In recent times, triple-A publishers have repeatedly had their lunch eaten — at least, in terms of mindshare — by more creatively nimble indies. Lethal Companywas last holiday season’s breakout hit, andPalworld followed not long after. Balatroand Manor Lords have come out of nowhere to tear up the Steam charts, as...
In recent times, triple-A publishers have repeatedly had their lunch eaten — at least, in terms of mindshare — by more creatively nimble indies
And that lesson is that online-obsessed, industry-focused journalists and fans have a super skewed view of the industry.
Don't get me wrong, all these layoffs suck and I agree with the sentiment that a longer term strategy for investing in games where you snowball up from small, successful ideas, is probably a better way to do things than trying to constantly chase the billion dollar game right away... but the "mindshare" argument is very skewed and the examples are cherry picked at best, tortured or outright incorrect at worst (Baldur's Gate 3 and Elden Ring "come from similar lineages"? Seriously?).
I think it's time we take a deep breath and decide what we mean by "triple A". If Grayson wants to argue that triple A is "American conglomerates spending a lot of money in games with some degree of games-as-service design meant to make billions" then maybe we need a new term for all the other games with nine digit budgets.
Nah, you have a point. There are a bunch of "2D soulslikes" that get advertised as "Metroidvanias", and I wish we had better language to split that difference, because there's a big conceptual shift between the "parry and dodge" souls style and the genuine Metroid/Castlevania style of movement and aggression. It feels very different and honestly the last time something scratched that itch it was Bloodstained.
So yeah, Hollow Kinght is a very well made game, but it's not what I'm looking for every time I fire up one of the DSvanias for yet another run.
I just like videogames, man. I just played Panic Bomber now and I had a lot of fun. And earlier I was playing Path Blasters and that's cool also. And Before that I spent a bit of time on Manor Lords and that's insane for a small team, I want to get back into it soon. And I'm thinking of going back of Horizon Forbidden West now that there is a PC version.
It's just... games are cool, you know? I like them a lot.
Right? It's kinda nuts how much this quixotic prepper-style power fantasy permeates some parts of the Internet. Hell, even that strip is conceding the basic point that there will be a cabal of evil people digging for all their super-important secret files at some point.
For the record, that's as fine as any other hobby, as far as I'm concerned. Just as I don't have any issues with... you know, survivalism as a hobby.
On the aggregate, though, there IS a bit of a prepper power fantasy at play, I stand by that. Hey, I have tons of hobbies myself where I find the collective average lands in a super creepy place. If anything I think it's a relief to acknowledge it. Gives you plausible deniability.
I mean, Goku's best friend is a billionaire, his son is married to the most famous family on Earth who sometimes just hands him money and his wife is a princess. Also, he's close personal friends with God, God's boss, God's boss's boss and God's boss's boss's boss.
Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Okay, this seemed wrong. As the article said, even Win8 didn't go down in usage over time. So I went and checked the methodology for the source data.
Turns out, this number is based on social media and search engine referral data. Also turns out, they warn that while they do track Bing chat referrals when you follow through a link, they don't see chat responses where you only read the AI response but don't click through:
We have no way of measuring the number of queries performed in bing chat. However, we also don't measure the number of queries to regular search engines like bing or google either. Instead we track search engine referrals.
i.e. If you go to a search engine and do a search for anything and you click on a website result, we'll record that click as a search engine referral if that website had the statcounter code installed. It's the click to a website that we measure, not the actual search queries that were performed.
When you do a search using bing chat, and you click on one of the "learn more" websites we can track that as a search referral. So we are monitoring bing chat in the same way we measure the regular bing search engine.
From this data we can see from the statcounter network of webites, that the amount of traffic being sent to websites from bing chat is very, very small. Less than 1/100 of 1 percent.
So from our data we can say that bing chat is not currently translating into enough clicks to our network of websites to change the search share.
Of course you are less likely to click on a source website from bing chat than a regular search, as it is intended to give you the answer rather than have you go visiting websites to find the answer. So that needs to be factored in when using our stats for your analysis.
That is very interesting. That's a likely culprit for Win11 specifically to have gone down a couple of percentage points in the US and EU (the other territories seem to remain flat), but it's hard to prove.
It's also a bit concerning in terms of measuring the effects of AI search in both network traffic and in how search results are consumed. If that's the cause it does suggest that AI chat users are less likely to follow through to the source info, which seems risky, although it's also hard to prove what that does to receiving truthful info.
Lots of counterintutitive, hard to parse implications from this one data point, but I'd be surprised if it was as simple as "people have randomly decided to roll back to Win10 (and Win8, which also grows) for no reason".
Just so we're clear, the data in the headline refers to the share of Windows editions among Windows users. By their count Windows actually went up slightly in the overall Desktop OS share last month, while Linux remains basically flat at 4%.
Well, a data point is a data point is a data point. You just can't make all your decisions based on a single one, at least without understanding what's behind it.
FWIW, the Steam survey has Win 11 growing by 3.5% last month, with Win10 going down by about the same amount (Linux stays at 1.9% there). Neither data source is wrong or bad, necessarily, but you do want to be aware that one is an opt-in survey of gamers and the other is a tracker of search engine referrals.
So the takeaway is that people are probably not deserting Win 11 in droves, but maaaybe their use of online search is being impacted by MS's integration of AI search or something else changing Win11 users' behavior around social media or search engines. Or mostly that it may be too early to tell and we may need more sources of info. For all the glee and schadenfreude in this thread, the big teachable moment is that data and stats are nuanced and hard to read and that confirmation bias is a bitch.
Honestly, the biggest takeaway I get from this subthread is to never tell people that you're young online, because I can feel the condescension in my bones.
But no, yeah, mobile games used to suck and now at least you get ports of decent indie games. It's still not great but at least now you can play Slay the Spire while you poop.
Because inflation applies to both the amounts you owe and the ammounts you save. It's kinda baffling to see multiple people here arguing that inflation encourages hoarding or not spending. Specifically it does the opposite. Money you save loses value, so you need to invest in something that returns value faster than inflation rather than sit on a pile of cash. Money you borrow also loses value, so the money you pay back later is less than the amount you borrowed. If you pay the same amount each month for your mortgage for 25 years and inflation is 2% each year the last payment should be half as valuable as the first (edit: about two thirds, actually. Maths!), so you're encouraged to buy on credit.
More importantly, governments have tools to control inflation, so they can intervene and course correct when sudden imbalances happen. The anarchocapitalist fantasy where the market balances itself is extremely dumb, government intervention is absolutely needed, and tools to regulate runaway effects are what keeps all your savings from evaporating every so often.
Yes, not all demand is the same, but the idea isn't to increase the demand of bread, it's to increase investment. If sitting on cash gets you more interest from the bank you're going to let it sit more. If it loses value you're going to spend or invest it more. And yeah, this does happen, among other things because inflation affects everybody, not just consumers, although this also influences how likely individual people are to buy things on credit. Companies and governments also care about this.
As always with economics things aren't straightforward, and you get lots of weird paradoxical behaviors, but the big lines of this one are easy to see. If you have some inflation and low interest rates you're gonna be more likely to make big purchases or investments on credit. And the real problem is once you have those and are paying them back if inflation flips and suddenly the 100 bucks you pay each month for that credit go up in value to 110 you may find yourself losing money on that investment or being unable to afford it, which is a big problem when that happens to literally everybody who owes money (including the government) all at once.
And since the people you owe money to are mostly just a handful of banks.... well, that's not a great wealth redistribution technique, is it?
Yeah, but... that's the point. That's an investment. You just said the same thing I said.
For sure that can create imbalances in itself, and that's where other government intervention is required through other tools, but what we're saying here is that inflation encourages you to use the money (say, by buying a house through a mortgage), as opposed to sitting on a pile of cash or keeping it in the bank.
Absolutely. Inflation isn't just inflation, different things move at different rates, and that includes salaries.
But that's why you want collective bargaining and an ongoing conversation about salaries, including periodic revisions of minimum wage regulations. We shouldn't let oligarchs tell us that inflation is what degrades salaries, it's the mismatch between salary growth and inflation. Inflation should be part of the calculation and salaries should be negotiated on a regular basis and regulated to prevent the system from breaking at the bottom.
When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”...
Mondragón’s founders adopted wholesale many of the Pioneers’ core tenets. In their modern-day headquarters, located in a renovated 14th-century tower with a spectacular mountain backdrop, Etxeberria counts off the group’s 10 “basic principles”. The list ranges from the sovereignty of labour and democratic organisation (one member, one vote), to wage solidarity and “social transformation” – which includes reinvesting surpluses to create new jobs, supporting local charities and community development projects, and strengthening the Basque Country’s Euskara language. Top of the list is voluntary and open membership – namely, the opportunity for everyone to have a personal stake in the enterprise where they work. As an early version of the principles reads: “The first form of elemental justice that we need to practise is to consider each other as free human beings.”
You did miss it, although it's a bit of a passing remark.
Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:...
Official OS support is a security concern. The machine I have in use at home that is running Win10 is doing so on deliberately old hardware for preservation and it will continue to do so indefinitely, just like my XP machine. I'm even a bit surprised myself by how few Win10 computers I have, considering I haven't once upgraded one to Win11 on purpose. I thik I may have an older laptop that is still on Win10 and can happily stay there, since it doesn't see much use.
But hey, corporate office PCs ARE likely to hit the used market in higher numbers at that point, and those are often a good deal for cheap DIY builds. It's still a good date to track if you're into that sort of thing.
Having used 10 and 11 interchangeably since 11 came out... meh.
I mean, maybe there are additional annoyances from the IT/sysadmin side that I just don't bump into as a user, but besides some UX downgrades that don't make sense (that taskbar... why?) it's a pretty neutral change. Maybe I'm to grizzled by having been there in the switch to 95. I unironically had Windows Me on my computer there for a while. I even caved and did some Vista eventually.
Yep. I get they wanted to pretend 8 wasn't a complete bust, hence the 8.1 nonsense, but they should have called it Windows 9 and been honest about it. They certainly acknowledged it by the time 10 came around.
Hm. Not been my experience going back and forth between 10 and 11, but that's always the case with Windows, isn't it? Bit of a crapshoot in general.
Honestly, I have no idea how to evaluate real laptop performance these days. Most of the performance issues I have on battery devices are some unholy combination of horrific power management, bad software and semi-deliberate online weirdness with services throttling you out of adblocker spite.
People are out there telling you how well Youtube is meant to perform playing video and how long the battery is meant to run based on that and I don't even know what they mean anymore.
As me and others have said all over this thing, Windows 10 no longer getting updates doesn't mean it's mandatory to update. Most of the users you describe will not notice or care that security updates die out and they will just take whatever runs in the next PC they buy, as they normally do.
This mostly matters to power users and corporations. If that. I'm arguably a power user and have zero intention to upgrade my legacy Win10 machines for this reason, either.
Agree on 1, mostly. I forget that's the case because I have software installed to fix it, which is fairly trivial but shouldn't be necessary in the first place.
2 is a day one meme thing that no longer holds. Sound management in particular is now much better than Win 10 in several key areas, IMO. Likewise with 3. Echoes of Vista and Win 8.1 dragging day one legit complaints way past when they were no longer an issue.
4 and 5 are the kinds of things that average users typically don't know or care about (and mostly don't have to) and are debatable from a power user's perspective. If the argument is Win10 is reaching end of support and you care about the implications of that, then you are the type of user that can fix that problem. And if you're the kind of user who doesn't care about a supported vs unuspported Win10, you don't care about this specific observation either.
Let me be clear, I'm not an active apologist for Win 11 or any other Windows, I just don't have a preference. Win11 was a sidestep, the best I can say for it is that I'm kinda glad MS was semi-forced to keep it as a separate version rather than a patch to 10. But it's also mostly just fine. A few people got really incensed about it early on and have tried to keep up a pretense that it's a disaster iteration in the vein of some of the really bad ones, which using it day to day is clearly an exaggeration.
I swear, the fact that people treat operating systems as if they were 90s kids arguing about Sega vs. Nintendo is exhausting and I have zero patience for it.
I'm all for that idea, but I don't think what's holding it back is the OS. It's not like there aren't ways to get there now, they're just... relatively rare and quite expensive.
I assumed the guy wanted to run DOS natively, otherwise open source MS DOS definitely isn't a requirement, you can just run DOSBOX on any cheap ARM SBC. But looking at the conversation you're having below maybe they just didn't think about that?
But hey, if you have links to new small form factor 386s for under 100 bucks please do share, I'd be super curious to get one. VGA out is strongly preferred. If I was going to live with nonsense digital output scaling issues I'd just use the MiSTer I already have.
Yes, alternatives exist. But they can be... how would one put it? Relatively rare and expensive.
I am aware of single board industrial replacement alternatives, but those can be hard to get a hold of, depending on location. Shopping around for used, older thin clients that still have the right I/O and compatible-enough hardware is honestly not a terrible idea, although weirdly the video that you sent as an example highlights a bunch of caveats and issues I wouldn't even have thought about. Still, that one may be a fun project, if slightly not in the spirit, certainly off-spec for the period and definitely not plug-and-play.
Ultimately, though, I do see the appeal of a period-approrpiate, native revival device. Clearly not alone there, hence the OP and the viral success of the Hand, with all its limitations. I'm not saying you can't work around the need for that exact thing. You can and I have. To repeat what my first response to the guy was:
"It's not like there aren't ways to get there now, they're just... relatively rare and quite expensive."
Well, the two relevant questions there are: A) is it?, and B) so what?
It's not like you're not allowed to provide paid support for a piece of open source software.
At this point I'm not sure what portion of the difference between 4 and 6.22 is relevant or unknown. That's a pretty well explored platform. I guess this way FreeDOS stays relevant a bit longer? Maybe? It's not like it isn't trivial to pull a copy of 6.22. It was trivial when it was new.
Making it open source seems to me like the solution to that problem, not the cause. If there is a vulnerability in DOS 6.22 people probably know about it by now. If you're using it for something critical you probably would have an easier time patching it with full access.
My goldendoodle puppy doesn't ever want to come back inside. I told my beagle "go get your sister" as I tried rounding up the puppy. Now when I say "go get your sister" the beagle runs to the puppy and baits her into chasing him into the house.
For a while he learned that "this is the last one" meant we were about to stop playing fetch and he'd pretend to have noticed something odd or been distracted to avoid bringing the ball back and having it taken away. We worked through that one with some treats, so now "this is the last one" means "treat upcoming".
We air dry our clothes on a balcony he doesn't often get to access and he gets to walk out with us when we're doing that and bark at birds and neighboring cats (which is why he isn't allowed out there all the time). He's learned to set up camp next to the door when he hears the washing machine beep after a wash cycle. Also when he sees us grab the container we use for the laundry, in case we're about to go pick up a dry load.
I've been hearing people claim that it's the next incremental improvement that's gonna do it since the very first Oculus prototype. Turns out there's always another next incremental improvement.
Look, I have owned what? Five? Six? HMDs since VR started. I'm looking at two right now. I'm not a hater. But it's way past time to acknowledge that this isn't mainstream tech. This thing is behaving like all other standalone VR devices. Which is impressive, because the price tag is absurd, it should have been dead on the water day one.
Yep. I'm right there with 3D as well. My 3DS's slider was on at 100% that entire generation. It's just hard to get everybody onboard, especially when you have physical issues like nausea and corrective lenses getting in the way.
At the end of the day physical displays are a great tech solution. You put a thing in a place and the thing shows you things with super high quality. And if you don't want to look at the thing you just... look away.
Gonna take a lot to convince people that strapping one of those to their face is a more convenient solution, or that immersion is worth the inconvenience. It's why people run around with laggy, crappy-sounding wireless earbuds instead of awesome, bulky on-ear wired audiophile headphones. Convenience and cost win most of the time.
As a non-American stuck with a terrible dual Whatsapp setup I can't kill due to network effects, this is true.
The counterargument is that any one platform will have this issue, so you'd need full interoperability. Except in direct messaging full interoperability is a bit of a security issue.
You kinda walked that back by yourself, I think. The point of anticompetitive practices isn't having a 100% market share, it's having a position of strength to enforce your control of the market.
So... you know, being dicks.
Enforcing a single form of in-platform commerce where you get a share and banning all other ways to sell or install software, downgrading the quality of media generated by your competitors, bundling your own unrelated software and adding roadblocks to competing alternatives... all of that is part of what's being discussed here.
I guess it depends. If Apple made iOS available on other hardware this conversation would be different, I bet. The problem with Apple's practices is the "ecosystem" approach. You get one of their devices and you HAVE to use their OS, you HAVE to use their core app bundle, you HAVE to use their store. And in a number of things where you don't have to, you're heavily incentivized or the competition is made less competitive. And now you're on a software platform that only works with Apple hardware, so now you have an incentive to migrate your other computing devices (laptops, desktops, smart TVs) to be from Apple, too, because that's where your compatible software lives.
It's the sort of practice antitrust laws exist to prevent.
Google is no saint and will do as much of this as they're allowed, but at least the nature of their OS and the diversity of manufacturers and OS customizations means they don't control the ecosystem end to end. The biggest manufacturer is Samsung, and they will ship with their browser, an alternate store, a different mail client and a bunch of OS modifications Google doesn't control, so Samsung and Google give each other some plausible deniability within the Android ecosystem oligopoly.
Yes, the use of OSS by Google doesn't exempt them from antitrust laws.
But also yes, it does give them a defense that Apple just doesn't have. Not solely because of the OS portions, but also because it tends to guarantee some nominal competition. See above my point about Samsung's alternatives.
See, that's the problem with modern politics. Warren knows very well that "a monopoly" understood as "the single remaining actor in a market" is imprecise and not the bar needed for antitrust laws to kick in. But she also knows that "an anticompetitive position of strength in the market" will not make the same headlines and confuse people.
So she says "a monopoly".
So you say "not a monopoly".
So this is a sterile conversation.
Antitrust laws are in place to prevent the specific behaviors Apple has been engaging in for ages. From the muscling out of third party repair shops to the attempt to bundle together every piece of software and hardware they make in-house, Apple is blatantly violating competition rules all over the place. The only reason they haven't been more aggressively regulated already elsewhere is their monopolistic price-hiking doesn't play in territories that are more sensitive to pricing for tech. Maybe on purpose? Hard to tell. If Apple had the type of market share across the EU it has in the US one can only imagine what sort of fines or threats to split it up it would have received by this point.
I'm so surprised by the way this has gone in the US. The weird ass blend of SMS and messaging iMessage uses for no reason and the fact that it's sorta-kinda platform exclusive but not really is just an absolute mess of dumb engineering.
The fact that RCS is even part of this conversation seems so weird. Surely the real answer is for iMessage to just... have an Android port that works like the iOS port, right? That's how every other messaging app does it. I mean, sure, over here in Androidland where everybody uses Whatsapp (which has its own issues), RCS is a thing. If you open your text messaging app for some reason there is a Google prompt to switch it to RCS as a one-time optional choice. I just... never bothered. Because who the hell uses either SMS or RCS anyway?
Would I switch to iMessage if there was an Android port? No. Because everybody I've ever known with an iPhone uses Whatsapp, so that'd be as useful as switching to carrier pigeons. But it's worth pointing out that the only reason the EU hasn't forced interoperability for iMessage is exactly that. If it hadn't already lost the messenger app wars in Europe they would have been forced to sort this out one way or another.
Wait, so this is not about the power menu, it's about the pop up when clicking on your account picture bubble if you're signed in to a MS account. They aren't adding a step to logging out of your local Windows user, just to logging out of your Microsoft account if you're using that as a login for Windows, OneDrive and Office365.
The "Lock" button also has a new home—it now sits in the power menu alongside "Shut down," "Restart," and "Sleep" options.
THAT is where the Lock button was? Not gonna lie, I've been Windows-L-ing so long I didn't even know they had moved that to the account bubble.
I'll be honest, the article is a bit overdramatic. Yeah, they are surfacing your services there to upsell you on the ones you don't have, but it's actually not a useless piece of info (currently finding your subscriptions is an ordeal) and none of the functionality is gone. It is true that a lot of UX things around Win11 have gotten worse, though. I'm currently using additional software to replace the taskbar (which will do the Start menu, too, if you want) because the inability to move it to the sides is ridiculous on the OS you're most likely to pair with an ultrawide monitor.
Yeeeeah, but this isn't a dark pattern, though. That's what I'm saying.
The article really wants it to be, but... well, it's not. The option to log out remains in the same place as the rest of your account info, and the account info they are surfacing is actually useful and relevant to how much money you're spending. They are making it easier to subscribe, for sure, but also to cancel, which used to be pretty hidden away.
I get that this fits into a wider pattern for both MS and other major software companies, but if they inch towards the boiled frog at this pace we're probably fine.
Now, if they ever try (again) to make MS accounts mandatory for Windows or to move Windows to a sub, we can have this conversation. As others said below, when you try to inch people towards dealbreakers you can find yourself losing ground very quickly. Especially if a new comparable alternative surfaces at the same time.
Bimbo is Italian and masculine, the correct feminine term would be "bimba" ( lemmy.world )
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimbo...
Big Video Game Publishers Like Microsoft Are Paving Their Own Path To Irrelevance - Aftermath ( aftermath.site )
In recent times, triple-A publishers have repeatedly had their lunch eaten — at least, in terms of mindshare — by more creatively nimble indies. Lethal Companywas last holiday season’s breakout hit, andPalworld followed not long after. Balatroand Manor Lords have come out of nowhere to tear up the Steam charts, as...
Am I the only person that feels that retro games are better?
Less DRM, smaller filesizes, no stupid anticheat, and no always online bs. Anyone agree with me?
He is a ghost ( lemmy.basedcount.com )
They're the same picture ( lemmy.world )
Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining ( www.neowin.net )
Statcounter reports that Windows 11 continues to lose its market share for the second month in a row. Windows 10, meanwhile, is gaining more users and is now back above the 70% mark.
Why do mobile games suck nowadays?
In the last 5-7 years I've noticed that mobile games have devolved info always online p2w shit...
‘Last Week Tonight’: Past Seasons Will Be Available for Free on YouTube ( www.hollywoodreporter.com )
We keep measuring everything's value with something that continuously loses value over time
It's becoming really annoying.
I fell into a burning ring of fire ( lemmy.world )
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14797615...
‘In the US they think we’re communists!’ The 70,000 workers showing the world another way to earn a living ( www.theguardian.com )
When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”...
Are you prepared for the ramifications of windows 10 EoL?
Next year Windows 10 goes End of Life. Microsoft will undoubtedly push windows 11 hard, but a lot of machines won’t support it leading to a few economic points of interest:...
Microsoft open sources MS-DOS 4.0 ( www.gamingonlinux.com )
What is a command you accidentally taught your pet?
My goldendoodle puppy doesn't ever want to come back inside. I told my beagle "go get your sister" as I tried rounding up the puppy. Now when I say "go get your sister" the beagle runs to the puppy and baits her into chasing him into the house.
Apple Vision Pro Customer Interest Dying Down at Some Retail Stores ( www.macrumors.com )
Elizabeth Warren slammed for wanting to ‘break up Apple’s smartphone monopoly’ ( www.bostonherald.com )
Microsoft wants to hide the 'Sign out' button in Windows 11 behind a Microsoft 365 ad ( www.neowin.net )