merc
@merc@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Correlation implies causation 6 hours ago:
Correlation causes causation.
- Comment on It's not about physical vs digital games, it's about ownership 20 hours ago:
Just because a day one patch is standard doesn’t mean it’s good for the game developer. Also, just because the game can be released in a buggy state doesn’t mean that’s good either. There are a lot of games that received massively negative reviews because they were released in a buggy state.
It gives you a chance to save your reputation if your QA processes are shit, but if they are that will bite you in the ass at some point.
- Comment on It's not about physical vs digital games, it's about ownership 22 hours ago:
Games had a higher quality to them before being released.
The quality was definitely higher, but there were also definitely still bugs in the released version.
Why do you say that the ability (and requirement) to patch the game after release is a benefit to the company that released the game?
- Comment on It's not about physical vs digital games, it's about ownership 1 day ago:
How to think of games has changed over the years.
Arguably the first real computer game game “Spacewar!” followed the “the “hacker ethic”, whereby all programs were freely shared and modified by other programmers in a collaborative environment without concern for ownership or copyright”.
After a while, copyright came into play, and people were expected to “buy” a copy of the game, but “piracy” was common.
Meanwhile, the consoles pretended the game was a physical object, and that you needed that physical object to play, and that you could give that physical object to someone else, or sell it back to the store.
And then there was the shareware model, used for games like Doom. It kept the idea that games were copyrightable stuff, but it didn’t try to stop people from copying, and allowed them to share the games around. People were just asked to pay for extra levels, or sometimes just to send in some money if they liked the game.
On PC, Steam became the dominant platform because it’s less of a headache than piracy. Steam doesn’t pretend you own a physical object, you’re buying a license.
Fundamentally, gamers want the games to be free. If possible, they want to avoid paying for them at all. They want to be able to give them to friends, and have no restrictions on how or where they can run them: online, offline, on a phone, on a toaster, whatever. Once they have access to the game, they don’t ever want to have to give up access for any reason. They want the companies that make the games to release patches for any bugs that are discovered, and ideally, they’d like free additional content post-release.
Game companies want gamers to pay as much as possible for games. They want people to buy their games, they want an additional purpose for every additional machine the game is installed on. In addition, if they can manage it, they want people to pay continuously for playing the game, so it’s not just a one-time payment. They also want to be able to revoke access to the game at any time, and not have to pay the players when they do that. They don’t want to have to keep maintaining the game after it has been released, though they might be willing to do that if it’s profitable because it means more people will buy the game.
Neither extreme position makes much sense. If people aren’t going to give money to the developers, there will still be people making games as a hobby, but there won’t be high-budget AAA games made as a business. On the other extreme, if a game is too expensive, can’t be refunded, might be revoked at any time, and requires that you continuously pay while playing it, most people won’t bother.
So, what’s left is a negotiation, what will people put up with? Gamers typically hate paying for live service games, but if they do that there’s a reasonable business case for the game company to keep releasing content for the game. Gamers would like to be able to re-sell their game (really their licenses to those games), but that means a significant loss of revenue for the game companies, so they’re unlikely to accept that. The additional revenue means they can either keep the price lower, or can make a better, more polished game. Gamers would love to be able to play games forever without additional payment, even online games requiring servers. Game companies don’t want to have to support that based on a single sale that might have happened a decade ago. Game companies would love it if old games stopped working, so people have to buy new ones. That’s unlikely to be a fight they win in the long term though, because unless there is a required online component, it seems absurd to cut off access to the game just because it’s old.
In the end, there will probably be compromises. For a lot of people, the compromises will be unfair. Maybe they’ll play more indie games or even free software games. For other people, they’ll grudgingly accept, but in exchange will get games that have 100,000x the budget of something like “Spacewar!”
- Comment on It's not about physical vs digital games, it's about ownership 1 day ago:
- and a pony
- Comment on Fingies 1 day ago:
At least 80% of the leg, by length, is arm/leg, not finger/toe.
Compare that to a bat wing, where the bones really are long fingers:
- Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe? 1 day ago:
I never liked the jewel cases. Not enough space for anything interesting inside other than just the disc.
- Comment on GOG seemingly shares that they are considering physical PC 'big box' games. Maybe? 1 day ago:
What I miss is cloth maps. I don’t know what I did with mine, but if I ever open a moving box and find one, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall.
- Comment on Fingies 1 day ago:
Both large and big?
- Comment on Fingies 1 day ago:
There are certainly some injuries that are survivable, and that would let a horse survive long enough to heal, if they were a creature that could heal. I assume it’s that leg healing reduces their speed or endurance, or requires that they consume more calories. They put all their points into “get away from predator” and zero points into “deal with injuries”. I guess as long as the average female horse has more than 2 young that survive, that’s enough.
So, probably there were mutant horses that could heal a bit better, but maybe they required a bit too much food, or they were a bit slower than the other horses.
- Comment on Fingies 1 day ago:
Horses must have plenty of good evolutionary traits, because even without human breeding they’re very successful creatures. I guess they don’t reproduce quickly, so that isn’t it. I guess they can’t shrug off injuries. They must be really good at not getting caught by predators, so they live enough to have at least a couple of foals.
- Comment on Fingies 1 day ago:
Yeah, it’s not the leg that’s a finger, it’s the hoof-part. The legs are legs, but instead of ending in 5 digits they end in 1.
- Comment on Fingies 1 day ago:
They are simply incapable of bearing weight on three legs
This must mean “for an extended period of time” or something, because walking (and especially moving at any speed faster than walking) requires at a minimum that one foot be off the ground.
- Comment on Would you rather 2 days ago:
Wrangled would be more hogtied. That’s more mangled.
What about the Toyota Water Cruiser?
Toyota Water Cruiser mostly submerged
Or the Honda Bucolic:
Honda Civic abandoned in a field.
(it’s surprisingly hard to find an antonym for “civic”)
- Comment on Gaming industry right now 2 days ago:
It’s more “regulatory capture” than it is capitalism. In any system where there are supposed to be people who protect the rights of the people, if those organizations are prevented from doing their jobs, you get stuff like this.
The USSR, for example, was famous for its “new word formulation” after the revolution, which George Orwell referenced as “newspeak” in 1984. I mean, the official Soviet newspaper was named “Pravda” meaning “Truth” when it was famous for publishing propaganda that was clearly untrue.
- Comment on It's that time again 2 days ago:
you’re trolling attempts
Now whose trolling?
- Comment on It's that time again 2 days ago:
I figured.
- Comment on It's that time again 2 days ago:
Are you dodging the question? What makes someone a historian? Is anybody who writes a book on history automatically an authority on history?
- Comment on I wonder why the world is on fire? A mystery 3 days ago:
Everybody likes a mix of capitalism and socialism. Nobody likes 100% one or the other.
Everybody who has experienced it likes socialized medicine. Public education just makes sense. The idea of having to pay a contract to get private fire service seems absurd.
At the same time, nobody wants to stand in a bread line, or for the law to forbid an artist to profit from creating art. We like certain forms of capitalist activity, like a mom and pop shop, or a restaurant, or a good mechanic, or a lemonade stand.
Every country that believes in capitalism still has a mix of socialist elements. And, every supposedly “communist” country has realized that it doesn’t make any sense to forbid artists and craftsmen from owning their own tools and selling the things they made. The real question is where to draw the line.
The problem, as always, is the rich and powerful. Capitalism was supposed to be an improvement on feudalism because it required capitalists to compete, rather than just collect rents. But, that requires anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws, and for those laws to be enforced firmly and fairly. If a company has no competition, it can go right back to collecting rents and not doing any work. Communism also fails when “the state” owns everything, but really “the state” is a single dictator, or is a bunch of oligarchs who see that they get more than the rest.
- Comment on It's that time again 3 days ago:
So, writing a book makes you a historian. It’s not studying history?
- Comment on It's that time again 3 days ago:
So, you think anybody who writes a book about history is a historian? No wonder you are so lost.
- Comment on It's that time again 3 days ago:
Regardless, if you don’t think historians are writing history books, what do you think they’re doing?
Researching it and writing papers for other historians.
Do you think most historians write popular history books for non-historians?
- Comment on It's that time again 4 days ago:
Historians are the ones who break through the myths. Myths are what you’re taught in school. In school they told you all about how the US founding fathers were heroic figures fighting for their freedom…
- Comment on It's that time again 4 days ago:
They’re of course going to give you the surface level, popular version of what happened. If you want to actually know the real story you need to talk to historians.
- Comment on It's that time again 5 days ago:
Yes we do, it’s literally the reason they left in the first place.
According to what you learned in an American elementary school?
- Comment on It's that time again 5 days ago:
A lot worse.
- Comment on It's that time again 5 days ago:
We do know that the colonists hated what they considered overreaching British control
Do we? Or is that the story that has been written after the fact to justify what they did and make it seem more noble?
It sounds to me like you’re a product of the US educational system and have accepted what you learned there without questioning it.
- Comment on It's that time again 5 days ago:
How directly was he involved in the negotiations? Often the king is the ultimate authority in a country, but they don’t actually make many decisions themselves.
It’s well known that the colonists were looking for a reason to break away, and that the taxation issue was a convenient excuse. After all, taxation without representation was the norm. It wasn’t like all of England had the vote and had representatives in parliament. Entire cities had zero representation but were still taxed. Ireland had been part of the British empire for ages and it didn’t have representation.
- Comment on It's that time again 5 days ago:
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight to keep it mutually intelligible for all speakers/writers.
- Comment on It's that time again 6 days ago:
