They said if you’re buying solely based bubble color then it’s based on peer pressure, there of course are other valid reasons for someone to choose one and there are also other bad reasons.

Dvorak?

Have you considered switching to pickup when you can? pick what you want from the comfort of your home, drive to the store at the designated time, an employee has picked all your goods and it is brought out to you. Same price for you, more labor for the company to pay for.

RoboQuest has been my main jam for a bit, decent little roguelite shooter. I like how you unlock travel to different areas by finding things from other paths.

Wish it scaled to more than 2 player though…

You’re headed towards the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon”. I’d also note, that people losing a war without suffering recognizable losses are less likely to surrender to the victor.

I feel like it’s ok to skip to optimizing the autonomous drone-killing drone.

You’ll want those either way.

I just checked an Amazon purchase that had the option for a payment plan, my options were to use my Chase card affiliated with Amazon or Affirm which is a 3rd party that is offering the structured payment. Not sure what it looks like for others, but if it’s similar, then Amazon wouldn’t be doing anything bank-like with those payments.

You could do banner ads, shrink the video, randomly add a banner to top/bottom and a 2nd left/right. If you skip the ads, you skip the content too.

I’ve been watching and enjoying Jesse Cox (on his CoxClips youtube) play it. He knows a lot about the universe lore and does some explaining for people who may not be as familiar. Someone related to the game also mailed him some ARG stuff related to the game before it came out and he did a few videos on his jessecox channel for it.

I’m expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there’s no way around it. They’ll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.

Your talk of providing estimates just reminds me of this scene from Star Trek TNG.

Geordi La Forge: I told the Captain I’d have this analysis done in an hour.

Scotty: How long will it really take?

Geordi La Forge: An hour!

Scotty: Oh, you didn’t tell him how long it would ‘really’ take, did ya?

Geordi La Forge: Well, of course I did.

Scotty: Oh, laddie. You’ve got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.

Chex Quest was straight gasoline.

Everyone has a bias and that’s expected and the stating of opinions as opinions is good, the line is stating opinion as fact or review bombing.

I didn’t play it because I didn’t want to log in, isn’t a review of the actual game, it’s at best review bombing against secondary logins. It tells anyone interested in playing the game nothing other than that a secondary login is needed.

The definition of the minimum criteria for what makes a game is pretty nebulous, but survivor styles are well above all but the most disingenuous definitions of what makes a game. Saying it isn’t a game because you don’t enjoy it is not having a bias that causes you to like something less.

The trending of most games to be 7+/10 is largely driven by idiots who tied the success of a game to metacritic scores and publishers who retaliate against games journalists for “hurting” that success by not cooperating with them on future products by providing review codes.

“I don’t like X game/genre” is a fine take, calling something you don’t like “not really a game" is not, unless you can really justify it not meeting some minimum criteria to be called a game (doesn’t present a challenge or problem to overcome, doesn’t have a fail-state, has no player agency, etc)

Most of your write ups seem decently done if you clicked with the game at all, but if you’re going to continue to review things, you might want to do reign in your personal biases a bit.

Low scores for games you didn’t play or realize you don’t understand the appeal of are pretty bad takes.

Vampire Survivors was quite literally one of the hit games of the year when it came out, to call other games of the genre that are following on its coattails “not really a game” and saying people shouldn’t buy a literal genre is just ridiculous. Is FatalZone trying to be some huge blockbuster, no, it’s just iterating on the survivor concept (same as Deep Rock Galactic is doing, which has more polish but less features than most). The game is literally $5 to buy right now in early access and as one of the many who do enjoy the genre, it’s probably worth the price with the content it has now (unknown if it’ll be same insane value VS has been).

People with a gambling addiction will find an outlet for it unless they get help controlling it, just like people with any addiction. Addiction is treated on an individual basis, not by banning an activity that the vast majority of the population can partake in with self-control.

We don’t have tons of public numbers to be able to discuss the initial development, licensing, marketing, support and ongoing development, distribution and overhead costs vs initial costs, expansion and MTX income of games at a large scale. But you can be sure the companies that make the games have those numbers, and they’re used for pricing and budgeting of future development. And that’s before we open the can of worms that is discussing how much profit is ethical.

Maybe they could make less money, maybe they could not make certain features, but where does the ethical line fall when it comes to predatory features and marketing? Who needs protection? From who? How do you implement it without infringing the rights of others? Is it ok to let them gamble if there’s a deterministic worst-case scenario? What if there’s a limit on how much they can spend? What if purchases are purely only deterministic, but they’re limited time exclusives that will never return? What about if you can earn them by playing or pay extra to just get them up front or faster? What about if they carve that feature out of the main product and sell it as an additional cost? These are all predatory in some way, but we don’t need to ban them all when a person can make their own value judgments and interact with games in a way that brings them enjoyment. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope to asking why we even let people “waste” money on entertainment.

Whales subsidize the cost of the game for everyone else. If there weren’t whales, the cost goes up for everyone or the product diminishes. Reality isn’t a magical realm where the company will not use ROI and net profit to determine what to make or how to price things, it’s all interrelated and you don’t get to hold everything else constant when asking for something to change.

While that’s true, there’s also a huge difference from like 20+ years ago when they more often than not released games as a complete functional product as opposed to a “we hit the date” buy-in beta test. Games just tend to release with less features and polish than they used to, for the most part companies will keep working on it and get it where it needs to be so the final product is comparable, but it makes for a murkier cycle, buy in at release and probably suffer or wait and try to time when it’s actually ready.

The point the other person is trying to make is that if a person wants to watch something, but the price is higher than they value or can afford for the experience they will not pay the price, so the company will not profit. If the person then pirates the content to view it, the company has lost nothing additional.

However, one could also make the argument that the viewer having the ability to pirate lowers what they are willing to pay, thus the company does lose some amount of profit in aggregate over time. This though is not necessarily true for those who lack the means to pay, rather than just the willingness.

Ultimately for people who do have the means, piracy is a symptom more of a service issue rather than a price issue. People generally will follow the path of least resistance to acquire what they desire. For most people a small payment and easy access will lead them not to pirate, but as prices rise, content fractures and UIs enshitify, the aggregate effort crosses the line and they start to withdraw and turn to other methods.

Everyone has their own willingness to pay for things on the demand curve, if companies pick an optimal price, they maximize profits, and aren’t harmed by people who cannot or will not pay that price utilizing a non-consumable resource without payment.

Honest criticisms: It’s a bit of a brick for sure. I turned the RGB ring off. The multi-function button isn’t as usable as I’d hoped, mostly just a flashlight/screenshot button. The headphone jack and USB port are behind a protected rubber flap, so I keep opening/closing it frequently, but that’s to help with being waterproof. While the optional case functions as a good stand for horizontal viewing and for holding, it is inadequate for vertical, and it just would’ve needed a small internal brace to fix that. The case also blocks their wireless charging connectors, if you were planning to use a dock for that. Attaching the endoscope requires removing a tiny screw. The lack of a bottom button bar has taken some getting used to but I’m fine with it now, the side fingerprint scanner is similar.

Overall I am happy with it. The battery lasts a whole day with high use, it has decent internals for games, the screen and included protector are appropriately unobtrusive, it isn’t running a very outdated version of Android. Perhaps most importantly, it should survive my child who likes to throw my phone and my dumbass who left it in my pocket getting in a pool.