free” content business model to die off.

GamePass is still early in the enshittification cycle. It will get worse.

Try the Total War games, especially the older (non-Warhammer) ones. Units take time to carry out actions, there is no point and not really a way to do insane actions per minute counts, as if a unit is engaged in melee, it can’t really disengage without losses. There is also a great scale to the whole thing. I loved Shogun 2 for example.

I also like Eugen games like Wargame, Steel Division or Warno if a modern shooty type thing is more your game. Maybe try Regiments, that one is also good and maybe a bit less complex than Eugen titles.

Neither of these has base building, both are more of a “this is how many soldiers get for this battle, use them wisely” type game.

I had a decent AMD card which ran it very well, but still had a bunch of artifacts like Judy’s head blocking reflections for the whole lake.

Sorry, I went too deep into sarcasm in there. I wasn’t advocating for violence, just laws protecting society and people that are strong enough to deter corps from breaking them.

The fuck clowns are buying up our culture. It’s hard to not participate in it. I don’t play these kinds of games, but I’ve nothing on people who do. We should beat up the fuck clowns until they serve society again.

And just to be clear, I am advocating violence in the form of stringent regulations binding corporations towards socially beneficial paths. I advocate for violent anti-trust measures to the point even the execs don’t know who is still working for them and who has been broken off to another company to compete freely. And I want worker protections that cause mind-bending fear in wage thieves.

The problem is who can you give money to for entertainment if not to the same 3 corps who have bought everything, and how else can you protest them doing stuff that’s outrageous even by their standards?

The point I’m making is that let’s say Gaben did not have the headstart or the loyal player base. What is Steam or Valve? Its customer base or market share? Those are for sale, they can be bought with “free” services, exclusive deals with publishers, or other fuckery. Its team and employees? How would you pay them without revenue if someone else is price dumping the market?

Yes, Gaben could keep the logo with the bald guy with the valve on his head, but that’s pretty much it. Everything else he has to fight for, invest in, keep alive. And the opponent, Wall Street, has literally unlimited money.

What I’m saying is that it’s not as simple as “just don’t sell out”. And I’m speaking from experience, not as the sellout guy, but as the employee where the company was sold out from over me a few times already.

This is such a weird thing to be upset over, and a weird side to take so passionately that you do.

I don’t even play Helldivers, nor do I plan to after this, it’s just on the one side there’s random upset people, on the other side there is the corp that got infamous for distributing straight up malware in a weird effort to enforce DRM. Why would people go back to being happy with a company that tried to fuck them over, and then walked its position back to the status quo with no commitments of not trying this again later.

You don’t lower your guard just because the fight is over. It’s not like Sony has morals or any trustworthiness to keep to this even in the midterm.

The point is that you can say no to selling it, but for that to work you need to:

• Actually own a deciding majority of the thing
• Have a good enough product to resist your business partners (eg. game developers) being paid with investor money to switch over to you, sapping value from your product.

The point is that if Steam wasn’t so much over the competition, Epic could have taken market share over with the exclusive deal shenanigans, or publishers could have started up their own marketplaces. The biggest reason for that is that Steam was early to the party and could get to a good product before others tried to enter the market.

If Steam didn’t have that, people would have switched over to Epic and publisher stores, and we’d be bitching over Steam not having any good games on it because of backroom deals.

Epic is trying to IPO and has all kinds of investors. It tried to undermine Valve by buying out its partners by just spraying money at them for exclusives - you know, “disrupt” the industry. Steam prevails because they are real good at what they do, and they had a head start, but it takes a Gaben to not sell out, a good team and a lot of luck to manage that. Steam is playing against a tilted field is what I’m saying, and is one of the few players who successfully are managing it. They are the exception.

If you don’t go public with your company, some other company will go public, and buy your company or your customers from under you with the money they got from Wall Street. There are some companies that can try and resist, but the field tilts against them.