I’m all for the cultivation part, but not when games make it so planning it wrong means starting over and grinding a hundred hours more. To keep the analogy, if your farm is not going too well you can just change things after the next harvest. Experimentation is something that helps these games stay fresh.

And yet people still say “if you don’t like ads, pay up” as if getting ads in a subscription is not a matter of time, like it’s happening to streaming.

I’m not extremely against all of copyright because I believe artists should have some protections (though the law sucks at this), but I also believe that once something becomes a decades-old billion-dollar franchise, non-identical imitation should be fair game. Can you imagine what would happen if companies could simply say that they own whole genres?

Right? Steam provides better service and functionality than any other PC storefront. It’s ridiculous that there’s so much whining about them charging for it. So what if it’s a higher percentage? It’s also a better service and a large audience. Whoever doesn’t like it is free to go elsewhere, unlike console games that can only be sold though the manufacturer’s store.

A dumb oversight but an useful method to identify manufactured artificial manipulation. It’s going to make social media even worse than it already is.

However logical it may or may not be, it’s a reality. Just yesterday we got a stark reminder of how pervasive poor decisions are.

Also, simply “calling out” your boss and HR for making poor decisions is more likely to put them against you than to fix anything.

Frankly feels like this anti-DEI wave is more politically motivated than a matter of results.

We don’t live in a perfect meritocracy where people are judged solely in grounds of their skills, we live in a society that is already prejudiced where a lot of minorities don’t get the chance to prove themselves. There’s studies proving how young white men are favored over any other demographics even when other people have equal or better resumes.

No but Lemmy is not publicly funded so people should send them a few bucks every now and then.

There’s no reasonable form of this.

Man, we should break more stuff.

A couple years ago it wasn’t thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.

There’s only a handful of games who really need the PS5, no surprise.

There used to be laws against this shit.

I feel incredibly bad for small creators that still rely on it for an audience and can’t simply afford to market themselves without it.

No?

The way you are speaking it’s as if they mean to close down the whole thing. There is a whole rest of the world for them to operate in. Sure losing the US market would be a huge detriment, but the owners still might rather have it everywhere else, than keep it running in the US in someone else’s hands.

Windows 11 made my girlfriend’s laptop so slow, even she asked me to install Linux, and she is not even a techy type.

Wild that since the rise of the internet it’s like they decided advertising laws don’t apply anymore.

But Copyright though, it absolutely does, always and everywhere.

It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.

They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.

Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.

Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.

If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.