And I’m sure they understand that exposure also leads to more sales.

Totally.

I didn’t know games could come with professionally printed labels, when I was a kid with no income. I thought everyone just got them on disks labeled in marker from a good friend of the family.

It’s important to me to support developers, but I can’t say I regret getting to play those games before I could have ever afforded them.

I’ve since gone on to buy those same games from their developers several times over on various platforms.

Why not both?

Because DRM misfires for a small percentage of paying customers.

Those paying customers, ironically, usually get help from the pirate community to get their game working.

Then they go back to paying for everything, because they still trust game studios more than pirates. Wait no, this last bit usually doesn’t happen.

Overall DRM prevents zero percentage of all privacy, while hassling a small percentage of paying customers.

Don’t make me point to the sign with people standing on boxes in front of a fence.

This should be very easily solved with matchmaking lobby settings.

Anyway, most accessibility settings are either something every competitive player should be using anyway (reasonable color contrast settings, HUD tweaks for clarity) or things that only people who need them despately would ever use (remapping all buttons to be able to play using only a stick in the players mouth, because they have no hands).

This seems to me like a total non-issue. And in the very few cases it is, the ranked lobbies can just diable that setting.

The backlash was probably because for you and I a harmed pvp experience is a “could happen” while for a bunch of gamers the lack of accessibility is a daily undeniable part of their reality. For some people, games are a critical sanity-saving retreat from the rest of their life. Let’s let them have their tweaks outside of ranked play.

Accessibility feature enabled: “You can just kill this escort quest NPC and go enjoy the rest of the game.”

I hope so. As someone who will use the accessibility features, I don’t mind separate badges at alll. I don’t need the same badge as a speed-runner. I just want to play the game.

Nah. Oracle is trying to pivot from “people noticed we hate humans” into “Like Microsoft, we embrace open source now”. I’m glad to see it, but also very skeptical that it represents a long term change.

Edit: Oracle’s stance on basic accessibility seemed really bad, to me, for a long time. I don’t actually think they hate humans…probably.

Except Oracle didn’t create either of those, Sun Microsystems did. Oracle bought Sun, and then made both products worse.

I’ve found diving deep into retrogames is great for my similar situation.

Games from the 80s, 90s and even some from the 00s are often designed to be played in much shorter play sessions.

Great points.

To add for OP: I’ve found that I can scratch the “play and progress with friends” itch with games like Torchlight II, which doesn’t have the same kind of addiction triggers.

Fair enough. I’m just getting a little tired of our monopolist companies buying every competitor while burning through venture capital and then claiming they need to raise prices to “survive”.

All great points. That said, no one should feel sympathy for Disney’s profit margins.

They can and should spend less on anti-piracy measures to become more profitable.

And Disney could be 100% profit, overnight, while paying their actors and writers handsomely, if they just license their content to a streaming service that knows what they are doing.

The goal of AI is fictional, and there’s no solid evidence today that it will ever stop being fiction.

What at have today are stupid learning algorithms that are surprisingly good at mimicing intelligent people.

The most apt comparison today is a particularly clever parrot.

I’m all for having the discussion about how to handle AI when we have it, but it’s bad faith to apply it to what we have today.

Critically, what we have today will never ever go on strike, or really make any kind of correct moral decision on it’s own. We must treat it like dumb automation, because it is dumb automation.

With only 2 developers, CI/CD can be your best friend. Automate the daylights out of testing your code.

Remember to tag your regression tests in some way - any test that is preventing a production bug that actually happened needs to be marked as a ‘regression’ and treated as high priority to keep passing.

Treat all others tests as more art than science. Keep the reliable ones, toss out the brittle ones.

Look for a network traffic recording/replay library for your toolchain. Reusing integration tests as unit tests is a huge time savings.

If you have live data access, build yourself a few charts that represent a typical day. Knowing what “normal” looks like in your database can be priceless on a weird day.

Yeah. Google needs to get in there with another product that they will leave in Beta until they cancel it in 18 months.

Wilsooooonnnnn!

“At Viridian Dynamics, we build our robots with ethical AI, whatever that means; so that humans and androids can live in peace - we hope.”

That’s a good point. No company has had a great time throwing their handheld into the market across from a Nintendo product.

Steamdeck and Evercade seem to be holding their own, at least.

Ssshh. Let’s not give away that little hint - there may be bosses present.

I learned Linux on the boss’ dime and it created tons of career opportunities.

Yeah, as the gap between paid OS and free ones narrows, we see the free ones in use in more and more contexts.

Cloud and phone went first, now it’s finally the year of the Linux desktop, again.

Yeah. It was embarrassing all those years we declared it the year of the Linux desktop, before. I’m glad we finally got there this year!

Plus on Pixel you can run GrapheneOS.

As a current Switch owner deciding what to pick up next time I spring for a new system, the lack of anything portable from Microsoft and Sony is kinda wild to me.

Honestly, if I had not been burned previously by Xbox losing my online purchases, I think I would consider buying an Xbox for game pass.

I don’t hate the concept, and I’ve heard great things about the Xbox game pass library.

I’m also not a big fan of not actually owning my games. I have 40 year old games that I still return to every year. The idea of finding something special on Gamepass and having it just disappear like a streaming show does… Not compelling to me.

Yeah. I stopped buying XBox after they let my account get hacked and restored none of my purchased content.

I occasionally consider giving Xbox another try, but then the whole tiers of systems and naming nonsense takes long enough to parse that I remember why I stopped buying Xboxes.

I like to play though GunStar Heroes (a terrific Contra style bullet hell) with a self inflicted “melee attacks only” rule.

The fact that it’s possible is one of the cool things about the game.

I had the opposite FF8 experience. I got lost like 3 times, and between over leveling and limit breaks, none of the bag guys ever got through their dialog trees during a fight. It was funny, but I don’t recommend it.

I did the speedster pacificst build in DnDOnline once, because I liked to kite most enemies while charming a few to fight for me.

It was wild how that character could solo some difficult dungeons, but then a solitary guard at the top of a ladder was nearly impassable.

I do the same!

I would love to hear people’s preferred early game alternate starters.

I usually go with the first non-Normal type Pokemon I encounter and build my team around it.

That makes me so happy.

Rarely. Require linear history for the win.

These are all very real possibilities.

Here’s another: The big shot billionaire’s agreed over drinks one night that their handlers - the staff that used to make them look smart - were overpaid.

I’m guessing that skill with Cascading Style Sheets is considered wasted time and effort at X, much like media relations, accessibility, and microservices.

I’m getting sidetracked here, but I want to give my support of McD’s turning every possible life event Grimace can have into to a new marketing event, so long as each comes with a new Gameboy color game.

I’m not sure, honestly.

Charitably, we could assume it’s just from removing Google and various carriers background apps meant to improve my experience.

Uncharitably, I have my suspicions. For the last five or so versions of Android something always seemed to be using processor cycles and battery when I wasn’t actually doing much with my phone.

But I never saw evidence of usage data exfiltration via Google apps - at least after I turned off the related optional settings.

In any case, switching to GrapheneOs was a startling and pleasant speed boost for me, whatever the real root cause.

I feel you.

I have found that searching for game reviews with the term “Cozy Gamer” finds games that fit into that after work funk, for me, when I have that time.

Indeed! I wish they would standardize this mode and add it as an icon to the back of the game box.

Edit: Also I’m old enough that I think of games as coming in boxes, still…

IDDQD

“Anything with a pause button.”

Someone make this into a shirt with a cool gamer logo. I’ve found my gamer crew.

“We’re here for you and we know that being 35 is really really really old, whether you’re willing to admit it or not.”

I feel seen.