Sometimes I’ll rename myself “Free XP Weekend” and invade people and then just jump off a cliff or let them wreck me. For free XP.

Having worked as a game designer, I humbly disagree with your instructor. No amount of brilliance or success makes it okay for someone to be ac douche

The fact that popular free apps in the EU are subject to fees unless they come up with their own app store is bullshit and clearly Apple trying to punish developers over there. Like, “if you don’t want to owe us money, then make it so the only people who can find your app are those who already know about it”?

It was fairly quickly demonstrated IIRC that Yuzu could emulate TOTK at higher res and 60fps. So it’s entirely possible to me that Yuzu’s Patreon sub soared because users wanted to play their purchased game on better hardware.

I hope the courts find in favor of Yuzu and set the legal precedent that it’s legal to dump secret numbers and purchased software from a device you own.

FYI, this is not about free GPUs. “GeForce NOW” is a streaming service.

Headline would’ve been less confusing if it had the service name in quotes or something. I can see how people might read that and assume it means free, ad-supported GPUs. It does not.

I mean, gaming exploded over the pandemic. Anyone who thought that was going to become some kind of norm was an idiot. Have we shrunk below pre-pandemic levels? Or is this just idiots who thought they could keep skimming free oil off the surface once the leak was fixed?

Also, I disagree with the idea that AAA games are performing poorly. Bad ideas in AAA games and chasing “easy money” in AAA is performing poorly. Helldivers 2 seems to be doing well, whereas Suicide Squad isn’t. Baldir’s Gate 3 killed it while Starfield kind of flopped. Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet expectations, but we know Square Enix regularly sets expectations too high anyway.

Are people tired of the same Call of Duty games over and over? Are people full up on live service games and looter shooters? Yes and yes. But are people crazy excited for the new Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? From the communities I’m in, very much yes. Did Alan Wake 2 release and sell faster than any other game from that studio? Pretty sure I saw that headline recently, yeah.

So when Diablo 4 dies on impact, was that the fault of the gaming landscape? Or was it because Blizzard execs pushed the team to maximize systems and balance they thought would bring in easy money but actually ended up alienating their core audience and reviewers?

I’ve seen this before when working in mobile. Execs want to chase the whales so badly that they don’t allow designers and devs to make the game actually fun to play. Doesn’t matter how “well” you monetize your shitty game if nobody wants to stick around to play it.

I look back fondly on the moments of “where is the phone?!” Because someone took it to their room to have a private conversation but then left it there on accident.

Still happens I guess, but where everyone has their own phone (not one shared for the whole family) it’s less frantic and thus less hilarious to me.

My favorite thing about podcasts is how, at least in the ones I listen to, the ads are generally relevant because they’re added when you download each episode. I HATE the modern YouTube thing of “this video was sponsored by” segments. “The first 100 people to…” on a video from even just 1 or 2 years ago is completely useless, and I hate that they’re forever burned into the videos :(

I could see Xbox becoming just a Windows PC preconfigured to launch essentially a Big Picture mode version of the Xbox app or something. And then maybe Sony goes ahead and makes their own store/launcher to sell a PS6 or PS7 that’s just a PC as well. But if you have your own PC, that’s fine too.

With them releasing more of their library to PC, this wouldn’t surprise me.

Haven’t there been some pretty flagrant cases where someone said “we are not doing XYZ” and then like 3 months later there was a big press announcement stating “guess what? We’re doing XYZ, and think you’re going to love it!!”?

My 7yo was upset the other night because I’d been playing FF7R (wanted to finish before the new one hits) instead of joining him in Minecraft or Fortnite or Parkitect or whatever.

He literally thought that FF7R didn’t have an ending because I guess in his mind all games are just live service/hobby things. Even I guess the ones that are story things.

If that’s the case… I kind of hope it gets leaked. But mostly I don’t because it’d be too easy for the execs to pin someone for it and cripple them financially for life.

If you don’t mind the feeling of having ear plugs or earbuds in your ears, I have found that the Flare Audio “Quiet” earplugs really take the edge off the world. They don’t prevent you from hearing in general, but rather they dramatically reduce frequencies above some pitch (I forget), which my brain often interprets as pain or like I’m being attacked.

Not spending my day under constant “assault” by the sound of fans or my young child’s high-pitch excited voice REALLY helps me to not get overwhelmed so easily.

I had several days in a row recently where I’ve gotten really panicked and close to snapping because of feeling overwhelmed, and I started wearing these again and it made it much, much easier to come down from that feeling.

I have a 2Gbps internet connection, and at my desktop running Firefox, I can’t reliably stream anything fancier than 1080p60. In the next room on my TV with an AndroidTV box attached, 4K60 streams flawlessly.

I never see ads because I pay for Premium, yet they still fuck me over.

I don’t mind Souls games, but I kind of hate how so many games lately (especially sequels) have been trying to low-key fit the genre when nobody asked them to. God of War, Darksiders 3…

I tried replaying the Kingdom Hearts games leading up to playing KH3. Got all the way to the final boss sequence in KH1, but I just couldn’t get past the second phase, and I didn’t have any good saves for going back and leveling up. Gave up. Already beat it as a kid when it first came out. No need to kill myself in my late-30s for it.

Good thing China spent all that energy flooding Taiwan with false information and propaganda… I’m sure they’re happy with their investment.

Yeah, I also paid for Destiny 2 on launch, and then like a year later they went f2p and archived all the original content I paid for. Really, really shitty.

I’m about a week off coming back to Windows from Linux.

Some things that chased me off:

• Alan Wake 2 used too new of GPU features
• Once after playing a game, my cursor was just gone—not invisible, just not there. Only keyboard.
• A few times after quitting games, something was broken about the desktop experience and I had to reboot the machine to get things working again
• Discord crashed any time the machine went to sleep (or woke up? Hard to tell which)
• Several games only worked if I manually put in Proton launch options
• No support for DLSS framegen
• Cyberpunk had to be given a fake driver version to support ray reconstruction
• No support for GamePass games still, which is how I’d been playing Starfield and Lies if P, and planning on Cities: Skylines 2.
• No native support for middle-click scrolling without pasting (I don’t count editing low-level X config files)
• [edit] Also Lords if the Fallen thought I was using a modified game and wouldn’t let me online—solo play only, thanks to EAC

I keep feeling like Linux is just a year or two away from being good enough for common folks to switch over, and I guess if all you need if Firefox, it’s probably there. But the experience is just so subtly, but consistently, bad year after year.

For reference, I was on Pop!_OS (whatever their latest stable was, I think based on Ubuntu 22?). I had read that Pop!_OS was one of the better distorts for games.

Can you tell me more about this? I’m running a synapse server at the moment, but if there’s about to be a smoother Rust option, I’m interested!