zikzak025
@zikzak025@lemmy.world
- Comment on "You Can't Rule Out The Possibility That Executives Are Idiots" - John Carmack On Microsoft's Gutting Of id Software 9 hours ago:
It’s funny how people flip flop between game pass causing bad sales, and game pass being a gigantic flop that no one pays for, depending on the point they want to prove.
I mean, both can be true. Microsoft would be counting on certain first party titles being pillars of Game Pass to pull in new subscribers and retain current ones. If they see relatively few Game Pass subscribers engaging with the title and subscriptions continue to drop, then it wasn’t the draw they anticipated.
And sure, Game Pass cannibalizes individual game sales, so I’m hoping they weren’t being held to that specific metric as punishment for Microsoft’s own failure in that regard. But we can also assume that not all engagement with GamePass would have translated directly into sales either, so low sales plus low Game Pass use would still indicate a flop.
- Comment on Valid point 1 day ago:
One could read it as advocating for eugenics, which I think is also not helped by being German lol
- Comment on Valid point 1 day ago:
But then that comes with the tradeoff of being unable to use Qi charging
- Comment on Microsoft’s Xbox to Shift Obsidian Studio to New ‘Fallout’ Video Game 2 days ago:
It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of situation.
The games industry has a lot of shitty business practices in general. Job security is almost nonexistent unless you manage to get a key position at a successful studio. Otherwise, you’re more likely to be hired for one project and then let go just before release, so you don’t get to collect the sales bonus. Some contracted employees are even omitted from the credits, so you don’t even get much of a portfolio boost out of it.
Larger companies like Microsoft are shitty in their own ways, but they don’t tend to do the hire-fire cycle of game dev as much as other studios may. So it was seen as stable work for a lot of these studios that were acquired. Especially for the former Activision studios that were falling apart at the seams while being rocked by a sequential train of scandals.
And by all accounts it truly was good times for a lot of developers at Xbox, where they were given resources to develop whatever they wanted with relatively little corporate oversight. But then these teams that were previously given carte blanche on their projects suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them by new management. They suddenly care about results, and that’s apparently now the developers’ fault for just doing what they were told was okay before.
- Comment on Flirtation 2 days ago:
sodium hydroxide
Also known as lye, and is the main ingredient used in common household drain cleaners like Drano.
- Comment on Microsoft’s Xbox to Shift Obsidian Studio to New ‘Fallout’ Video Game 2 days ago:
Honestly I am surprised they didn’t do this years ago. It makes sense to let the studio that made the best Fallout game continue making Fallout games while the other studio works on the long-neglected Elder Scrolls 6. Otherwise we’d just be looking at decade-long droughts between Elder Scrolls and Fallout games at the pace BGS develops.
- Comment on Update: 136 workers have been laid off at id Software 2 days ago:
You mean other than being an anti-“woke” libertarian chud?
- Comment on I am hungover and full of regrets. 2 days ago:
Assuming this is the perspective of Americans, about 19 in 20 Americans do not eat enough fiber.
- Comment on Resetting XBOX - Compulsion Games and Double Fine to go indie again, Ninja Theory and Undead Labs "to join new ownership" 4 days ago:
That’s probably partly why they’re being sold off, unfortunately.
I admittedly have not played any of the State of Decay games, but is anyone expecting the third one to be a smash hit? That’s a long time to spend money on a studio to produce a game that might only sell modest numbers.
- Comment on A chart of how Xbox Games Studios became the largest publisher in the gaming space. 4 days ago:
Really interesting chart.
Would probably take a lot of effort, but it’d be neat to illustrate which IP also came in with the various studios that were acquired as well. Or show homegrown IP in addition to homegrown studios.
- Comment on Microsoft is selling off four Xbox studios as part of significant gaming cuts 4 days ago:
I wouldn’t rate Phil Spencer too highly either, though. He was the face behind these massive buyouts in the first place. He set the strategy for Xbox’s very lackluster console offering this generation. And he went all in on “You’ll own nothing and like it” with GamePass.
The studios that Xbox spent so much money on don’t appear to have really paid for themselves yet. With games being made at a glacial pace, you have not only the large sum of cash spent on the buyouts to worry about, but years of additional salaries, infrastructure, and services to pay before profit starts coming in. GamePass also appears to have been a major investment that hasn’t quite paid off, what with them now denying new contracts to third party studios while they reevaluate its business model.
- Comment on It's funny how we say "a bug hit my windshield" when we are the ones going 70mph. I'll bet the bug's family describes it differently 6 days ago:
It’s not a question of active vs passive, just who the actor is. Swapping the actor implicitly swaps blame.
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Car hits bicyclist (car implied at fault, as with all the examples above).
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Bicyclist collides with car (bicyclist implied at fault, they must have been doing something that caused them to get hit).
The assertion made above is that the latter trend is more common, but it was disputed, and the other examples provided in response just follow the first model.
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- Comment on I wonder why the world is on fire? A mystery 6 days ago:
Yep. Republicans like my family are still so focused on the idea of “welfare queens” and illegal immigrants who are sucking up their hard-earned taxpayer dollars, while completely blind to the fact that they are spending thousands enriching corporate middlemen who provide little to nothing in return. So who are the real leeches?
- Comment on I wonder why the world is on fire? A mystery 6 days ago:
I think you recognize a fundamental problem and yet do not address it.
Superseding an entire industry consolidates the economic weight of that industry into a smaller, more captive market. A capitalist push towards post-scarcity won’t work because the capitalists will always be motivated to implement artificial scarcity to protect their profits. Look at the current cost of computer hardware for one example.
A revolution of some sort would still be needed to truly make a post-scarcity economy, otherwise the fruits of those innovations will remain limited to the hands of the few.
- Comment on I wonder why the world is on fire? A mystery 6 days ago:
They sound like my family. God forbid there be “socialized” healthcare that the “leeches” can benefit from, but also insurance sucks and doesn’t pay for anything and whoops now we have medical debt.
They don’t want their tax dollars to subsidize the care of anyone they think is less deserving than them, while they begrudgingly accept having to pay hundreds of dollars each month on an insurance plan that won’t even cover the care they need.
And they want to see every change introduced by Obamacare undone, so, have fun going back to insurance plans that can deny you coverage just because you have a preexisting condition that they don’t want to pay for.
- Comment on What's the weirdest thing in english? 6 days ago:
English was screwed by the advent of the printing press.
From the beginning of the renaissance up to the 1700’s, English underwent a vowel shift which saw a lot of words change pronunciation. When the printing press arrived in England in the late 1400’s, there was a push to set standard spelling. But because the printing press arrived while the vowel shift was still ongoing, the new pronunciation of some words was revised with updated spelling (consistent with other words at the time) but other words would receive new pronunciations after their spelling was already set in stone.
If a language undergoes a vowel shift after its spelling is standardized, the phonetic rules remain mostly intact because they will trend towards changing consistently. If a language completes a vowel shift before its spelling is standardized, then the new spelling will just reflect its current phonetics. English was unlucky enough to be locked in time during its blunder years.
- Comment on How are you liking the Star Fox 64 remake? 1 week ago:
For the most part I think the new English voice acting is good, but it’s Fox’s in particular who feels more phoned in, which is unfortunate when he’s the main character.
Falco’s VA on the other hand I think captured the character’s personality perfectly.
- Comment on Is the Switch 2 a waste of money? 1 week ago:
So regarding the second part of my comment, how do you get around the geofence?
- Comment on Is the Switch 2 a waste of money? 1 week ago:
Depends on how much you’d want to use it, to be honest.
People balked at its price tag at launch, but it’s currently the cheapest entry point to gaming. It delivers better performance than the Steam Deck at nearly half the price, but the tradeoff is the closed ecosystem.
If there are key games you want to play on Switch 2 that are easy to get for less than MSRP, I’d say it’s worth it. If you want games that are also on every other platform and you have options that aren’t the Switch 2, no harm in saving your money. Probably not worth it for just 1 or 2 big titles right now. But it’s only been around for a little over a year so there will also certainly be more to look forward to down the road.
The only other factor is that hardware is continuing to get more expensive over time. Short of a major changes to global production/the AI bubble bursting, I wouldn’t count on that changing for a while yet. So there may also never be a cheaper time to get a Switch 2 than right now, especially when we know the price of the console will go up in just a couple months.
- Comment on Is the Switch 2 a waste of money? 1 week ago:
At the same time, my friends and I lend our Switch games out to one another, which we don’t have the ability to do with Steam. I’m currently borrowing Star Fox and enjoying it, while friend A is borrowing my copy of Donkey Kong Bananza and friend B is borrowing Tears of the Kingdom. I bought maybe 2 Switch games last year, but played 10.
Before anyone mentions family sharing on Steam, we tried that, but Valve quickly caught on to the fact that we didn’t live in the same household and cut us off.
- Comment on If Steam were to shut down tomorrow how much money would you have lost in total on games / DLC ?? 1 week ago:
About $3000 over 20 years. Not as much as I thought, to be honest. I wait for sales and try not to buy things unless I’m sure I’ll play it.
- Comment on what's the difference between a simp, a normie, and a basic b**ch? 1 week ago:
But no less toxic!
- Comment on "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" 1 week ago:
Unless we’re talking Switch 2 game key cards. Those are just downloads you can trade. But at least Nintendo puts all of their own properties on full carts rather than game key cards (Pokopia aside; Gamefreak and Pokemon are technically not Nintendo).
- Comment on "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" 1 week ago:
PS4 still gets new games, yes. Even physical ones.
- Comment on what's the difference between a simp, a normie, and a basic b**ch? 1 week ago:
Simp: includes connotation of submission to someone/something
Normie: cool-averse, trying not to stand out, passive participant
Basic Bitch: goes out of their way to chase fads, lack of originality
Lot of potential overlap between them, but there are certain nuances to how they’re used. A nerd who does whatever their favorite e-girl streamer commands may be a simp, but not necessarily a normie or basic bitch.
- Comment on Impossible 1 week ago:
Not universally. And even for cars that do, it is still easily noticeable when someone has their signal on. There are at least 3 brake lights, so if one of them is flashing instead of solid, that one is the turn signal.
I find more cars these days tend to have dedicated front and rear turn signals that are separate from the brake lights, though.
- Comment on It was called Freedom 250 because that's how many people went. 1 week ago:
According to this article, they have a photo wall of famous Floridians and a room that smells randomly of oranges.
washingtonian.com/…/i-went-to-trumps-great-americ…
I looked it up and there may also be a raffle or something. Maybe they’re raffling off citizenship like the article joked.
- Comment on Thats you 1 week ago:
A knuckle sandwich is a euphamism for a punch.
The commenter above joked that OP made a knuckle burger because they used a bun (bap/roll/barm/whatever they call it elsewhere) instead of the bread slices typical of a sandwich.
- Comment on Thats you 1 week ago:
But canolli are just a type of burrito
- Comment on DIY is way cheaper 1 week ago:
I’ve never understood why folks upload AI images with messed up text when that is one of the easiest things to edit manually.