MudMan

Nah, some thoughts.

But not everything is black and white. And in the spectrum of grey there are plenty of in-game sales that are better than the alternative.

Again, I would much rather buy the characters one by one and have the all-in-one box come out later than have to wait for the big box and pay full price for it.

I am genuinely baffled about why you think that's worse than "pay me for the game every month or I take it away". I am even more baffled by how you think that distinction is somehow logical beyond personal preference. Your being adamant about this doesn't make it make sense.

That's great. Then we only need to make one of those every day for five thousand years, give or take, and we'll catch up with them.

Hosting maybe, but there is no way you're serving any content from a phone on a mobile network from a mobile device. That's just a nonstarter.

Also, why is Apple any better than Facebook in this scenario?

What's "plenty"? 50%? 40%? 10%?

I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.

I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that's not the case.

I wouldn't consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren't the same thing.

Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don't like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren't full physical releases. It plays Nintendo's game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.

So can somebody walk me through the assumption that it is somehow less private for Gemini to access your apps to send messages than it was for Google Assistant to access your apps to send messages?

Look, hey, it's a neat side effect for AI panic to make people aware of some of the privacy issues with voice assistants, but beyond the emotional, is there a reason that'd be the case?

Hey, if latching on to the jokes helps you ignore the point be my guest, but the point stands with or without your acknowledgement.

I don't "delight in their exploitation", I am one of the people who buy this stuff.

I am not a victim just because you decide I am. I have some say in this.

So hell yeah, bait me, daddy. To this day, Dragon Ball FighterZ is probably the best gaming experience I've ever had. I was there at ground floor, bought every character, watched every tournament, got competitive. I ended up with three copies of the game, all 100%-ed and with hundreds of hours of play.

And the only thing that bums me out is that they had to bail out of it early, presumably to go make Marvel Tokon.

I will be on ground floor for Tokon, and I will be funding that mouse engine with a bunch of piecemeal cash, I'm sure.

And I need you to listen to me when I tell you that it's going to be on purpose, that I'm not a victim, that I hope that treadmill lasts for a good long while and that the game is good enough to support it.

So please spare me the benevolent outrage. I don't need your protection from my own taste. I would very much appreciate an offline-playable version of the game I can buy with all the DLC down the line, like I did for Marvel vs Capcom 3 or Street Fighter IV, and thanks to the weirdly wholesome interaction between developers and the FGC I may actually get that at some point to support tournament play. But otherwise? Nobody is complaining. You can go save somebody else.

And hey, I say this being a big fan of single player games, and a big supporter of physical media and game preservation. But you come here to tell me that some of my favourite games —and I'm talking game-changing experiences I cherish deeply— should have been illegal and I just don't know better? Yeah, not gonna fly, Hillary.

Wait, in what world is a subscription a "rational consumer purchasing decision" where buying characters for a fighting game if you want them as they come out is not?

I would prefer to pay for in-game content of any kind, cosmetics included, over paying a subscription for a game. Any day. Especially if the content is characters, as is the case in LoL or Street Fighter.

And yeah, I bought three 3D Street Fighter games. And a bunch of characters for each. Even a costume or two. I am extremely on board with that. Money extremely well spent, as far as I'm concerned.

Hell, the SF6 community at the moment is begging for more cosmetics. They just announced a handful of horny-ass swimsuit costumes and people went ballistic. It's not my bag, but if people like them and they know what they're buying who the hell are you to tell them they're wrong, let alone that it should be illegal?

I mean, it's a straightforward enough transaction. You think bikini Cammy with tan lines is hot and will pay some money for that skin. I get subsidized by your teenage hormones and keep playing the game I like. Win/win in my book.

That's the problem with this train of thought. There's some stuff where you and I agree there are bad practices and we can probably agree on some common sense regulation for them. But if you're going to come at me with a maximalist approach that boils down to "games I don't like shouldn't exist" we're going to disagree.

Which, if nothing else, is a good reason for regulation of creative products to be relatively loose whenever possible. I was not on board with Hillary wanting to ban Mortal Kombat in the 90s because she didn't like hearts being ripped out and I'm not on board with people wanting to ban free to play games now. It made sense to have age ratings in the 90s and it makes sense to have that and other common sense regulations now.

There aren't anywhere near enough of us here for there not not be an "overarching culture and ethos". There are few places on the Internet more ideologically consistent than this, frankly. Self-selection is a powerful force.

Yeah, no.

I like a bunch of games that do this. I've liked games that do this for 40 years.

I mean, technically you just banned all arcade games that ever existed. I liked a bunch of those.

And I like a bunch of free to play games. I spent a bunch of time playing Hearthstone. I'm gonna say that at least some of the millions of people in LoL would like to keep playing what they're playing. I am looking forward to a bunch of new characters in Street Fighter 6. I kinda don't want to go back to the days where I had to buy a second full price copy of Street Fighter 2 just to get access to 4 new characters.

I get that it sounds good to say this when thinking about the worst parts of the industry, but... yeah, no.

Well, the missing context is that this is how a lot of gaming is tuned regardless. It's pretty basic economy tuning to look at how long a task takes to complete and tune based on that (for games with grind, anyway, think RPGs).

So if you're playing "Perfectly Fair Single Player RPG 3" there's a more than fair chance that the developers looked at the expected completion time of a quest, plugged in that time into some spreadsheet and assigned XP and other rewards to the quest based on that, just to keep the XP curve of the game somewhat predictable. This is a big rabbit hole with a bunch of nuance, but for these purposes we can assume they at least started by doing that flat on all quests.

If you have a F2P game and you're charging for things you can also grind I frankly don't see a much better place to start.

Now, if your premise is that all design for engagement in F2P is gross because it's servicing your business and all design for engagement in paid games is fine because that's just seeking "fun"... well, I don't know that gets fixed. I agree that pay-up-front games can benefit from getting the ugly matter of getting money from players out of the way early, but these days even those games are trying to upsell you into later content, sequels and other stuff, so the difference is rarely that stark.

I think there's a conversation to be had about whether "good", "fun" and "makes people want to engage more" should be seen as the same thing and, if not, what the difference is. It's tricky and nuanced and I don't know that you can expect every game to be on one end of that conversation. Sometimes a person just wants to click on a thing to make number go up, and that's alright.

That's the thing, right? What's "a lot of data" at these scales? Since they keep all these messages indefinitely (and users keep up to two copies of each, too) that's 100 gigs of data per byte that they save per day. 40 Terabytes per year. Plus 40 more among their collective users and another 40 presumably stashed in some Google Drive somewhere.

It's a lot for me, and it'll cost you what? A couple grand to store at home? That's a drop in the ocean of a company like Meta with petabytes upon petabytes of garbage stored all over the place... but then again, if I was making a thing and I could shave 40TB a year of storage I... probably would?

I don't know, the scope of modern, monopolistic online services is mind-boggling. I'm in the space where I'm savvy enough to understand how massive this nonsense is but also not working on it directly enough to be desensitized about the numbers. It's like trying to figure out how many people live on the planet, your brain can parse that it can't parse what you're trying to do and the dissonance makes you all wobbly.