I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?
Software engineer (video games). Likes dogs, DJing + EDM, running, electronics and loud bangs in Reservoir.
I’m not against these changes, but aren’t physical footy cards and other types of trading cards the original loot box aimed at kids? Or have companies successfully argued that they’re selling chewing gum and the cards are just freebies in the pack?
This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.
No, see you’ve fallen into the exact trap I just described. The “exact same binaries” is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won’t. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you’ve still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).
For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.
Edit: btw I’m not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I’ve been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.
This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
The reality is those other platforms won’t make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they’ve made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.
It’s the same reason a lot of indies don’t target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn’t make sense for small teams. Anyone who says “But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It’s literally two clicks!” has no idea what they’re talking about and hasn’t actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.
It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the “new” Metro-style Settings, then just kind of… gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can’t believe they’ve left it this long to address, it’s an awful user experience.
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
Another vote for Mikrotik, but only if you’re technical-minded and want to learn how routers work. One of the things I like the most about it is the ability to import/export the router config as plain text. That makes it very easy to do things like bulk-editing (I have a lot of IOT devices I need to configure), storing your config in version control for safe-keeping etc.
It really shouldn’t be possible in a EULA/agreement of any kind to essentially say “you agree you can’t sue us in future for anything ever”.
But in many ways, it would probably be easier for them to remake in first person, considering they’ve got the engine and a wealth of Fallout 3D assets ready to go.
What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.
To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.
God, even if they didn’t have QA test it, they should have had continuous integration running to test all new channel updates against all versions of their program, considering the update will affect all of them. What an epic process failure.
The older I get, the more I question the value of public companies vs the damage they do. As soon as you’ve got shareholders at large to please, you’re incentivized to keep your share price going up above all else, especially in the short term. Global stock markets seemed like a great idea at the time, but I feel they’re doing more damage than good at this end of capitalism.
I feel like they’re going to get into legal trouble with that name and logo.
Is it? I skimmed the GitHub source code and couldn’t see anything involving encryption, but it’s totally possible I missed something. Perhaps just accessing the database from python is enough to decrypt it.
Wow, it’s pretty wild they didn’t even attempt to encrypt or protect this data, even if it is local to your machine. What a treasure trove for malware to sift through.
A new deal is being forged with 4chan instead.
The author had so many things to highlight that they didn’t even mention “as of August 2024” being in the future, haha.
What a trainwreck. The fact it’s giving anonymous Reddit comments and The Onion articles equal consideration with other sites is hilarious. If they’re going to keep this, they need it to cite its sources at a bare minimum. Can’t wait for this AI investor hype to die down.
This article seems misleading. It uses the loaded Western term “selfie” to generate these images of different cultures smiling. If you use the term “group photo” instead, you get much more natural looking results, where certain cultures are smiling and others aren’t.