Exactly. Nintendo is not our friend, but it’s also playing by the rules it has available to it. It’s the rulemaker’s fault if the rules are shite.

As a publically traded company in the current system, Nintendo is not in the business of making video games, it’s in the business of making shareholder value. Video games are just a tool for doing that, exactly how a PC is a tool for writing documents or developing software. At the end of the day, companies have more than one tool at their disposal, and are going to use all of them to compete.

It’s on us to take away the tools we don’t think they should have access to, not on them to voluntarily not use the ones that are in play.

It’s the slow but inevitable achievement of end-state of a system designed to re-frame and re-centralize power in the hands of the elite following the liberalization of political power.

This is its purpose. It always has been.

Regular reminder that prices are not based on what something’s component pieces are worth, but what people are willing to pay.

Nah. This is the sort of thing you get when different features are owned by different dev teams.

Didn’t spend all of their time arguing about idological purity online and actually pushed to achieve their agenda.

It’s patently bizarre how a company whose only purpose is transferring money from account A to B can then arbitrarily decide what people are allowed to buy and sell.

This is the whole point of capitalism. Those who control the systems, control the people, and capital exists to ensure that the people do not control the systems.

Yup. This is purposeful mischaracterization from one of the biggest boosters of games-as-a-streaming-product. Ubisoft doesn’t want you to have the ability to play things at your whim, but exclusively at theirs. They sure as fuck don’t want you spending your time on something they sold you 10 years ago.

Quick Time Events; characters that automatically do 60 things just by holding down “forward” on the joystick; the Ubisoft logo.

Gotta keep going. Not all signatures are going to be legit, so a reasonable buffer needs to be in place.

NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.

Because there is zero trust that this won’t be a one-sided liberalization, in favour of the fascists.

Hey, do I work for you?

Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.

At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.

I bet door-to-door salespeople would make way more money if they could just break into your homes, leave their junk on your table, and steal your credit card, and yet we don’t let them do that.

Right. But when the bar is owned by a Nazi, your options for pushing them out of the bar becomes a lot more limited.

“Reviewers” need to understand that, unless they paid their own money, from a bog-standard store, on or after release day, they are not reviewers, they are hired spokespeople.

Doom 2 was the peak. 2016 was a strong reimagining of Doom 3, but it was already trying to be something Doom wasn’t.

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The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it’s true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.

All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.

There is no reason to even suggest that AI ‘means well’. It doesn’t mean anything, let alone well.