Valve is an independent company.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I’ve found to be actually good.

I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:

• Foreign (Non-American)
• Indie
• Small studio

Basically all of the good games that I’ve liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I’m sure if you think about it, the great games you’ve played have also been this way.

Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won’t have fun, and it’ll be expensive.

Go play EDF5 with some friends. It’s jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.

Raft is great, too.

Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.

And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.

Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it’s been solid.

But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.

It’s like the loss of a union, except it’s industry wide.

There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don’t have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.

Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn’t that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you’re voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.

It’s ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn’t be supportable.

Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn’t be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.

Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they’d: “be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all.”

But remember:

• Foreign
• Indie
• Small Studio

These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.

STOP MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Enshittification.

128gb here. I sit constantly between 40 and 70gb in use. Heavy multitasking between Internet, professional, gaming, and creative outlets can sometimes push near 90.

16 was the pcmr standard in 2010, but is a complete joke now. 32g is the new 8gb now. “Casual” pc usage is way, WAY heavier now: nobody just uses a computer for only one thing anymore, they use it for multi-window browsing, music, and YouTube, along with the new standard of everybody plays games and nobody wants to close shit just to play a game.

Games are heavierweight and the only reason it’s as low requirement as they are is because of console peasants. CS2 is like 100gb storage, up from the laughable ~2gb in csgo. That’s just not how the world works anymore. The economy has chosen ease of development and priority on graphical fidelity over deep design complexity. Shit; Starfield is basically just a 200gb graphics mod of Morrowind.

And then you have heavy users like us, who actually use bleeding edge functions, who have grown up wanting better and more, experimenting and not trusting and wanting to pay cloud. Despite the neon gamer rog chrome and black image, I’d be willing to bet almost every person here in this thread has at least one HDD currently in use (take note of these demographics: fediverse, English speaking, pcmr, aware of RAM) - and the reason is because they’re cheap, fairly reliable storage and we all ain’t made of money. Ironic because of the amount of RAM being discussed.

32GB has been the new 16GB for probably five years, and realistically, 64GB is actually what you should be getting when you upgrade/make a new build.

Reason: 64GB, right this minute, is one double above “just cutting it”.

IT’S ALMOST AS IF THERE IS A DEFINED SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS THAT’S SUCKING MONEY FROM THE ECONOMY

Less infighting, more eating of the rich. Pay the devs, not the landlords. The capitalism system is broken and breaking further. The cost of goods is defined by how much workers need to be paid to make it, and then multiplicatively inflated by how much greed that BILLIONAIRE CLASS wants.

Government is for the people, by the people, that’s the ONLY reason it exists. People in, and that want to be the billionaire class have declared war on the rest of us, and it’s the government’s sole purpose to protect the well-being and will of the people.

The government MUST serve the people.

If it can’t, the highest priority is it MUST be fixed immediately.

The longer we flail and wait, the more that obviously hostile class of people grow in power and make fixing this a more and more serious issue.

Like any good leader, if you are failing in your duties, you must self-correct, elect an adequate replacement, or you must be removed, by your own will or by force.

Because life-time is too precious to waste waiting for the conflict to come to a head and burst.

That hostile class is doing everything possible to prevent any of this. Calm down, diffuse, obfuscate, confuse, project, gaslight, lie, cheat, steal, destroy, and gain power to RULE above the-will-of-the-people: the government.

I’m a little out of the loop. How so? Have they always been said way? Edit: I’m an aspiring dev and want to know as much as I can, and if they’re shitty, I wanna know.

Apparently he was CEO in mid-2004 when EA bought Renderware and basically killed it.

COINCIDENCE???

It’s global warming. All the natural disasters, insurance and repairs are extreme and accelerating, and those funds need/want more money and are collecting in every way they can.

I can’t believe it either - our inability to prepare for global warming has caused Unity to charge per install.

(vger.app for those wondering)

Sync is everything is my fav. But switch the colors between the main healing and the subtitle sync, so that the main one is red and the kitchen sync is blue.

Edit: maybe even say “Even the kitchen Sync.”

It has been an absolute gift to be part of and watching that/this growth. Seeing posts on a new platform go from something like 10/day to the, now, probably, hundreds, if not thousands per day.

I remember in late May/early June this year (2023, when this place really came alive, for archival sake), seeing the posts on Reddit about the ACTUAL api changes, then that evolving into a bit of vocal protest, which surprisingly evolved into an ACTUAL protest with a lot more information why. It was the last straw for me. Everything the world has shit on me and my generation and lifetime, all of it from selfishness and ignorance and greed. Then musk bought Twitter and immediately drove it face first into the ground at high speed and got support by most of the worst demographics on the face of the planet - and I didn’t even care about Twitter. But, a long-standing media giant, brought down by a billionaire simply because he had the money? It was if all of our intuitive fears about the world being awful just came true in real time, over, and over, and over, and over. The past fifteen years have been so bad, it’s actually insane, and it’s nuts to think that it can still be way way worse.

And then along came this dried out, greedy ass, shameless, two faced, wannabe psychopath who IDOLIZED Musk, Hoffman/spez, and just shits in the faces of everybody on Reddit that ever cared about anything. The very people trying to make the world a better place at least for a little while, pleading with him not to be THAT greedy and shitty. And he just spread open his wonderbread buttcheeks, stared us all in the eyes, looked away, smiled into a mirror, and blasted out what was left of his rotten, liquefied spine. RIP Aaron.

Everybody saw it coming, yet we were still all shocked at how blatantly greedy and manipulative every single event was. Now, he’s just trying to wait it out and let it quiet down.

I’m still convinced this or an evolution of this will be Web3.0. The evolution past megacorps as a result of direct abuse of power, anti-competitive and other dark behaviors, anti privacy, ultra-rich maximizations of profits, and late stage capitalism. Decentralization and a reinvigoration and re-emphasis on integrity and quality, put truly into the hands of the users by stripping abilities of people like musk to literally capitalize on and destroy is hugely paramount in the next step. We all want it, the world needs it, and maybe the Fediverse is it. Maybe, maybe not. It feels like the right direction and I’ve had enough bullshit to know it.

Oh yeah. I totally missed that because I’ve seen this before. That’s actually pretty messed up.

Trillian was the shit! I always wondered if they stole my information or it was a virus, but the combining all the stupid services into one with an the quality of life improvements was fantastic!

You remember their little multicolored round glass minimize, maximize, close buttons? It was like yellow, blue, red iirc?

It was eye opening and made me realize how nice things COULD be.

I think there’s two definitions, in priority order:

1. the most accessible side that you’re most likely to get in on, the side that’s facing you, or
2. if there’s no walls and the bed is in the middle of a ballroom or floating in space, the head of the bed.

50k very active users that try to have integrity is a pretty big deal. Because with that will come development of the platform, meanwhile Reddit is going to struggle with a new chapter of shitty moderation and decreased quality. There are also a lot of people burnt out on the issue and so I expect real numbers from the immediate to be more visible over the next month or two.

Plus, which instances are you looking at for those numbers? Are all the lemmy instances and kbin included in those numbers?

Let’s just assume that it’s going to be about 1% of reddit’s userbase. Does it matter which 1%? How will the platforms evolve? Because both are very different now than before, we’re seeing realtime changes across a lot of tech and the internet. A lot of faith was lost by the public in many platforms by the people at all paying attention, and a lot of hope was garnished by the successful move to new platforms.

Stuff is definitely changing. I’m curious what big tech is gonna do to try to restore faith, or if they’ll try to pretend nothing’s happened and try to sweep it under the rug. A lot of people already try to downplay the events into just numbers, but in reality, there are a LOT of eyes watching and waiting to see what happens. People are tired of the same old capitalist bullshit and want something better, it isn’t just ex/reddittors, it’s Twitter users, Linux users, Amazon users, Netflix users, students with debt, homeowners, and a LOT of young people. People want better and the messed up economic future is making people pay attention more than ever.

It’s all interwoven and something’s gotta give.

“galaxy”

I’m not sure you can solely blame devs or players, as there’s absolutely a call and response, sort of mirroring effect that begs the question “chicken or the egg”. Which is why I believe it’s an economic phenomenon.

Let’s be clear: it’s a very good browser, very HTML5 compliant, and perhaps one of the best browsers…

…Assuming you don’t care about insane amounts of spyware - AND not having a lot of really cool browser add-ons (those having spyware and memory leaks is a separate topic, but I want to acknowledge these problems).

Edge makes more calls home per second than any other piece of software on my computer. I looked at my live log and it was a literal stream. Nearly every single action you do is tracked and sent… (waves hands confusingly up in the air in circles) …somewhere. Likely Microsoft, but I really don’t know.

Almost all of Windows is like this too. I hate it so much. There’s just no great way to have nice things right now.

Haha it was perfectly good and the same as all the others on THIRD PARTY APPS

Because prioritizing growth rather than sustainability costs a shit ton of money, money which gets borrowed from investors, which has to get paid back in folds, and then the investors also want more and can control what you do, and all they want is more money, so they reinvest over and over and over, which just perpetuates debt and further and further delays profit.

In short: late-stage capitalist greed.