But it’s broken and unplayable because the developer/publisher renders it unplayable and that’s where the initiative comes in. The initiative wants to make it so that if the developer/publisher wants to turn off their official services they don’t render the game unplayable.
You’re stating it like it’s somehow objective, but it’s not. Battlefield 3 and 4 have been delisted and it’s a matter of time until EA turns off services and those games are left for dead. Battlefield 4 still averages above 1k players a month. It’s clear that EA won’t see value in keeping the light on and will turn off the services in the near future, but do you think the players will go overnight from “I want to play this game” to “This game is worthless”. Don’t you think the people playing BF4 wouldn’t want to continue playing after EA shuts down the services keeping the game running?
I think it’s pretty obvious that there are two groups who decide if a game has value or not, the company and the customers. Right now after purchasing the game the customers no longer have a say whether a game has value or not. Only the company has a say and if the company says it’s not worth it then the people who bought it just have to suck it up. And that’s the idea behind the initiative, to make it so that the company isn’t the only one who gets to decide how long you get to use the product you’ve purchased.
I think if we expanded the idea of bricking software beyond gaming, if companies could destroy any piece of software they made, you’d also be in favor of this initiative. Imagine if Microsoft could brick Windows 10 when they’ve officially stopped supporting it. Or Nvidia effectively bricking their older cards by stopping official driver support. Would you then also argue that the software has lost value and it’s acceptable behavior?
I usually agree with Thor but on this one I probably couldn’t disagree more. Based on what he says I’d say his mindset is completely opposite to what his initiative wants to do. He essentially said he doesn’t see any value in (live service) games after they’ve reached their end of service and from that perspective I can understand how this movement is pointless or even potentially damaging. But that assumes that the (live service) game loses value after the company stops supporting it and I just don’t think that’s the case.
A lot of games continue live despite the company ending official support for them. If anyone remembers there’s a gem called Wildstar that was shut down in 2018. Despite the game being shut down and even trademark has expiring people are still running the game on private servers. People are putting in sweat and tears to make sure a game is preserved. Imagine how much easier it would be if Carbine or NcSoft had released proper tools for it. Even Vanilla WoW exists because private server did it first and Blizzard wanted to get some of that money.
And another point that Thor made how it’s not about preservation because you can’t preserve a moment in time. I think that’s a completely disingenuous argument because it feeds into FOMO. If you join WoW today you will never experience “the golden age of WoW”. Maybe another game you might be interested in is having a golden age right now, better buy into the hype. You can’t argue against preservation like this because it’s literally impossible to preserve a moment in time except in your memory so you have be at that exact place at that exact time to really experience that thing, that is FOMO at it’s purest form. That argument against preservation is an argument in favor of FOMO.
Thors points come for a belief that live service games don’t need to be preserved after official support has ended, and he views this initiative through that lens. Of course he will have issues with the initiative because he’s opposing the idea at a fundamental level. It’s like asking a racist how to be more tolerant with other races, the answer obviously is that you shouldn’t want to tolerate other races. And just like you would ignore a racist I think you should ignore what Thor has to say on this matter because anything he says is against the idea of preservation.
So is Twitter but that didn’t stop Twitter from becoming wildly popular. YouTube shorts are just tweets in a video format.
Online casinos are also tech. The devops in the article literally says they set up proxies to continue operating in countries where their main domain is blocked. I know the core domain of casinos are very regulated, but I doubt the entire tech aspect of online casinos are regulated. I imagine there’s plenty of fuckery to do there.
Also casinos will throw out people who benefit too much at the expense of the casino. The casino benefitted too much at the expense of Cloudflare and refused to share the profits, so Cloudflare did what any casino would do and kicked them out.
The rest of the tweets definitely don’t make him appear as less of a self-righteous ass.
This actually made me cringe:
Your weekly reminder that FFmpeg powers all online video - Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Disney+, Netflix etc etc, all run FFmpeg underneath
I think it depends. I’ve had a non-technical PM and he was great. He knew he knew nothing about development and as such did what great managers do, create an environment where we could work as efficiently as we could. If we said it takes X amount of time he wouldn’t try to squeeze out a faster deadline, he’d report “it will take X amount of time”. If we said it’s unreasonably to take feature Y in he’d say we’re not going to take feature Y in.
IMO it’s much harder with PMs who did some development 20 years ago and “know how things are done”. The ones with some technical knowledge almost always butt in.
My experience has been that it’s often not the team that’s the problem, it’s the management. I’ve seen a team full of talented developers who know how to successfully launch, only to barely get anything done because management keeps reprioritizing everything. It seems in OPs case the org itself might be the issue. Even if they move to a team where the PO actually does their job instead of letting the MVP balloon the team keeps fighting business just to deliver something.
If I was OP I’d probably look for a job in a different company.
Do you also believe Nazis are actually socialists because Nazism is short for national socialism. Or that North Korea is a democratic country because their official name is literally Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Do you really want to prove you’re that stupid?
I’m just going to pretend you said nothing at all, because that statement was incomprehensibly idiotic.
I’m going to leave it up for you to decide. Mondragon corporation has been around for over half a century and is one of the largest worker coops in the world.
Because there are literally real world examples of this working, they’re called cooperatives.
You’re awarded the bad take of the day.
alright, be cool be cool be cool, it’s just Margot Robbie.
Yeah I could totally do those one of AMA dooda thingies.
what the fuck was that abomination of a sentence? Okay okay okay, let’s just try to smooth our way out of it.
Bye
I just realized that I called esteemed character performer Margot Robbie a goon. Many apologies. I respect your dedication to the craft.
You should do an AMA. How did it feel being touched by god?
It’s when you write everything in l33t WITH CAPSLOCK ON.
Yeah. Every time someone comes up with “games are too cheap” I always point to the fact that the vast majority of AAA games have insane amount of bloat. If AAA devs were struggling to make a profit then a clear way to cut costs would be to streamline the product. If leveling is not vital, cut it. If randomized loot is not necessary, cut it. If horse balls shrinking/expanding with the weather is not necessary, cut it.
There are always ways to cut corners in a AAA games and if the cost was an issue they’d do it. But the fact that they don’t shows how little the actually struggle. So far Bethesda is the only company that is clearly cutting the corners of their AAA products.
Don’t forget the map points to literally a viewing distance from town, in a game where you theoretically have the entire planet to explore.
It is kinda cynical, but it’s also exactly what you’re seeing on Reddit. Some subs stopped protesting the moment Reddit said they will start removing moderators. Not because the sub wanted to stop protesting, but because the mods of that sub decided so. /r/pcgaming for instance is one of those subs. Another sub I frequently visited, /r/europe, pulled an entire charade of having users vote whether they want to protest or not, when protest won they asked for suggestions on how to protest, the top suggestion was moving the community which got no response from the mod team, instead they had another vote on whether to stop protesting or continue, and when continuing to protest won they gave some bullshit response and opened the sub. I never said moderators don’t care about their subs, I simply stated that some of them value their moderation of the sub above what the sub might want to do.
As for fracturing the community, I’d argue what Reddit did already fractured communities into people who want to protest and people who don’t. Fracturing was always going to happen, it’s only a matter of making it apparent or acting like it didn’t happen. Because of that you’re not going to move the entire community anyway. The community is fractured, some people just don’t want to move. From the mod perspective it should come down to understanding who are the people that actually make up the community you’re moderating and then doing what they want.
I don’t have an issue with mods who had the community vote and then opened the sub (or didn’t even participate in the protest in the place) if the community voted that way. I have an issue with the mods who effectively make those decisions themselves. If you’ve already decided to protest without discussing it with the community then IMO you can’t just decide to back out later, unless the community wants it. But that’s what some of the mods did. Decided to protest and then decided to stop. Then it is already in your self-interest because you’ve technically already abused your power to protest without communicating it with the community. If you then stop protesting you should also resign because it’s a breach of trust and someone who the community cannot trust shouldn’t stay as a mod. But the mods don’t do that because “who else is going to moderate?”, meaning they would much rather moderate a community that has no reason to trust them than have someone else moderate the community. How is that not putting their own interest of moderating over the interest of the community?
They do exist and some of them swear Mac has better workflows (than windows because most of the time your options are Windows or Mac). I would call them loonies but I’ve seen some smart people use Macs.