chiliedogg
@chiliedogg@lemmy.world
- Comment on not getting it™ since 2024© 1 day ago:
The 196 community has an (unenforced) rule that you must post every time you visit, so they’re posts that are following the rule.
- Comment on As Xbox and PlayStation flounder, Steam is reportedly having another record year 1 day ago:
Sony doesn’t want to come out and say “Best Buy can get fucked” because Best Buy still sells headphones, TVs, and other products Sony makes, including the Playstation itself. They need the retailers to sell their products.
But with digital goods, they can cut out the retailers retailers. The $10 bucks or whatever the retialer would get now goes to Sony.
- Comment on national anthem 1 day ago:
Not even his daughter. He’s the PM and he does it to get a princess released.
And it turns out she’s released before he even does it.
- Comment on Day 107, suspicions are high and a fear I must soon leaf 1 day ago:
If you see a church suddenly get a new steeple, there’s a good chance it’s a cell tower. The cell companies will pay for the steeple addition. It works out for the cell companies because they can usually get a deal to build the church a steeple one time instead of paying a lease for decades.
- Comment on definitely not recording! 1 day ago:
You have to specifically asknfor it in the US, and they act like it’s a crazy request. And they usually won’t give you your PD.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
They don’t want to risk people overdrafting and just changing banks.
- Comment on Being poor is expensive 1 day ago:
Being poor is super expensive. When you don’t have enough money in your bank account they’ll charge you a monthly fee. When you’re too poor to have an account, you have to go to a check cashing place and pay to get paid. Too poor to have awesome credit? You have to pay higher interest fees and larger deposits.
- Comment on As Xbox and PlayStation flounder, Steam is reportedly having another record year 1 day ago:
That’s the point. It’s not about the disc. It’s about cutting out retailers.
Games sell at the same price or cheaper at the retailer as they do digitally, and the retailer takes a cut. Games sold through PSN or the Xbox store make Sony and Microsoft way more money.
And that’s before we get to used sales.
- Comment on Yankee Doodle 1 day ago:
Good news: It’s not the size of a pop-tart.
It’s a cherry cobbler.
- Comment on "My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well" - id Software co-founder John Carmack speaks out after devastating Xbox layoffs 2 days ago:
The old Mechwarrior games were more like simulators than modern mech games, so were pretty complicated to get into.
And they were very demanding performance-wise.
- Comment on definitely not recording! 2 days ago:
Yeah, but they also own the $50 frames.
- Comment on definitely not recording! 2 days ago:
It’s harder for people who go to the optometrist and get their glasses.
The Luxoticca-owned insurance company makes them use the Luxoticca-owned optometrist that sells Luxoticca-owned frames with Luxoticca-owned lenses.
Moat people don’t even know you can ask the optometrist for your prescription so you can go buy frames and lenses from Zenni or Coastal.
- Comment on "My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well" - id Software co-founder John Carmack speaks out after devastating Xbox layoffs 2 days ago:
They had a bunch of great titles.
Age of Empires, Freelancer, Mechwarrior, and more.
- Comment on Which are you? 2 days ago:
Lemming
- Comment on definitely not recording! 2 days ago:
The shitty thing is it’s hard not to give the fuckers money.
Luxoticca owns most eyewear brands, optometrist offices, eyewear retailers, and even a ton of optical insurance providers. They control the frames, lenses, and more.
Oakley used to be independent, but they actually stopped lenscrafters from providing lenses for them and bullied their suppliers until Oakley’s stock dropped enough to buy them out. They’re the reason frames that should cost $15 cost $900.
They’re one of the clearest examples of a monopoly in the world, but we just fucking let it continue.
- Comment on "My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well" - id Software co-founder John Carmack speaks out after devastating Xbox layoffs 2 days ago:
Microsoft’s gaming division was pretty respected in the industry for a long time. Lots of people give them (deserved) flack over Kinect for the Cbox One, but what really drove them over the cliff was buying all these studios to make Gamepass more attractive. It was actually a good deal for everyone when it was mostly games that were older, but when they started doing day-1 releases of first party games and buying studios to add to the number of games getting that day-1 release it turned sour.
A bunch of games that early adopters would previously have paid 60 bucks for were suddenly included in theit $7/month subscription, so tons of people who would have been buying 10 games a year were suddenly spending less than a hundred bucks on new Xbox games because enough new stuff was coming to Gamepass they could stay busy, so all these AAA releases that cost $100 to make were losing money.
So they raised the process of gamepass to try and keep up, but didn’t. Then they bought Activision and lost their lunch when Call of Duty sales plummeted because millions of people with Gamepass who had been buying it annually didn’t.
So they increased the price of gamepass so high everyone canceled, removing the only reason many of them were still using Xbox over Playstation, and at the same time the consoles skyrocketed in price.
Now they aren’t including Call of Duty from Gamepass for the first year and taking the price partway down, which was a good start to righting the ship but too late.
Chasing the Netflix model doesn’t work if you do it dumb. Netflix didn’t buy all the other studios to make their original programs. They did make some internal studios, but they mainly partnered with existing studios to make specific programs. Instead of buying Bethesda, they could have partnered with them on specific games, which would have been better for the games, the studio, Microsoft, and Xbox customers. But buying Bethesda was a simpler brute-force solution they employed dozens of times.They became an even dumber Embracer Group. Embracer at least they had a (dumb) plan to sell off the assets. Microsoft bought a bunch of studios with no plan for how to make it profitable.
- Comment on The land before time 3 days ago:
They also stopped doing the 30-minute thing because they kept getting sued over the wrecks caused by trying to meet the 30-minute deadline.
- Comment on Let it sink in. 4 days ago:
I want to go to the kinds of bars where counting in binary wins bets. Most of the time it’s things like “open a beer bottle with your eye socket”.
- Comment on This guy managed the movie theater I worked at in high school. 1 week ago:
Bad dress shoes feel awful. When I used to wear them at a dresser job, I loved my Bostonians.
- Comment on Oblivion 1 week ago:
I’m a lecturer for a University where all courses are required to have a mandatory textbook that is sold at the University book store.
The thing is, most of the time the book isn’t actually necessary - we just have to tell the students in code. When I tell students that a textbook is mandatory as a required supplement to the materials that will be provided in lecture and online, it’s code for “Don’t buy that shit - they’re making me say it’s mandatory.”
When I was in school, I also had a professor who had written a mandatory textbook, but it was printed on the cheap, spiral-bound, and he didn’t take a commission on its sale, so it was like $12.
But there are also evil professors. I had a professor of American History in college who had a “mandatory” textbook he had written and said would be included in all the exams and that he would not cover it in lectures. The book turned out to be about an art movement in 1920s Mexico (his doctorate was in Mexican history), and not a page of it was actually relevant to the course or included in the exams. He just wanted to make extra money off the students.
- Comment on I wonder why the world is on fire? A mystery 1 week ago:
It’s awful. And until you hit maximum out of pocket, the insurance company may not be paying anyway.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
That part makes sense. They’re different boxes in different locations.
- Comment on "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" 1 week ago:
Reselling does nothing for Sony though, so losing the customers who are buying and selling used games isn’t a loss for them.
It’s like how people freaked out about how Netflix would surely collapse when they cracked down on password sharing, but it’s actually brought in a bunch more money for them. Losing viewers who aren’t paying for the service was actually a bonus. Even if there had been a bet zero change in subscribers, they’d save money from the reduction in traffic.
- Comment on End of an era? 1 week ago:
Yeah. The Xbox One’s initial digital library plans were actually pretty compelling. The ability to lend and sell licenses was actually pretty neat, but they had to cancel it with the backlash to the announcement that you’d have a license code tied to the disc.
Honestly, if Xbox had ditched physical entirely that generation instead of causing the confusion around requiring the digital license despite having a disc I think it would have been better-received. That or going to a 2-tiered system where you had to have the disc in the machine to play games that hadn’t initially been a digital download.
Oh, and ditching the Kinnect bullshit.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Free riders are a feature, not a bug. High unions make everything better for almost everyone. The only ones who benefit from union-busting are the ownership class, because ultimately they only work in a competitive market when the ownership isn’t hoarding more than their share.
- Comment on It's that time again 1 week ago:
Taxes pay for community benefits and projects like roads and police and fire services and public education and (ideally) healthcare. Those paying taxes should have representatives to help ensure their constituents are benefiting from the taxes they’re providing.
The American colonies were being taxed without representation and therefore meaningful benefits from the taxes they were paying. The British government was present in the colonies, but they were there for the purpose of trade and tax collection to benefit of the Crown and those in England.
- Comment on It’s just apophenia 1 week ago:
Shit. That was a long stretch.
- Comment on It’s just apophenia 1 week ago:
I get the 4 lights joke. I’m referencing the loss joke.
- Comment on It’s just apophenia 1 week ago:
You lost?
- Comment on I want it to slap me across the face 2 weeks ago:
My understanding is that dark roast is just as strong or even stronger by weight, but the longer roast makes it lighter for the same volume. Since people tend to use scoops to measure out their coffee the lighter blends end up stronger.
But if you measure by weight instead, that’s no longer the case.