As an able-bodied neurotypical 30-something straight white cis male with a suburban middle class upbringing and an office job, I don’t participate in identity politics.

Or maybe an abbreviated hash of the text of their specifications?

Interacting with people whose tone doesn’t match their words may induce anxiety as well.

Have they actually proven this is a good idea, or is this a “so preoccupied with whether or not they could” scenario?

Steam is so funny.

Buying there instead of pirating is a joy, the ads actually feel like a benefit instead of a punishment, the analytics seem to be aimed at saving me time by highlighting stuff I’ll like instead of gaslighting me into emptying my wallet…

The result is:

I buy lots of games, watch lots of ads — share ads with friends even — go out of my way to give them more analytics data points, and trust their recommendations enough to shell out $2.99 for something on sale after only 10 seconds of research.

Why are other companies not able to follow Steam’s approach?

So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.

Makes sense as a requirement for online play.

I even understand region-locking all digital PC titles to regions where they already sell digital console titles. (Global consumer care, legal, and tech support is a complex beast.)

Requirement for single player is unnecessary though.

I can’t think of any good technical or business reason for it. Just shoehorning an extra potential marketing channel that doesn’t really need to exist if they just use the PC-based channels that are already available without extra friction.

I expected any operation involving origin/foobar to be an online operation and work against the latest server-side version of the branch.

I didn’t expect it to keep a local copy of the remote branch instead.

Haha, glad you enjoyed it. My top-level comment is… not doing well.

There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.

That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!

But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.

Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.

I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.

I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.

FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.

Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.

You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.

Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.

Sorry, I meant digitally.

I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.

The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.

I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.

One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”

They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.

I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?

Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.

3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.

Sucks, but it is what it is.

BigYiff69 is edging to a match-3 game in My Waifu HVAC Repair Elf 6

I need help finding a source, cuz there are so many fluff articles about medical AI out there…

I recall that one of the medical AIs that the cancer VC gremlins have been hyping turned out to have horribly biased training data. They had scans of cancer vs. not-cancer, but they were from completely different models of scanners. So instead of being calibrated to identify cancer, it became calibrated to identify what model of scanner took the scan.

Hah, yeah a hexagon is a weird case. In my experience, devs talking about “math in a custom view” has always meant simply “I want to render some arbitrary stuff in its own coordinate system.” Sorry my assumption was too far. 😉

You should probably use matrices rather than trig for view transformations. (If your platform supports it and has a decent set of matrix helper functions.) It’ll be easier to code and more performant in most cases.

It really isn’t that simple.

If all your system cares about is recording incoming events at a discrete time, then sure: UTC for persistence and localization for display solves all your problems.

But if you have any concept of user-defined time ranges or periodic scheduling, you get in the weeds real quick.

There is a difference between saying “this time tomorrow” vs. “24 hours from now”, because of DST, leap years, and leap seconds.

Time zones (and who observes them) change over time. As does DST.

If you allow monthly scheduling, you have to account for some days not being valid for some months and that this changes on a leap year.

If you allow daily scheduling, you need to be aware that some hours of the day may not exist on certain days or may exist twice.

If you poll a client device and do any datetime comparisons, you need to decide whether you care about elapsed time or calendar time.

I worked on some code that was deployed to aircraft carriers in the Pacific. “This event already happened tomorrow” is completely possible when you cross the international date line.

Add to all of this the fact that there are different calendars across the world, even if the change is as small as a different “first day of the week”.

Look.

I made space for us both to be right here, cuz you pointed out a way for my original comment to be misinterpreted and I agreed with your thoughts on that misinterpretation.

But you clearly just want to fight now.

To be clear: When I say "This is good", I don't mean that this makes Facebook a good service. You're 100% right about Facebook's trajectory here.

My hope lies in improving consumer expectations, and tech entrepreneurs' estimation of those expectations. For about 20 years, there's been a universal assumption that users will never pay for a website, ever. They'll pay with their privacy and attention all day long, but their wallet? Not gonna happen.

If this proves that there are users who will pay with their wallet instead of their soul, then it paves a way for people who are interested in making ethical services – people who may have been discouraged in the past because they were told that the only way to keep the lights on was to round up their users and feed them to a hungry pack of advertisers.