I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.
Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.
They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.
I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.
Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.
Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.
I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.
Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.
I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.
I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.
I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”
Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.
But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.
I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?
I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.
But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.
Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?
Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?
Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?
If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?
I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.
As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.
I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.
Yeah, my plan is PS5, too. I was worried because been playing these games on PC almost literally my whole life, from BG1 and IWD through to PoEII and DOSII. But I don’t have a PC that can play any sorts of games right now, so it’s gonna have to be PS5.
Watching a few let’s plays and streams, it sounds like controller support is solid. So despite not being what I’m used to, I’m confident it’ll be a solid experience.
This instance that you are posting to is in fact run by a guy who has proven to thwart DDoS attack without resorting to CF using methods 1 and 3 (confirmed), perhaps more.
I’m glad to hear it. Did they share these solutions in an easy-to-consume manner for other instance admins who may not have the same expertise, resources, or time? As I said before, I’m not suggesting they must do the work to share these things in an easy-to-consume manner - I’m just saying if these solutions aren’t available in an easy to consume manner, then you shouldn’t be so surprised and upset that other people are reaching for the easy-to-use solutions instead.
Telling people “bring a PR or GTFO” is very much the non-constructive shitty attitude we need to avoid.
The sentence you quoted very specifically did not say “bring a PR or GTFO,” so I’ll ask that you try to not put words in my mouth. In fact, I went to great lengths to make it clear I wasn’t saying that because I happen to agree with you - it is an unconstructive attitude.
I very specifically did say “bring a PR or don’t get mad that other people aren’t immediately doing the work for you.” If you aren’t bringing a PR then you are bringing an idea. If you aren’t bringing solutions but are bringing a sensationalist and confrontational attitude, don’t be surprised when you have a confrontation rather than a conversation.
Maybe it would be more constructive to identify barriers to adopting privacy-respecting solutions rather than getting judgemental about using other solutions. What makes Cloudflare easier than tarpitting? How could the barrier to adopting tarpitting be lowered to make it a reasonable solution to adopt? Are there any Lemmy admins that can weigh in on the conversation and share their challenges?
Okay, you’ve doubled down on hating Cloudflare, which is fair.
Do you see why maybe instance admins are reaching for the Cloudflare button, though? They are often individuals or small teams with relatively little expertise, time, or financial resources. Plus a lot to lose financially if an attack blows out their bandwidth budget or gets them kicked off their hosting. And they’re under extreme pressure to keep their instances available and reliable because that’s what users expect from web services these days, whether it is realistic or not. Saying “the instance will be offline for two weeks while I work on this haproxy config a couple hours each evening after work that may or may not effectively mitigate this attack” isn’t really a reasonable expectation.
Throwing out “just move to tor,” “jusy build a firewall rule with the last-known IPs of your users,” “just do tarpitting,” and “just turn off images.” Are nice ideas (except for maybe the known IP thing which has a lot of problems in an age of mobile devices and VPNs), but none are yet solutions.
So presenting it as “I can’t believe people are doing [this incredibly easy thing that I have an ethical problem with] rather than [this series of complicated ideas that have not yet been proven to actually solve the issue] this is a disaster in every way” is not conducive to open conversation and instead makes people who did [incredibly easy thing you have a problem with] defensive and/or just straight up annoyed and dismissive.
Ideas are good and having ideas for instance admin tools for things like moderation, ddos mitigation, etc is good because we need to start somewhere. But you can’t jump right to “I had this great idea it’s an absolute travesty that nobody has already implemented it” and expect people to take you seriously.
Now that’s not to say that your post is bad unless it comes along with “Intro to Tor for Lemmy Admins” or “how to configure rate limiting with tarpitting in your reverse proxy” or “here’s a PR I made for Lemmy that implements an optional text-only emergency mode.” But if you aren’t coming with those things you should instead come from a place of collaboration, education, and curiosity.
Right? I’d never heard of either of these games before, but after playing the Goodboy demo and watching some YouTube videos of Witch n Wiz, I’m pretty excited for this cart.
Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.
The things that drew me to Evercade are:
Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.
There were lots of games back then. And many of them were as bad or worse than the shittiest shovelware and template swaps we’ve got today.
Thing is, most people don’t remember the 200 Action Games 3 disc pack at the bottom of the bargain bin cause they sucked.
I’m not disputing that there is more “stuff” these days by raw numbers, with the barrier to creation and distribution of games and such dramatically lowered by ubiquitous and easy to use tooling. But I bet the ratios of good games to shitty games won’t have changed too terribly much over the years.
DMVs are sometimes where states will dump troublesome or underperforming employees they can’t outright fire.
On the other end, the DMV is one of the places where employees have a job interacting with the public for sometimes-complex transactions. And, generally speaking, the public is dumb, unpleasant, and unprepared. Especially when dealing with low-level government beaurocrats who are telling them something they don’t want to hear.
I gave away my NES, 3DS, Dreamcast, N64, and all related games and peripherals a few years ago cause they were taking up too much room for stuff I barely ever used.
I’ve already played these games on (3)DS back in 2013 or so, so I agree it’s the best way to play em. But I just don’t have the time, money, or space to be a retro game collector (outside of Evercade) anymore so I’ll make do with playing these games on Switch.
I’m playing through the Switch re-releases now and they’re great. The mapping controls leave a lot to be desired versus the DS originals, but it was never gonna be as good as that magic.
Yeah, I like that. After being able to recognize and validate claims, being able to verify the validity (at least logically if not factually) of any conclusions drawn from those claims seems like a good next step.
I dunno. For someone just starting to want to think critically during discussions of when reading things, asking them to get serious in the academic pursuit of logic and argument theory might not be the way. For one, it’s probably just asking for them to get stalled in the sort of dunning kruger zone of identifying fallacies and stopping there.
Especially when such behavior is already endemic to the internet and many platforms have feedback loops designed to reward this behavior. Just dunk on 'em and move on - watch the upvotes and retweets roll in.
I definitely don’t want discourage OP from learning anything, but I do want to be careful in what direction we point a beginner.
I think maybe learning to find good sources of information and verify claims might be a better first step. That doesn’t give OP any shortcuts I’m discussions, which is good. Then they may begin to notice different patterns or forms of discussion and at that point they can start to classify them and learn about them if they see fit.
Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.