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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • That’s actually kind of shocking to see that indie games have surpassed AAA in revenue. I expected that was kind of inevitable given how uninspired and criticized modern AAA stuff is. But to actually see it already happened is cool.

    It’s been shocking to see the amount of financial industry money and control at some of the bigger studio, and the way they talk about the future of the industry is disturbing. Although, if the money isn’t rolling in, or there are other parts of the market making more money, it makes me hopeful that finance will loosen it’s grip on these companies and let them make good projects rather than chasing arbitrary metrics.


  • This is a shame, I haven’t played a sims game in a while and I remember them quite fondly. The latest EA sims stuff has just been utter micro transaction slop, or at least last I checked. I hate to see a smaller studio that’s not working through one of bastard publishers get hit like this.

    I’m a lot more patient with paradox than I am with other publishers. Their focus still seems on producing interesting games rather than chasing “maximized revenue”. There are realities to being a publisher though. if a studio is failing to produce something and your financials are limited, there’s only so much risk you can take on extending deadlines, and writing something off for a quick boost to financials is a alluring sirens call.

    I have my issues with how paradox studios design is affected by their DLC model, but I don’t think there’s a better way to bring in ongoing revenue to fund further development.

    It’s a mess, all of it, but it is a results of the context and system they exist with in, not necessarily the will of those making the calls at paradox. Paradox tends to do a better job of existing with in the system without making pure slop than other big publishers, so they have my patience for that.




  • I think the larger issue here is that you can’t compare music or TV shows to games, at least not in how people interact with them.

    TV has always been a subscription model, the only difference with streaming is getting to choose when and what you watch. Games have always ether been pay per play or pay for a copy, with the notable exception of free to play or MMOs that require a subscription. Music is an odd case because it’s split between two models historically, radio and records/CDs.

    I generally watch a show or movie once, maybe I’ll rewatch it if I really like it, similar for music. If i loose acces to it because a streaming service drops it, shame, but no big deal. But I’ll often go back and play a game for hundreds of hours, loosing acess to a game is a much bigger deal. People generally put a lot more time and effort in when they play a game, owning it makes more sense in that context. Personally, I don’t buy that many games over all, having access to thousands of titles doesn’t mean much if I’ll only ever play a handful. Something like Game pass is more expensive than the rate i buy new games at and loosing access to a game that i routinely play is a legitimate concern with a streaming model, ether because i stop paying the subscription or they decide to take a title off the service.





  • Clinton did win the primary (even without super delegates), so “forced on democrats” is only true in a sense. She was certainly the preferred candidate of party leadership, and they did everything they legally could to help her win. Major center and center left news outlets also seemed to do everything they could to help her win.

    But I don’t think harris is any better in that regard. She has not won a primary, Clinton at least managed to win the primary. Arguably Harris has been even more forced upon Democratic voters.

    I suspect that this is going to become a huge issue and talking point later on.



  • I don’t care much for good personality in politicians, plenty of politicians with great personalities have gone on to do awful things, plenty with awful personalities have done great things. I care far more about the issues they campaign on and policies they’ve pushed through in the past.

    Haris seemed to drop and pick up policy positions during the 2020 primary purely based on what her team thought would advance polling numbers. Which makes me skeptical of any claimed positions without concrete evidence of commitment.



  • Honestly, I prefer Biden to her. Haris’s historical political positions are questionable at best to me personally and I don’t trust her in the slightest to implement progressive policies or challenge corporate power. She has co-signed a lot of letters, and sponsored a few bills that sounded good, but never when there was a real chance of them passing, and I’ve seen very little from her that would convince me that was anything but performative.

    I’m not crazy about Biden and I think he gave up far to much on a lot of the bills he managed to get through, not to mention that his foreign policy had been a mixed bag, to say the least. But, I’d still rather him be in charge of things.

    This is my biggest reservation about the whole replace Biden thing. Suddenly the party is worried about Biden’s electability now? Not when they could have run primaries and had voter input? To me it feels like they always wanted to pick another candidate, but they didn’t want to run a public primary campaign. Perhaps it’s because they wanted to give the right wing propaganda machine less time to demonize the chosen candidate, or maybe insiders at the party were worried the voters in primaries might choose someone they didn’t approve of.

    The first seems… I dunno, somewhat reasonable? The second ticks me off though. This all stinks, especially because most of the left of the party is still voicing support for keeping biden. If the party wants to replace Biden with Harris’s they should have had a primary about it, and not just slipped it in last moment.






  • Not the person you’re replying to, and I don’t have personal experience with Bazzite but, essentially, it is gaming oriented distribution built on fedora.

    It has a lot of stuff built in to help it run games well, including the right graphics drivers. Fedora is one of the major Linux distributions along side Arch, Debian (which Ubuntu is derived from), and others.

    There are a few other distributions that do much of the same regarding graphic card drivers, but built on one of the other major distributions. For instance PoP_OS! (Based on Ubuntu and thus Debian).

    So bazzite is good for running games, that’s what it is built to do, but other distros do that as well, it depends what flavor of Linux you want it to be built on.