badgermurphy

@badgermurphy@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie dev defends criticism of Steam refund abuse amid review bombing of his game: 'It's wrong to refund a game after having fun with it and completing it'⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Then it’s a product that this market does not bear. They must tolerate it or make more content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie dev defends criticism of Steam refund abuse amid review bombing of his game: 'It's wrong to refund a game after having fun with it and completing it'⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems like a pretty simple fix within the control of the publisher. If your game has less content than will fill the return window, you risk this kind of loss due to the tiny size of your product. It is a product that this market does not bear. Tolerate it or make more content before release.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indie dev defends criticism of Steam refund abuse amid review bombing of his game: 'It's wrong to refund a game after having fun with it and completing it'⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  I think market capture is the core problem. The fact that any of these storefronts can play kingmaker and supreme arbiter of what gets released is what discourages indie releases. We are very lucky that the gaming industry ended up under the stewardship of a relatively benevolent company, but if the global economic stage remains as it is, the minute Gabe dies or relinquishes control of the company, I suspect it will shoot like a bullet to the bottom of the barrel with all the other publishers. It’s not a good situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue": Sony just proved why digital storefronts are broken⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is an example of competition working. Normally, an oligopolistic market like this would not have good faith competition, but Valve got rich before they could be corrupted by VC, so they obey the intentions of one crazy entrepreneur, instead of the normal undifferentiated VC behavior.

  Steam’s competitors keep trying the VC strategy and it can’t work because Steam exists and, at least while Newell maintains this attitude and control of Valve, don’t do it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish it were true. For me and I’m sure others, leisure activity must be planned, scheduled in advance, and coordinated with several people. Even then, it is not uncommon for it to be interrupted.

  I find it strange how many people find it unbelievable that there are people much busier than themselves that do not have time for impromptu leisure activity. I feel like I’m being punked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed, but I already watch maybe 1 hour of TV per week, and wouldn’t even have one if I didn’t have kids. Trust me, I’ve already looked for low-hanging fruit; I do not love being this busy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I dont think its at all productive for us to compare responsibilities and measure. I invite you to consider that the level of responsibility in one’s life varies a great deal from one person to the next, even within the same demographic group.

  In your own post you stated that you never had a time where you couldn’t game without prioritizing it, and in my post I stated nearly the opposite. Either one of is is lying, we have a very different baseline level of “priority” for gaming, or we lead different lives in which mine is busier than yours.

  People often are dismissive of people’s responsibilities they have no way of knowing and offer the platitude, “You have to make time for what’s important to you,” but it is just that. Everyone experiences a finite amount of time, and it absolutely can all get used up on critical things before leisure things can be considered. I know I personally have many important things I’d very much love to stop leaving idle, but there are, quite literally, not enough hours in the day. As I’ve aged I’ve gone from needing 4 hours of sleep to at least 6, for example. That’s 2 hours per day that are simply deleted from my calendar. Once you get to 24 hours, there’s no more hours.

  That whole line of thinking seems to me to be in the same family of thought as blaming poor people for not working more or harder-- it ignored a mountain of circumstances that make that impossible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly, thank you. Of course I could prioritize gaming over nearly anything, but no reasonable person would for important things. I guess I have more things I feel are important going on than this guy and some others find believable. I assure you, I am not making up a story to earn fake Internet points that could not have less meaning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am using that word as follows:

  Prioritize: to adjust the priority ranking of something to a higher level than it was previously.

  not

  Prioritze: to assign something the highest priority.

  Maybe I am using the word wrong, but I believe both definitions to be valid. Sorry for the confusion.

  What I meant was that I do not have anything on my docket that I think a reasonable person would demote in priority to make room for gaming. That day may come, but it has not for many years now. You may be surprised how wildly varied people’s level of responsibility is and how busy that makes them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s a good tip, thank you!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I know older gamers too, and can tell you firsthand that the amount of “busy” in a person’s life varies wildly. I am the second busiest person I have ever met, and the busiest person does not have children and I do, for example.

  If I were to carve out more time for leisure, something else would absolutely have to suffer. Sure, that is a choice I could make, but I dont think any reasonable person evaluating the trade-offs in good faith would consider that choice to be on the table, hence why I used the “ackshually”. It is technically a choice to a pedant, but not really a choice to anyone acting sane.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ackshually, we don’t. If we prioritized gaming, we would not have any money for the games and hardware or the place to hook it up and use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is gaming better as a kid or an adult?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re asking us adults, most of us wouldn’t know. Most of us dont have time for it anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When you hear it's the end of Deatiny 2⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It isn’t. It got parceled out and sold off. It belongs to some holding company under a shell company operated by some monopoly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I do believe social media may be the latest, most distilled form of industry directing culture, in this case, hollowing it out like you said.

  As we as a species began to study and better understand human thought, weaknesses or “bugs in the software” were discovered. That knowledge was then weaponized to wage psychological warfare on society at large. They learned like that if you can persuade someone to fear something, you can then leverage that fear to make people think with their amygdala instead of their prefrontal cortex, making us behave more like predictable animals that can be conditioned to do things that our not in our interest because we are afraid something bad will happen to us if we don’t.

  Logically, even a child could see the ploy, but they got us using an older, simpler part of our brains that does not enjoy the benefit of logical, critical thinking.

  I think that marketing and advertising has leaned on this for generations, but the difference now is that they have teams of psychologists on staff to maximize the manipulation. They learned that it is more affective to “hack” minds so they feel they need a product or service, rather than trying to persuade them to want it. In that environment of fear, more advanced human pursuits like cultural and social interaction are diminished. I am less inclined to form a community with my neighbors and countrymen if I’m afraid or jealous of them.

  I think that this is the primary mechanism that stunted American culture and continues at a rocket propelled pace today. As you aptly pointed out, what passes for culture here is a collective concern about how we’re doing in life compared to everyone else, based on who’s got the most best stuff or biggest army of followers or rarest collection of Funko Pops.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think that’s true. I think that stems from the fact that a large percentage of global consumption is American in origin, and since at least the Industrial Revolution, that country’s culture has been led around by the nose by business magnates to the point that our national culture has remained relatively shallow compared to other nations and is largely centered around buying things, as you point out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That doesn’t make sense. I have a PC older than my kids that I still game on. I think your statement needs more qualifiers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  As we have seen, they won’t and never will. This is arguing for gravity to stop pulling so hard.

  The mechanism to fix the problem you’re describing has broken long ago and everyone stopped trying to fix it. Your money needs more choices of where to be spent, then businesses will force each other to price things reasonably. If anyone can name all the companies that make a type of product, then that is not enough companies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a game you can’t understand why its so popular ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel exactly the same. Of all the genres of games, this one seems the most poorly differentiated. So, so many FPS games feel so very much like the others that I’m burned out on nearly all of them as though they were the same game. Sure, they each have their own metagame, and they have at least one special movement mechanic, but nearly everything else is so similar that I just can’t anymore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Xbox Player Voice Quickly Reveals What Players Want Most⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The most popular suggestion from their consumers was to re-implement an overt anti-consumer tactic? The hell?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PlayStation boss says single-player games won’t come to PC going forward | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  When companies do it, its called “marketing”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Krafton still supporting Subnautica 2 launch despite Steam page change⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but it’s complicated like an ant colony–incredibly complex and nuanced, but tiny, inconsequential, and easy to ignore.

  I got one whiff of that dumpster fire and thought, “You know what? I’m going to check out some of the near-infinite other entertainment options available to me in the Information Age and give that whole thing a miss.” I’m sure a significant portion of other people interested in the game came to a similar conclusion, which can’t be ideal for their sales goals.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Any update is a bonus not a right": Peak co-developer Landfall reminds impatient fans it's not a live-service studio⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think we are both primarily referring to things that are pretending to be both, “software as a service” (SaaS). They are renting us things with no option to buy and no depreciation, using artificial software mechanisms to enforce it.

  The major industry players have also completed a regulatory capture, controlling legal policy to protect the practice that nearly every human but them believes should be outlawed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Any update is a bonus not a right": Peak co-developer Landfall reminds impatient fans it's not a live-service studio⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Subscriptions make much more sense if they are actually providing a continual service, such as MMOs or newsgroups. They stop making sense when you have to pay retail for the software, then also must subscribe for it to work. Companies that do that are having it both ways by selling you the product and then still charging you rent on it.

  The only software that needs to be updated regularly is stuff that needs to be secure; locally running self-contained games and other software do not. So, I absolutely should be able to buy once and then be entitled to updates for at least some period of time, then be able to opt into renewals or not based on my needs.

  You can’t sell me a hammer, charge me every time I swing it, and take a percentage of the profits of the thing I built with it, but that is exactly what many software companies are being allowed to do. The fact that the product is not tangible makes that fact less obvious, but still just as true. Getting paid forever for work you did once is a societal ill.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We Spoke To Game Devs And All Of Them Hate DLSS 5: 'What The F***, Nvidia?'⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You are making that “first reaction is the wrong one” assertion like it is some sort of law of physics. Many people have read all the published materials and are knowledgeable in the field, and come to the sober, measured conclusion that this technology is mostly a turd. To make matters worse, its a $2500 turd that makes the room hot and the electric meter spin real fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I haven’t heard of the term before, but the notion you’re describing is definitely something I’ve thought and read about some before. Thanks for teaching me something new I can go learn more about!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this might be a self-solving problem. Because the barriers to publishing software are practically nonexistent anymore, gaming companies cannot corner the market like you see in other industries.

  People that don’t mind cutting corners, and those that have little taste and have seen every Friends episode 20 times, will still pay top dollar for the slop because they are easily marketed to, but there will always be people refusing that path that make things with the intention of the customer liking them instead of the shareholders. The businesses doing things this way will find a lively marketplace untapped by the AAA studios that can’t stay out of their own way.

  If it continues as it has, the gulf between quality and slop will continue to widen, and these slop games will be consumed by the same people that think Arby’s Steak Nuggets are food, while the rest of us enjoy quality content actually made by someone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is not, but prohibitive pricing causes potential customers to be more considered in their buying decisions. If I’m looking at graphics cards, and one costs triple the other for AI reasons, some will have the decision made for them by their wallet, and others will decide the AI stuff is not worth more than the whole rest of the PC, leaving only the whales with more money than sense.

  Catering only to whales may work for businesses making microtransaction games, because there is no limit to how much a whale might spend there, but no matter how rich a customer is, he only wants one graphics card for his PC, maybe 2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NVIDIA Says You're "Completely Wrong" About DLSS 5 Being Slop - Gamers Nexus⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  However, they continually lend their money to their biggest customers, none of whom have managed to use that stuff to make a dime yet, so their chances of actually getting their money back, which is rivaling the GDP of many countries at this point, are just about zero.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the gaming industry, though; their primary target market is children. They’re naive because they’re children. Maybe there’s some masochists out there volunteering for the abuse, but this is really adults failing to protect kids, by allowing it to be legal to use psychology tricks and gambling mechanics on minors.