Is. Continues to be. And it isn’t just Japan. Worldwide, the games industry has always had horrible work-life balance (some cases being better or worse than others, of course).

I went to college to go into the industry 10 years ago and never did because of the things our professors (who were all industry veterans, some still actively working in the industry and some having been in the industry since the 80s) told us. “Nobody makes video games because they want to get rich.” Upon graduation with a 4 year degree (and a hundred thousand in debt probably), I was expected to make the same annually as I did if I worked year-round at my summer job. Everybody today talks about crunch time as a problem in industries. Video games are crunch time. We were told to expect to work on a project for 4 years, with the last few months being spent in the office 7 days a week, no holidays, and orobably eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the office. Maybe even sleeping there as well. Clocking out after 8 hours would be seen as being a traitor to the company. And after a project ships? Dust off your resume, because unless you’re senior level, you’re gonna be fired as the company downsizes until the next project.

The mass layoffs the past 3 years have been worse each year than in the 2008 recession. There are people working at the Blizzard main office who live out of their cars because they can’t afford an apartment within commuting distance of the office. The list goes on and on. And they can get away with it because they’re exploiting the passion of people who just want to make something that people will enjoy and there’s an endless stream of starry-eyed college kids ready to throw themselves into the grinder.

When was the last time you saw a game that was more than that outside of porn games and maybe dating sims? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Cyberpunk 2077.

I always think of this kind of stuff when these kinds of polls come up because they’re always by big corporate companies who put the most shallow of these themes in. People want this stuff like they want strong female leads: they want stuff that actually puts the effort in to make it good, not half-baked content just to maximize market reach or that one gay side character with one line of dialogue mentioning his husband who never actually appears in the movie.

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

And very expensive doctors.

And how many failed technologies and companies were there along the way? How many movies do you watch on your LaserDisc player? Or your HDDVD player?

This current “AI” iteration is already hitting its limits despite having access to the sum total of human history. The bubble is already bursting as companies are finding that people don’t want AI in their refrigerators any more than they want it to replace a basic search engine or making fake Facebook accounts for you to talk to like Tom from MySpace.

OpenAI has said that they will go bankrupt if they can’t train their AI on copyrighted material for free.

It’s largely a tech without a use case in this current form, and not every money pit turns into a success before the companies burning cash go bankrupt.

Spend all the money you earn on fees to a shell company that you own in a country with less or no corporate tax rate.*

Yeah, the tweet clearly says that the subscribers they have are using it more than they expected, which is costing them more than $200 per month per subscriber just to run it.

I could see an argument for an economy of scales kind of situation where adding more users would offset the cost per user, but it seems like here that would just increase their overhead, making the problem worse.

I was instantly reminded of the appendix, where for so long we thought it was just an extraneous evolutionary leftover of an organ, only to find out not all that long ago that it actually acts as a seed vault of sorts for our gut’s microbial biome to repopulate the good bacteria in case something bad happens and wipes them out.

Are you a friend of Dorothy?

I feel like tech people often get stuck on the fact that most regular people don’t want to do a ton of work to browse the web, they just want content to come to them.

I think this is also true for why people gravitate towards places like Bluesky in more general terms as well. Without even getting into the details of whether or not a platform has an algorithm or whatever other features, whether or not a platform is federated means nothing to the average person and the benefits of the decentralized servers are a disadvantage to onboarding people. When the Reddit exodus happened, I was describing Lemmy to a friend, and when I told him that anybody could spin up their own instance, his response was “why the hell would anybody want to do that.” And this is a guy who ran his own TeamSpeak server for like 20 years.

People don’t want an alternative to Twitter - they want Twitter without the rightwing extremism. Bluesky offers exactly this with an easy and straightforward onboarding process and a familiar UI. There’s even browser extensions to search the people you follow on Twitter and find their Bluesky handles to make the swap easier.

I’ve also seen people praising Bluesky’s algorithm being entirely optional as well as a plus for discoverability. People really like the chronological timeline that doesn’t bury posts - especially artists. I haven’t used Mastodon, and I only used Twitter because all the artists jumped ship after Tumblr banned the porn, but I can say that I have enjoyed how Bluesky works similar to Tumblr in that regard. I’ve never liked algorithmic based feeds, so a chronological feed of the people I follow and the stuff they reblog from other people who I can then go check out as well is exactly the kind of experience I want out of a platform.

This is like tying a dead rat to your door to keep the plague away.

I’ve seen this reported in other countries as well, and it makes perfect sense. If you’re already at risk of being deported just for existing, why would you do anything to put yourself at higher risk.

Just installed an update to 10 2 days ago to find that it had installed Copilot and put an icon for it on my taskbar. Stuff like this is why 10 will be my last version of Windows.

Are they, though? Starfield was so lifeless that I felt scammed even getting it for under $50 on release.

I mean, Lemmy definitely runs more techy than most other places, but I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say the average user here knows any better than any Reddit idiot or something lol

And my point wasn’t to peer review your example or anything, just to say that people keep complaining about it because these snake oil salesmen keep getting richer while using the same tired lines about how AI will do everything and anything, and do a handstand while it’s at it.

It’s like all the complaints historians keep finding about that one guy selling shitty copper bars or whatever. Nobody is gonna shut up about it until the bubble finally bursts and these AI companies can’t unload their shitty copper on anyone anymore.

In your example, the thing missing is that the belt sander companies are selling their belt sanders as screw fastening, band saw multitools.

I always say about AI that it’s not the tool but who’s making it and why, and this is especially true for the average person. Your average person isn’t seeing the LLMs that are trained to identify anomalies in MRIs or iterate on chemical formulas to improve drugs in a simulation that takes milliseconds compared to the months of research it would take technicians to replicate the same experiments. So all they can talk about is the AI that is in their face all day, every day, as every company in the world tries to shoehorn it into their product somehow. And so they complain about the belt sanders that the company told them would fasten their screws and cut their 2x4’s.

The only way the complaining is going to stop is when the bubble bursts and these companies have to find a new way to chase the infinite profit pipedream.

I didn’t mean that Ubisoft’s was better than Steam - just better than Epic’s store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.

As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn’t exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.

The big reason I think we don’t see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam’s biggest competitors are the consoles, and that’s largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.

Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).

A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn’t like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn’t offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn’t even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.

B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service’s website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would’ve been more willing to give it a chance.

Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?

I’m getting flashbacks to Tumblr’s “female-presenting nipples” censorship rules during the porn ban.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you’re going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can’t go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that’s before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.