The end of my post is where I address this. Publishers have the option to use their bigger cut to reduce prices, but even if they don’t, money is moving closer to the people actually making the games possible instead of a platform provider. There are also a lot of indie developers. It’s not just all greedy publishers.

I was thinking the other day about how Spore would benefit from modern hardware. Spore came out when multicore processing for gaming was still relatively new and memory amounts were a handful of gigabytes at most.

Momentum. Steam was among the first on the scene and provided the best experience. Thankfully Steam has kept the momentum going instead of enshittification (thanks to being a privately held company), but almost a third of the price of the game is still ridiculous if you consider the effort that goes into making a game vs maintaining a mature platform.

I won’t say no to cheaper games. The 30% cut was settled upon in the days where physical copies were the norm and Steam was still under heavy development. Given how established Steam and digital distribution in general is, it’s not really fair to developers to dedicate almost a third of the price of the game to a hosting platform. Yes, exposure is important, but that’s a service provided passively due to the fact of being the largest platform. Reducing Steam’s cut hurts no one except maybe Gabe’s ability to buy another yacht (and even then, not likely). Even if customers don’t see lower prices if Steam were to reduce their cut, it’d be great to see the actual developers getting more money from the games they put all the effort into making.

That’s not the reason why they’re doing this, just like how eliminating the super size option wasn’t to have people eat less junk food. It’s not effective in achieving that. This is just to squeeze more profits out of people, on an item that costs them pennies.

Perception plays a huge role, that’s true, but I guess we’re just going to have to agree to disagree since it’s ultimately subjective.

The arcade experience is fundamentally different from the console experience. Arcade games are generally crafted to eat quarters and kick players off as soon as possible without making them feel ripped off. Jumping in and out of games is common at arcades. While it’s nice to save that couple of seconds on a console game, it’s not something that adds up a lot unless you’re jumping between games a few minutes at a time, which again, is more like an arcade and doesn’t make as much sense in a console gaming context because you generally have a better idea of what games you own and want to play.

As for the second issue, if it was a feature that wasn’t worthwhile and that nobody cared about, then why was he considering it in the first place? There are many technical details in games that exist that casual players don’t pay attention to, but subconsciously would enjoy. Surround sound adds quite a bit to a racing game, considering that the entire game is about racing against other characters that are positioned all around you.

The title states “Masahiro Sakurai refused to add Dolby Surround to a Kirby game because players had to sit through the logo” presumably because you actually cannot have Dolby sound without the logo. Yes, technically you could, but it’s likely part of the license agreement and so him refusing to display the logo as outlined by the license means he couldn’t use Dolby sound in the game (or would get sued if he went ahead and did it anyway).

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. This is a significant enough feature that a couple seconds is really not a big deal. There are likely time-wasters just as long, if not longer, elsewhere in the game and they do not contribute a much richer audio experience. While I’d love to minimize time wasting as much as possible, this is something that appears once on boot-up while I’m sure there are other time-wasters that appear multiple times while you’re playing the game. If they’re even a fraction of a second, they will quickly add up more than this logo’s time.

Donald Knuth has a great quote on this: “The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.”

Turn the bottle 90 degrees?

I’ve heard people say “data is the new oil” and there’s some flaws in that thinking, but what I find apt, and what was probably not taken into account when that idea was thought up, is that like oil, it’s being drilled, refined, and combusted, polluting the environment. Whether this is AI-generated or just poorly-written slop by a human for the purpose of generating “content” to make money off some dumb algorithm, it’s polluting the environment and making it harder to get a proper answer.

Without a mousepad, the laser on my mouse leaves marks on my desk. It’s a cheap desk, but still.

Why can’t our own green energy campaign be additive instead of combative with other initiatives?

Rapid Abandonment Is Imperative

No, even though they don’t like the instance, they are required to post in it for whatever reason and then cry when they predictably get modded.

Taking each of those symptoms in isolation, how would someone know that person is autistic? Pretty sure the sentiment behind the “I would never bully someone for being autistic” statement is that if they knew the behavior is caused by a condition then they wouldn’t bully that person. The difference being that it would then be assumed the behavior is due to something out of their control.

You could take the absolutist position of “don’t bully anyone for any reason” but how absolute is that position? Is it not okay to call a politician an idiot or an asshole for doing something you don’t like? What if they have a condition that makes them behave in a way that you call idiotic or assholeish? A child refusing to even try to eat something their parent worked so hard to make could be considered assholeish behavior, are we to assume it’s because they have autism and thus never call them out on it?

We can all see the results where almost every politician on both sides fully support israel, even as they’re committing genocide.

AIPAC bragging about how they lobby (which we all know to mean bribe) every US leader. Doesn’t get more blatant than that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlKmWa8p4UM

This is why I’ve learned to write at least some of the solution I’m considering while I’m thinking about it to make it easier to recall if I lose track, but I do revert to keeping it in my head when I get too lazy to type.