So there's stuff about this that confuses me. Are US gas stoves always burning gas for a pilot flame? Is that the issue? Are there no regulations about kitchen ventiation for gas installations? Is it less usual to have an active smoke extractor over your stove? Are all the kitchen walls in the US super gross as a result?
Gas stoves are on the way out as general climate change (and energy dependency) pushes away from gas anyway, and I haven't seen a functional gas oven in decades, but still, some of the language in the discussion and in this study seem to assume something different than what I expect when somebody says "gas stove".
The ridiculousness of this is that out-of-print game libraries are already freely available online for no effort. Pirating games of the late 90s and early 2000s is trivial. This is yet another case where a legitimate use of software (academic research, preservation) is made more difficult than just simple emulation by broken DRM and copyright rules.
Call me crazy, but if libraries and academics are legally prevented from preserving art while alleged "illegal piracy" is forced to do the bulk of game categorization, research and preservation I'd say your copyright system has thoroughly failed at its intended purpose.
That doesn't seem to be the argument being made, though. It's not "I need to emulate to do my job as an academic", it's "academic institutions can't bypass DRM or make games remotely accessible for academic purposes", emulation or no emulation.
Which in turn is a big part of your second statement.
The headline mentions emulation, and it certainly is the most effortless way to stream access to a different location, which is what the proposal is about, but that's not the focus of the argument. The argument is about remote access for academic purposes.
That's not how language or communication work. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?
Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It's bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there's way too much English out there as it is.
Who thinks anybody is a nerd for playing anything? Did you time travel from the mid 1990s? What the hell? Civilization 6 and Total War:Warhammer are the top 29 and 30 most played games on Steam right now, Resident Evil 4 is 221 on that list. Stellaris, incidentally, is number 45.
Maybe you make a habit of giving Civ players wedgies, I don't know how old you are, but over in the real world that's not a thing. Mainstream means mainstream, and it's way more likely that both your mom and your little brother play Civ or Mario Kart than Resident Evil or God of War.
"Mainstream" doesn't mean your online friends like it. People who make things "mainstream" don't post about games online, they just... play them.
A lot of the competitive RTS crowd transitioned to MOBAs and it's hard to scratch that itch with an old-school RTS now. Having the full offline and online package was key of the time when those games were popular and you don't get that when the competitive space has moved on.
But you have a point. RTSs at their peak were super triple-A stuff, with mind blowing execution and production value for the time. Point and click adventures have a bit of the same problem, they used to be these massive technical showpieces and as a mid-size or indie thing they are a tougher sell when the modern equivalent of investment is going to absolutely insanely huge games in other genres. Even when a triple-A studio does one of those you tend to not get as much of a massive investment, and when you do (say, Total War: Warhammer, or even Manor Lords) they do see success. It's just never going to be the same because you're never going to call your friends over to show them Warcraft 2 running on your PC.
This is demonstrably false. I mean, if "mainstream" means "successful to broad audiences", that'd be games with crafting/building elements (Forntite, Roblox, Minecraft, The Sims), sports games (FIFA) and a bunch of competitive games (League of Legends, CounterStrike, CoD). Plus a couple of outliers, too (Mario Kart, GTA V, Animal Crossing). Batman, God of War and RE do... fine? They do fine. But they're not the "mainstream" of the gaming industry, they are games for a specific slice of players, they would need 10x the reach to compete.
RE4 Remake sold what? 5-7 million units? Mario Kart was breaking 50 million last year. People don't have a grasp on what games are actually popular.
So my experience with ASUS is that they do do this, but they do all of it. To be clear, in the video they explain that once they rejected the outrageous charge for minor cosmetic damage they did get both the reported in-warranty fix and the unreported SD card reader damage fixed. The issue here is ASUS including language that suggests you will forfeit the warranty fix if you don't accept the extra charges and attempting to charge you for superfluous fixes.
The last time I had to send something to ASUS for a fix they insisted on very detailed up-front images and they did send a bunch of confusing emails like these, but they also did fix the issues after I just chose to ignore the incongruous automated email responses.
Which is not to say I'm defending the practice. When I later had some RAM compatibility issues I chose to ping the RAM manufacturer first instead of ASUS because I knew ASUS' processes would be more of a pain, which is 100% the intended outcome.
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.
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.
