And this is why Tesla is a danger to everyone INCLUDING the people who could actually be saved by real, well-tested, extremely safe autonomous vehicles like Waymo et al.

TESLA IS NOT AUTONOMOUS DRIVING

ACTUAL AUTONOMOUS DRIVING IS SAFER THAN HUMAN DRIVERS

Fuck fuck fuck I hate this timeline so much. We could be saving lives but NOOOOOO we get this bullshit instead

Fun fact: the infamous “cripple fight” from South Park is a shot-for-shot remake of the fight scene from They Live

😍🤩 Contextually relevant Depeche Mode 🤩😍

I was wondering wtf you were talking about until I remembered I have the entire tankiesphere blocked. Oh the blissful, golden silence 😁

Called this a while ago https://urusai.social/@neatchee/112255667073894754

I never said anything about the quality of the games. I’m speaking specifically to the monetization bullshit.

As I said elsewhere: budget bloat happens in a lot of places. Greedy executive and publishers is one place. Overambitious design goals that get scrapped is another. There’s also bad tools workflows, mismanagement, and any number of other contributing factors.

But even indie devs are getting screwed on pricing and making far less than they deserve to be in many cases.

If people keep buying CoD and Assassins Creed, devs will keep making them. And if they can’t increase retail price to cover the budget they will find other ways to do it.

I almost replied from my inbox; glad someone said it before I even got to it haha

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the capital structure is fair by any means. I understand all the reasons why people - especially right now - are struggling to justify big purchases.

And I will readily agree that inefficient and improper use of resources is one of the contributing factors to ballooning development budgets

That said, video games are - and I challenge you to disprove this - easily one of the best investments for entertainment. Dollars-per-hour of fun on a 20hr, $60 game is $3. For a live service game where people spend hundreds of thousands of hours playing it can get below $0.10 per hour.

EDIT: I also agree that demos need to make a comeback because I’m sick of wasting money. Though people also need to read some reviews before they buy occasionally :/

While that may be true, the costs and budgets we’re dealing with today are orders of magnitude higher than they were back then. Physical product manufacturing doesn’t even come close to making up the difference when you factor in digital storefront costs.

I simply chose two big, well known, and beloved titles for the sake of expediency.

This problem is not unique to big budget games.

Indie devs are getting screwed too. You saying that you’ve found great games for $30-40 from indie devs isn’t an argument against more sustainable pricing like you think it is.

If the dev budget for the indie game was 5% of the AAA game but the price was 50% then you’ve literally just helped prove my point

The fact is - and I challenge you to prove me wrong here - video games continue to be hands down the best dollar-per-hour investment for entertainment. Even a $60 game that only lasts 20 hrs is still coming in at $3/hr of entertainment, which is very hard to beat. When you look at live service games where people will spend literally thousands of hours after paying anywhere from $60-200 you’re looking at $0.10/hr in some cases.

Fun facts incoming!

Cost of “Mario 64” on release = $59.99

Development budget for Mario 64 = ~$1.56mil

Inflation adjusted Mario 64 cost in 2022 = $111.91

Inflation adjusted Mario 64 budget in 2022 = ~$2.91mil

Cost of “Elden Ring” on release = $59.99

Estimated dev. budget for Elden Ring = $100mil-200mil

Mario 64 units sold = ~12mil

Elden Ring units sold = ~28mil

These details are provided without comment. You do the math and decide whether the fact that prices haven’t changed since 1996 might be the reason for some of the enshitification we continue to see.

And now for the comment:

Consumers are horrifyingly resistant to price increases for games. It is directly responsible for many of the shitty monetization models we’ve seen. Development budget continue to rise, even on indie games, while consumers pay less and less in “real money value” over time.

It’s completely unsustainable and the very reason the “business types” get involved, forcing unpopular monetization schemes

Exactly this. I work in the games industry as well and even big studios are falling over themselves NOT to release anywhere near GTA6.

Nobody believes there won’t be people playing other games at that time. But it’s going to dominate the media cycle for a month, especially if it is either better or worse than fans hope. And the reality is that many, many people have limited gaming budgets. If you’ve only got $100 to spend, GTA6 is very likely to be the default pick at that time.

It’s a behemoth in terms of grabbing attention from both the media and players. All the best laid plans for a successful release can be completely derailed by a game like GTA6.

Legit same

Unfortunately most, if not all, of these AI filter apps offer some sort of beautification, as it’s very popular and a good source of user acquisition

It looks like the best you’ll find is something like B612

Interestingly there is a body of research that suggests enjoyment of music comes from having exactly one of two things, never both:

Familiarity and predictability

If it’s neither familiar nor predictable, it is inscrutable and therefore discomforting to listen to

If it is both familiar and predictable it is boring

If it’s familiar but unpredictable, it feels like a journey through known emotions

If it’s predictable but unfamiliar it feels like ‘logical discovery’ and is fun and satisfying

A bit reductive but I love this idea

I think we have far more that we agree on in this conversation than we disagree on. We can get into the minutiae of specific UIs but that probably misses the point.

Where I agree with OP is on the first impression of the default Lemmy UI to users trying to migrate from big-corpo products

For better or worse, these folks have come to believe that “slick looking” = thoughtfully designed = featureful and advanced. And that “sterile/boring looking” = amateur UX design = complicated and difficult

We can’t break that mentality in the general public by simply repeating over and over that they’re wrong. It just doesn’t work that way, sadly.

On my Mastodon server, we have the Elk frontend available and have it listed prominently right next to the sign-up/sign-in button as a “Twitter-friendly UI experience” (also on our About page). Then, we periodically throw up an announcement telling users that apps, Elk, etc don’t provide all of the features available on the modified webUI/PWA, along with a list of what they’re missing and how to learn more.

It’s an “abopt, extend, extinguish” approach and it works. There’s a reason corporate enshitification pioneered that strategy. We can use it too, but for good :)

If the goal of Lemmy - and specifically lemmy.world is to be a boutique, niche aggregator then fine. But that is explicitly NOT the goal. That may be what some users want but they are free to go form their own small servers and isolate as much as they want

I am not suggesting that every community needs to be growth-oriented. Small groups are great.

But they are also weak, and virtually incapable of creating and maintaining the systemic change required to protect themselves long term.

If the attitude is “let the capitalists take over everything else, I’m happy with my underground movement that struggles to survive” then that’s honestly bordering on selfish. “I’m happy so I don’t care about what happens to others. They can figure out how to find us and do what we do or get fucked” kind of energy. It’s privileged in the extreme

The best way for small communities to thrive is through collective action. And in order for that to happen there need to be enough small communities to have any sort of influence as a collective. And in order for that to happen, there needs to be an entry-point into the collective that is accessible to newcomers.

That is what Lemmy - and especially lemmy.world - have positioned themselves to be. It’s not dissimilar to Mastodon(.social)

Get ratiod and blocked, weirdo. Go try to impress someone else with your misuse of logical fallacy terminology. Some people might be convinced you’re smart but probably only on hexbear lol.

Buh-bye, chief 👋

LMAO this chump thinks hexbear is a good example of…well, of anything, really.

Go circlejerk in your little group of isolationists if you want but please stop telling the rest of us about it. You sound like a weird voyeur