HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
Thinking about stuff I loved from the early 2010's, and then how my gaming consumption habits shifted after that, I think you're onto something, and that something is "the changeover from the 7th console generation to the 8th console generation." The 7th gen was already a huge shock for the industry, leading to multiple studios closing down (and there were still the odd casualties of studios and game franchises even into 2012-ish), and the 8th gen doubling down on high-fidelity probably didn't help keep the AAA side of the industry from becoming a total rat race.
It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot.
I haven't touched console gaming in a long time, but I kinda miss this practice. I kinda liked seeing all the "Platinum Hit" covers for Nintendo, EA, and Konami games from the 6th gen. And I think it made a degree of sense, in that for some games, most of the revenue value was extracted more upfront when the games came out, so slashing the price to keep milking the long tail wasn't completely a loss for the publishers. It probably also helped pump up those impressive lifetime sales numbers to lower the price so that the kids who missed out on the launch wave could still buy in.
Like, I'm pretty sure that, right now, on Steam, you can buy the original COD 4 for just 10 bucks. 10 buckaroonies! For a game that was $50-60 new! Activision doesn't give a shit, they have the modern COD-as-a-service as their vehicle of avarice. Valve has similarly slashed the prices on their back catalogue of non-F2P games, literally the most expensive game of theirs right now is Half-Life: Alyx (still at like $60 or so).
Similarly, GOG also just added a bunch of games to their store that made their way there from the GOG Dreamlist (a relaunched version of their long-standing wishlist where people could vote on which games GOG should add), and a good number of them were part of their GOG Preservation Program, intended to make old games playable even on modern machines. Probably the standout here is Silent Hill 4, where they also went and added back in some cut content. Now, this is a game that GOG has put work in, and even gone above the call of duty in making available to their customers (ETA: and this game never even had any PC versions before this!). What do you think the price of this pseudo-remaster is?
The answer: $10. And they also had a sale on these GPP titles that ended yesterday, so you probably could have gotten it for even cheaper. Old games should be cheaper, period.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Yeah...Hanania invokes Chavez and Morales, even though part of the problem is that, from the perspective of some Americans, the Dems were leading us down the same path as Venezuela and Bolivia anyways.
Trump is a flailing incompetent, I can't really argue with that, but why weren't his rivals that much better about governing convincingly? Not to deny any agency of Trump, but our present situation is the culmination, the natural consequence of billions of smaller choices that have led us to his second term and this tariff madness. The populist anger that defeated Harris at the polls is perhaps simply the wages of 21st-Century sin.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I'd consider "two-year-old child in India" to be an edge case. I wonder if the other human deaths from H5N1 were similarly debuffed immunity-wise.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Isn't there a "defense tech bro" scene in some other part of California, though? I think there has been a culture shift occurring, though somewhat slowly and silently.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I'd rather we just didn't.
I think the problem is that we honestly just can't not. I think destructive nonsense like this has become an inevitability in some way, and it's going to keep happening until enough destruction has passed.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
That one was even based on a Jack Chick tract comic, if I'm not mistaken.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
and let's not get started on the Volkssturm or Hamas' choice of soldiers.
You may notice that the former were the pathetic last-ditch force of a faction that was effectively defeated and was trying not to realize that, and the other is likely heading towards a similar position (if it is not already there). Child soldiers are the disgusting last resort of a faction that has no meaningful right to use violence.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
the obvious one being fatherlessness:
Goddamn, blacks have that problem in Britain, too?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
preventing NAFTA
Wasn't it more like "preventing the TPP"?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Yeah, Stellantis is huge. It's literally a combination of Chrysler, Fiat, and Peugeot.
Granted, those layoffs are probably all on the Chrysler side, so probably still bad optics.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Off-topic, but: I wonder if the problem with the Jones Act wasn't exactly the restriction itself, but the failure to enforce export discipline. In another timeline, the Jones Act is probably still around, and is much more unassailable because the US went South Korean with shipmakers.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Safe Needle Space Needle?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
The sales decline in Europe is at least potentially explainable by the backlash to Musk, what explains China? Preference for domestically-made EVs?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Yeah, we have them here in Phoenix, and as a native resident of Phoenix, I can say that we have some truly questionable human drivers on the road as it is.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
True, there's already enough that's made by humans that one can find easily, and yet, we are getting generative AI pushed in our faces anyways. Every tech corporation is on a crusade to put an AI button within easy reach on UIs and even physical devices.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Now, hold on, this probably needs the caveat of "terrorism works in the short term." I doubt this automatically means that the Greens are going to get the pick instead.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I am going to pre-register my position of "no major Happening occurs." It may well just be for the purposes of carrying out another flashy, expensive bombing run on the Houthis. Why strike Iran now and not before?
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I dunno, some of the ways I can think of to bring down a transformer station or a concrete-hulled building involve violent forces that would, in fact, be similarly capable of reducing a lone infantryman to a bloody pulp.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment (at least, I see you replying to yourself).
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
To put on the Hlynka hat, both extremes are guilty of both of these things.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
To add onto the other disagreeing replies here:
Consider the technology we use to make a cup of coffee. Once, you had to just boil ground coffee beans (presuming you already knew that you had to roast and grind them) in water. This made okay coffee, but you had to deal with the grounds. Then, we invented the percolator, which sprayed hot water over coffee and made for a crappy end result, but was probably more convenient overall.
Then came the Chemex, which took a bit more manual effort, but made good coffee. Then the almighty drip coffee machine was invented, which carefully dripped just-hot-enough water over the coffee grounds, and the end product was pretty good--maybe not as good as the Chemex, but still good enough, and very convenient. But then, then came along the Keurig K-Cup and all its derivatives, serving us coffee from plastic/aluminum pods. Is the end product as good as the older drip coffee, let alone as good as the Chemex coffee? Again, probably not, at least as far as aficionados would tell you, and yet, the K-cup has proven to be just so damn convenient that I would not be surprised to learn that the drip coffee machine was a declining product type.
This story of convenience beating out quality has happened in many fields of technology, and I feel that AI could play out the same way.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
I would like to agree, though I think poetry is one field of art where slop is characteristically more palatable to the masses than the real thing. It's one thing to have too-perfect generated images vs. illustrations made with actual care, but your average Joe is probably going to prefer a low-brow limerick over Eliot, Ginsburg, or Cummings.
HalloweenSnarry
2mo ago
Yeah, I think conventional explosions could still cause blindness, assuming sufficient yield, no neutrons necessary.
If we're gonna be citing RTS games as the warning signs of change, why WC3 and not C&C: Tiberian Sun? That game infamously launched in quite the state, and contra WhiningCoil's above post about auteur studio leads, I doubt that TibSun was supposed to be a magnum opus kind of game. It was an ambitious title, sure, but it was otherwise a bigger-and-better sequel that, as far as the popular narrative goes, was unfairly rushed out the door by EA and never really fixed into what it should have been.
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