For all my criticism, I do enjoy some live service games too, but I’m of the opinion that any live service game would have been better off without those conditioning tactics, without a balance marred by Pay2Win and power creep, and if it was hostable by any player. Not all them are fundamentally bad, but they are made worse by these elements.
But unfortunately, games keep being made that way because it’s more profitable.
Definitely less than it would be from having a game which they can keep playing, and getting that content permanently.
Is the enjoyment of getting a single instance of a single character, sometimes not even having full access of their abilities, worth as much as an entire other game? Maybe even a console or more, as the price surpasses hundreds of dollars? Not to mention any other practical things that they could use that money for.
However much one might argue that value is subjective, what isn’t subjective are the conditioning tactics being used. Habit-forming mission and reward structures, content being put in gambling formats to incentive compulsive spending. The fact that the game is bound to private servers is itself generally only done to enable monetization, and even more cynically, to force players to move to the next thing once that one ceases being sufficiently profitable.
I see enough people ultimately regretting how much they spent to question if they ever got that value out of it.
Frankly that says more about the gullibility of gamers than the legitimacy of NFT. Gamers will pay for the chance of getting access a fictional character in a game that will eventually close its servers and take everything down with it. They can’t seem to differentiate the value of something within the fictional ludic context and the value of something as a piece of media or an entertainment product, and gaming/tech businessmen these days take full advantage of that oversight.
Proton looks pretty good, but all the paid Google services show that paying is not enough to be seen as “not the product, but an actual customer” these days.
Absolutely. People can talk about the Musk fanatics and grifters and actual addicts who can’t leave but… they aren’t who keeps the place alive. The crowds of people who just browse it casually are who keep social media alive. There’s no show without an audience.
They won’t get regular Joes and Timmies to shell out actual money to keep seeing posts when they could get the same in some other place for free.
If we’re lucky we will be their well-cared-for pets. But what kind of existence is that?
Sounds pretty good actually. Better than having to fend off by ourselves in an uncaring world. Really, it might free people to look for their own meaning rather than competing just because that’s the only way to get by.
The issues I see are none of that, but rather if we’ll even be allowed to benefit from the benefits of AI or they will be hoarded by corporations while we are left to starve for our uselessness.
If Silksong is delayed because of this I’m going to riot!
Unity games include Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail and Marvel Snap.
I doubt The Pokémon Company, MiHoYo and Marvel/Disney will just let Unity shove this decision at them, especially when some of these are have tens of millions of players and many more downloads per player.
Retroactive change of terms for already released unchanged products? I don’t know the legal details but it seems pretty strange that they can just say they will charge over something for products that were finished and released under different terms before all this. The devs may not even be opening those projects on Unity anymore.
Do you really want to ask anything out of someone who diverts a flight and drives to a random data center at 2 am on Dec 24 to take it apart with a pocket knife?
China? The source of most products keeping our capitalist world going? What about it was supposed to be communist again?
It says “piracy is hard”
Absolutely!
The short term effect was a major problem for those laborers who were displaced with a long term effect of creating a more efficient economy, with cheaper products for everyone and most people benefiting from a higher standard of living.
This first part is very understated on retellings. The major problems were not limited to displaced laborers, but also the rising industrialist class which took advantage to them to the extent we had a phase of child workers getting their limbs crushed by machinery and then discarded. The higher standards of living relied greatly on fierce efforts from labor movements to guarantee basic rights and dignity for the workers and their families.
It also comes to mind that for all the wonders of the internet, a lot of people had a better conditions working in brick and mortar stores than they now do in the infamous Amazon warehouses. Maybe we are falling short on this side of progress.
This is such an important point that AI advocates keep glossing over. It’s not even like there is an amount of education that will make up for it. All intellectual work is in line for being automated.
Automation that lets people go from tilling farmland to writing about what they are passionate for was (mostly) great. Some may mourn the loss of artisan crafts but the net result was positive. Automation that takes people from their writing jobs is not so great. Where are they supposed to go to now? To AI? They don’t own the platform, it’s not gonna get them a living wage. How are they supposed to afford this “cheaper stuff” with no money? Do they even want to go to AI if they even had the chance? Many people who work on writing and art would like to just be able to keep at it.
It’s easy and optimistic to expect that because it turned out well before it might do so again, but think of what the invention of automobiles meant for the horse population. While I doubt humans would go away so easily, with the automation of writing, arts, customer service, coding, we might be driven into sweatshop jobs rather than benefit in any way. Unable to outperform AI, many people will have to undercut machinery instead. What a future would that be…
Ah, I see. That’s a complicated matter. Ultimately everything that relates to people’s lives is political, but many people don’t even think of matters as political unless they are having issues regarding their rights.
I don’t think that response is accurate, but it’s a way to convey that trans people’s rights should be a given, just as cis people’s rights are. Most people don’t think of their cisness as political, even though it is.
That doesn’t mean it’s any less tech for it, it’s going to affect the whole landscape of the internet.
Technology can’t be so easily detached from politics. It’s not just about components and code, it’s also about how it’s used and what are the rules around it. There is a lot of politics even around something as basic as copying a file.
Cool thought-terminating cliche. So you really don’t give a single shit for minorities in a hard situation if they don’t sacrifice their livelihood out of your weird sense of moral purity. I hope you pay Fediverse artists pretty well at the very least.
Calling a platform of hundred millions of users a “nazi bar” as if they could pick a different venue the next street is a massive understatement. You also don’t seem to realize that even if all these small artists move, those nazis can still have a lot of influence over clueless people who remain there because they haven’t realized what’s happening. But rather than seeing the risks of widespread radicalization and the value of challenging it, you’d rather call everyone a nazi and not think about it.
If you want to blame anyone, you should point your outrage towards large media organizations and celebrities who keep posting there business as usual as if nothing changed. They are the ones keeping that place alive and giving it legitimacy. Not small artists and those denouncing the nazi shit.
Fair, “social illness” is a good way to put it.
Mythbusters managed to do that pretty well