MudMan

A bit too optimistic, but hey, at least it’s a post pointing people at GOG, which has otherwise been losing big publisher support (SEGA and Sony used to put some big games there and don’t anymore, for instance).

I’m also not sure that the big failures of prominent games as a service are an indication of a return to appreciating ownership. I’m afraid it may be rather that the established genre leaders are taking all the oxygen out of that space, just as it happened for causal mobile F2P games a while ago.

If the perception makes players more likely to give up on their forever games and go back to buying piecemeal experiences they get to keep indefinitely I’d call that very good news, but I’ll need a bit more evidence before I declare myself optimistic on that subject.

It’s been an interesting full loop. The first rise of P2P file sharing was obviously much more convenient than the combination of broadcast TV and slow-to-release and expensive physical media and the legal fight against it proved pretty useless, beyond shutting down the most obvious for-profit services. Then streaming tipped the scale of convenience, where it was simpler and easier to have an affordable Netflix account than it was to dig through sketchy sites to seek out torrents and only find out later that half of them were actually gay porn.

The history is well known, the question, I guess, is what the next loop around the enshittification path will look like. Are we always doomed to run in circles seeking the optimal experience or can we agree on what it is and deliver it in a somewhat stable fashion at some point?

Yeah, well, if I wanted to tell you who I am I’d write a bio, and I have no obligation to educate or reality check people one by one, which doesn’t work anyway.

You’re right, though, it’s dismissive and kinda rude and definitely not worth having the conversation because it won’t change any minds. Which is why people don’t have the conversation in the first place.

Mediaset is a proper multibillion dollar multinational media conglomerate. It is not the one rich guy wanting to protect their investment, any more than Disney dictating the details of US copyright law is. Diney, incidentally, also a player in this conversation.

Lobbying doesn’t happen based on percentage of GDP, friend.

It depends on the question, I suppose, but they’ve clearly broken into the mainstream in a way Masto did not when it had the chance.

Well, it does if the person on the receiving end gets nothing useful from it. That’s my point, the confusion around Masto specifically wasn’t “why do people with different handles get to talk to each other?” That’s something that enthusiasts and developers care about and users don’t even notice.

The question that was being asked was “why do I need to pick an instance at all and what does it affect?” and that didn’t even BEGIN to explain the mess of themed instances, personal instances, effects of instance population on post distribution, manual blocks and defederations, what things did and did not make the leap cross-instance and the whole bunch of other details that matter.

A much better answer was “it doesn’t matter, just sign in to mastodon.social and call it a day”, but people used to be reticent to argue for centralization, because… decentralization!, so…

Ultimately the answer to that problem ended up going to Bluesky, which I think was very much a problem with both the design and the community at Masto. I actually think the Lemmy/MBin/Fedia Reddit-like corner of federated services is much more workable than a Twitter substitute. And it doesn’t even need a bad email analogy to kinda just work, either.

No, I’m not saying it was rosy, I’m saying it was mostly text and then it was mostly hotmail and then it was mostly gmail.

And I’m saying none of that matters, because “it’s just like email” is a weird meme that people try to use to justify the weird or hard to understand parts of Masto to normie users and it has never once worked. Because it’s not just like email in any way that matters to an end user.

I have, in fact, touched grass today, though. So there’s that.

Those pieces don’t say at all what you (or the OP, I suppose) are implying. The first one is about working conditions and harassment, the others are about management choices, not at all in-fighting or jealousy among writers. Incidentally, that last one sucks. Go find better games reporting, holy crap, I promise you it exists.

Honestly, it’s a neverending source of fascination to see what people who don’t work in the industry perceive as the internal logic of these things. I used to think it was a problem of transparency, the industry not doing enough to show things behind the scenes or explain how games are made. But man, that part has improved A LOT. There are lots more resources now to help you wrap your head around it, but the weird fantasy world people imagine is still exactly the same. It’s very frustrating.

It was such a thin sliver of time, and yet it’s still so pungently 2023.

Look, I was there when email was a ISP thing. All emails looked the same everywhere because there was no support for anything but text, so that’s a supremely nerdy nitpick that doesn’t apply to the conversation.

Likewise to your other point. Nobody cares about all the mental gymnastics, the “it’s like email” explanation doesn’t work because no, it isn’t, I can tell it isn’t and no I’m not choosing anything, what are you talking about, I’m either signing up to a social network or I’m not.

Federation is a back end feature, it’s transparent to users, users don’t care about it. They will sign up for a thing and use it. Just like they signed up for gmail once and never thought about it again.

In any case, I’m not particularly keen on relitigating that. My solution to the concept of a social media endlessly repeating this argument and literally nothing else was to go elsewhere, so I’m good for now.

We really don’t talk enough about how the worst rated game of the Tomb Raider reboot from the B studio for the series ended up being the default benchmark for gaming for the better part of a decade.

Good for Eidos Monteal. Guardians of the Galaxy deserved better, too.

It just sounds really dumb. The word “federation” was right there.

Well, for one, like the guy says below, it was often said to people as a means to explain how federation works, which immediately failed by way of people not thinking about or knowing how email works, either.

For another, my emails look like emails everywhere, both on source and destination. I don’t have a different character limit or feature set about what I can slap into my emails depending on what client I’m using, and I’m reasonably sure my email looks the same on the other end, no mater what client the recipient is using.

So the back end may work like email (not really, but it may approximate it), but the front end sure as hell doesn’t, so the explanation is more confusing than anything else.

Also, not the part of Mastodon specifically that people didn’t understand, they just tried to log in, were presented with a thousand instances, told choosing which one to use was super important but also that it didn’t matter and they should keep changing instances later, but also that migrating instances was not an easy process, but don’t worry, it’s just like email.

It was a hilarious endless loop of a conversation, like a Monty Python sketch. Or seeing people try to tell normies to use Linux.

Sale is the only issue because you’re talking about an exclusive right to profit for something. You can already copy a thing at any point for free. That technology is trivial, we just don’t allow it as a general rule. You’re fantasizing about creating an exception based on a thing not being widely available to purchase. If the thing is free, then there is no exception because… well, the thing is free. It’s a valid distinction in that yeah, it’d allow people to retain some control over free licenses, but it still wouldn’t fix what happens to things that haven’t been commercialized yet or that aren’t commercialized constantly.

TV shows that were aired once and aren’t available for purchase, private art that is not made freely available, one-off concerts or events, tools created for private use… there are so many things that would be severed from protections if that was the line.

And just to frame what you’re arguing regarding price control: the outlandish scenario people are trying to prevent with the price control here is one where, to prevent losing copyright under the weird “access” rule, someone keeps a game up for sale somewhwere at an inflated price because they don’t want to sell it otherwise. That is not why meida goes out of print or gets delisted, for one thing, and price control wouldn’t impact it much, for another. I mean, Starfox 64 was 80 USD in 1997, so you could sell it for like 200 bucks now, which doesn’t seem like it fixes the entirely imaginary problem that idea was trying to solve.

Meanwhile, what happens to all the games that depend on a server or that lose compatibility with modern platforms? Are you mandating people to sell iOS games that no longer work on modern phones? Movies in discontinued formats? Is Disney obligated to keep selling the VHS version of The Little Mermaid or to publish a new version of that cut? What about Star Wars, where the movie is actually different? What happens in scenarios like Apple removing the old 1080p cut of Alien and replacing it with a 4K that has different color grading that annoys purists? Are those the same thing or different? Can you take GTA San Andreas down if you sell the remaster?

This is not “easy”, and it doesn’t work the way people here seem to think it works. You’re just working backwards from a specific example that annoys you and not considering the wider context.

See above. Gonna need names and sources for that one.

No, it is not. Just isn’t. Not a thing in Bioware, to my knowledge. Not a thing in the industry at large, either. This is an extreme leap you’re making.

Displeased with management decisions? Absolutely. Frustrated by working conditions? Rarer than you’d think but it can happen. Abused and harassed by a manager or a coworker, particularly for a woman, and receiving insufficient protection from HR? Unfortunately possible, but definitely not my first or second guess when somebody announces they’re leaving a studio.

“My coworkers are jealous of my talent and are mean to me” is science fiction.

Oh, man, I hadn’t heard the “it’s like email” nonsense since I stopped daily driving Mastodon. Real nostalgia going on here.

Yeah, no, I got the intent, it just seems like… a random thought? Why would that be the case? You just think the other writers are jealous of someone who was there for fifteen years and just… mean girl’d them out of the company?

That’s not a plausible scenario. Or at least not the first think you’d leap to.

A main driver of this was Mediaset, which is actually Italian. Seriously, the article is right there. I didn’t know about it before I read it, either.

There’s been a Dragon Age sequel in some form of development for a decade. It’s not that surprising, people are gonna churn. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t stuck around in a single job for 15 years ever.

I’m not her and I’m not there, but I’m not sure what “being pushed out by other employees” would even mean. That sounds like something that happens in a nature documentary about lions, not games studio.

Agreed, although apparently plenty of governments don’t think the same thing.