Bleeping Lobster

  • 2 Posts
  • 166 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.

    Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.




  • This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.

    It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.

    I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).




  • Yep I definitely took it wrong, one of the problems with text only communication… No body language or audio cues! No worries.

    The devs of my audio interface have definitely been asked a fair bit about Linux compatibility… But considering they’ve not even bothered bringing their new DAW to PC, it seems they’re strongly focussed on mac ecosystems only for the foreseeable.

    Personally I think compatibility should be a two way street pun not intended! But unfortunately companies tend to vote with our wallets, so until Linux becomes even more established I doubt they will dedicate much if any resources to making their devices work on it. Shame.

    I bought a new audio interface for live work a few months back, went for an audient id24 partly because it’s Linux compatible (although no native drivers). So I will get stuck in at some point. I started using PCs back when floppy disks were actually floppy so I’m not afraid of command line stuff!


  • None of the main adobe suite works on Linux either, so let’s not pretend my use case is so narrow. Literally none of the programs I use to work (Cubase, Audition, After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere, yes I can install a virtual windows machine but that completely defeats the purpose) works with Linux. And from what I gather last time I researched this, hardly any audio interfaces are Linux compatible. Most of the games I want to play also are not Linux-compatible.

    Fact of the matter is, despite the large dedicated userbase (which I appreciate), it still has a giant gap where many prosumers and casual users cannot utilise it. It’s no good saying “ahhh well YOU’RE not compatible with US! No u!”. I’d love to switch and tbh am strongly considering a setup for live PA that’s Linux based, in the hope that it brings greater stability. But it’s going to be a large investment of time, and I’ll have to buy a different audio interface if I have a hope of making it work.





  • I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.

    I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.

    I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?




  • I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.

    But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.


  • Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.

    When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music