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