At that point, use AI as a filter. It’d be the perfect setting for some mild gloop.

And for those who aren’t aware, it sounds killer when played at the wrong speed.

“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” is a fucking crime.

‘Andromeda who?’

Mozilla had the right idea with FirefoxOS - doing everything as HTML. All the apps people give a shit about are glorified browser windows anyway. What Mozilla fucked up was aiming for a low-end market… with an OS defined by constant power / performance overhead.

Every application in any modern phone could be transpiled HTML5 and you would not know the difference. If it’s not “one o’ them Genshin Impacts” then it probably already is.

I can recommend a big stupid project where it’s not a big deal if you fail.

Until recently, for me that would’ve meant “run Windows programs on Android,” mashing together Wine and e.g. Unicorn Engine… but now there’s like six different “userland emulators” vying for preference. FEX-emu, Box86, others with even sillier names.

I did manage a bespoke 8-bit FPS. That only took about two months. And then I’ve been idly tweaking it over the last two years. Splitscreen multiplayer, as a joke, was maybe not the best idea.

What’d take both time and space is some extremely low-end VR. I am convinced that Quest-ish headsets could cost, like, fifty bucks. The big players keep iterating clever hacks from a decade ago. Solving those problem, instead of avoiding those problems. Light should be collimated by default, which means a point source, which is any single LED. Rendering has to be detached from software performance, which means projecting the nearby world to e.g. floating dots instead of directly making a flat image. Inside-out tracking is at least the right idea, but it doesn’t have to be especially good in order to ground an inertial estimate.

Obligatory Mike Montiero talk: Fuck You, Pay Me.

“They have a monopoly” doesn’t mean they’re the asshole.

But they still have a monopoly.

People get so fucking weird trying to deny this. They insist there’s good reasons none of their competitors matter, when the question was, do their competitors matter. They proudly state they never consider buying from anywhere else… end of thought. No amount of explanation for why they’re the PC gaming store will change that they are the PC gaming store. But the label doesn’t mean it’s their fault. The label means, it is so.

Yeah, that guy’s not joking.

It’s not some kayfabe act. He is sincere in all of that posturing assholery.

Block and move on.

If you’re using Twitter, fuck you.

I don’t care why you’re still on some fascist manchild’s propaganda box. Leave. You’re already here - you know alternatives exist. Stop visiting the Nazi bar.

“Because” doesn’t change what we’re talking about. You said: “no one is competing on PC”. That’s a monopoly. That’s you, calling Steam a monopoly. Do you understand that? Saying ‘Steam is a monopoly because…’ would not change that.

I gave you those reasons already.

In response to a comment reading: “Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly.”

Their market share is what make them a monopoly. That’s what the word means.

You literally said “no one is competing on PC.”

If you’re not arguing against calling that a monopoly, I’m pretty fuckin’ sure everyone else missed it.

Upvoting ‘no competitors means it’s not a monopoly’ is tribalism. Y’all don’t care about the words. You are performing loyalty. Comments defending the ingroup must be good and smart and right… even if they’re repeating the initial criticism.

‘Steam’s competition doesn’t matter.’ ‘Wrong! They have no competition.’ That’s worse. You know that’s worse, right?

If they dont even challenge then how are they competition?

That’s equivocating two definitions of “competition.”

no one is competing on PC

… that’s admitting they have a monopoly. That’s the monopoly we’re talking about. You’re not disagreeing with me, you’re just picking unrelated definitions and talking about something else.

Steam’s competitors, on PC, are services like GOG and EGS. Their teensy market share doesn’t disqualify them as competitors. They are in the exact same market. That’s why they have a “market share.” And Steam’s market share is so overwhelming that you’re treating their would-be rivals like they do not exist.

Steam didn’t need to change because none of their competitors challenge their de facto monopoly. Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly. They have a supermajority market share, and people glibly admit, they don’t even consider buying games except on Steam.

So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn’t impact that company’s market share.

Hmm.

At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.

Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.

I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?

The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.

But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online

That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?

Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful.

Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.

Ignoring how thousands of brand-new games pull this shit from day one.

The existence of good options means nothing. This abuse should be criminal. The fact companies don’t have to commit this intolerable exploitation against their users, does not lessen the problem when some companies do it anyway. If you just mean to nitpick the word “nothing,” sure, congratulations. Someone somewhere will dodge this bullet. But I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem that’s already half the industry by revenue.

Any real money spent in games was defrauded, because all apparent value was made-up. As surely as someone selling you the deed to scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. The paper is real! You get the paper! But the paper is not why you handed someone a suitcase full of cash. There was a story you were told, and it’s not real. That’s what games are.

Games make you value worthless things. That is what makes them games. There is no real-world value to points or shards or rare drops. They’re arbitrary goals with arbitrary obstacles. They’re achievable so that your brain will squirt the happy juice. But treating them as valuable, the way money is valuable, is a category error.

The small charges are more insidious. Like the naked greed of paying instead of watching a counter tick down - a transaction that is neither a good nor a service. Or the lootboxes that everyone now agrees are intolerable, once the industry has moved on to calling them keys. Or anything consumable, proving your money went to something so worthless, the game will just hands them out in unbounded quantities. Even peacocking for other players makes people go, oh, it’s just a dollar. It’s just cosmetic. It’s just the only reason the game exists in the first place, to grind you against that constant nagging temptation.

These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.

They’re optimized to make you feel good when you open your wallet and look away.

And until you do, they’re as addictive and frustrating as we can manage.

This business model is built on exploitation of innate human shortcomings. Your brain is not very good at distinguishing sources of happy juice. It can easily be tricked, and literally the entire games industry exists to trick it. Again: that’s what games are. Their enjoyability comes from that fiction. That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.