Broadly speaking it sounds a bit like Antitrust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

But I haven’t seen it in quite a while so I’m not sure how well specifics line up.

Over the years, I’ve become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn’t, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.

For retro games, that means my process is:

• Evercade - I’m a huge fan of the Evercade ecosystem and if a game is available there I will play it there first.
• NSO - For games not available on Evercade, my next stop will be Switch Online.
• Collections - If a game isn’t available on NSO, I’ll see if it’s available via a collection. Think Castlevania Collections, Arcade Archives, Namco Museums, etc. For these I’ll typically check reviews before picking it up and make sure the games play well as that’s not always a guarantee.
• Unlicensed emulation - Only at that point will I fire up a game on my raspberry pi.

Though honestly I can’t really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I’ll just decide to play something else instead.

I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.

Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.

They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.

Oh, interesting. I also initially read it as a thinly-veiled threat but I think you’re right it was more of a “will i be assaulted”. Still a weird thing to say.

Certainly I’m not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn’t cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult’s life.

We’ve already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?

You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I’m misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I’m not sure I’m following.

Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?

Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?

I agree that an apprentice working with a single “master” probably wouldn’t work very well. But I’m also not sure how frequently other apprenticeships still operate on that model. Perhaps it’s more common for other trades due to a preponderance of independent contractors, but there’s no saying that the apprentice needs to be beholden to one individual “master.”

You’re right, you’re probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the “college intern” grunt work of a software dev team.

The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.

But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I’d just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don’t have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.

It really, really, really doesn’t take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I’ve worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.

Let’s make that even easier to do.

Well maybe you couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn’t already exist.

Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.

Heck my local technical high school offers an “Information Technology” vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn’t it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?

For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with “bootcamps.” Increasingly you’ll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you’ve been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you’ll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.

These can vary from “pretty good, actually” to “predatory” to “a little bit like indentured servitude.” Wouldn’t it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they’re interested in?

I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.

Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.

I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.

I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.

I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”

Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.

But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.

I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?

I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.

But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.

Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?

Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?

Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?

If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?

I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

Okay. If the article is misleading or wrong, it shouldn’t be posted. If it is found to be incorrect after posting, is it better to fix the title and let the comments sort it out or to fully delete the post?

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.

I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.

Yeah, my plan is PS5, too. I was worried because been playing these games on PC almost literally my whole life, from BG1 and IWD through to PoEII and DOSII. But I don’t have a PC that can play any sorts of games right now, so it’s gonna have to be PS5.

Watching a few let’s plays and streams, it sounds like controller support is solid. So despite not being what I’m used to, I’m confident it’ll be a solid experience.

Right? I’d never heard of either of these games before, but after playing the Goodboy demo and watching some YouTube videos of Witch n Wiz, I’m pretty excited for this cart.

Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.

The things that drew me to Evercade are:

• Licensed emulation. Lots of folks don’t care about this, but I’m happy to pay for my media when I can. In cases of indie/homebrew releases, devs get paid which is great. In cases of retro releases, rightsholders get paid which is sometimes just someone with a piece of paper saying they own a particular IP. Which is maybe less important than paying the people who directly made a thing, but in the way our society is structured, imo it’s also important to pay people willing to keep something commercially available as long as they aren’t trying to gouge you.
• Curated library. I mean, part of this is just because not everyone will license to Blaze so they need to pick and choose. But back in college when my roommates and I built a mame machine, or later when I was emulating on a raspberry pi. I would mostly play the same handful of games over and over again. I love that I hadn’t heard of like 70% of the Evercade library and hadn’t played like 80% of games in the library until they came out on carts. So much discovery. I also love the fact that not all the games are all-time greats - average and below average games deserve a chance to be preserved, played, and loved as well.
• The community. I probably should have listed this first because I’m not sure if I would have gotten as into Evercade if it weren’t for the community. The folks in the discord are great. Lots of really chill and knowledgeable folks to chat games with, a few colorful characters to keep things interesting, and Blaze themselves are pretty active and transparent in the chat which is really great to see. There’s a weekly games challenge (often but not always high score related) that one of the moderators runs that has lots of us playing the same games at the same time which is always fun.

Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.

It’s always interesting when someone is like “I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can’t because all of my family are on Facebook.”

Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn’t anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I’m saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it’s okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you’ve ever met. Yeah it’s more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can’t do so passively via Facebook, but that’s how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.

If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn’t need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.

I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just “look at picture, press like button”) are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you’re going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn’t switching with you, it’s important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.