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1 year agoText-based-games and MUDs are not the same thing. There’s a considerable library of text-based interactive fiction out there.
Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023
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15·1 year agoHan is the captain. The captain of a ship makes the calls as to what it does, and the Millennium Falcon came back.
I think a better question is why Luke gets special recognition versus the other pilots. I mean, he happened to be the one to make the final shot that blew up the Death Star, but everyone else in the squadrons went in too.
12·1 year agoReddit had the ability to have a per-subreddit wiki. I never dug into it on the moderator side, but it was useful for some things like setting up pages with subreddit rules and the like. I think that moderators had some level of control over it, at least to allow non-moderator edits or not, maybe on a per-page basis.
That could be a useful option for communities; I think that in general, there is more utility for per-community than per-instance wiki spaces, though I know that you admin a server with one major community which you also moderate, so in your case, there may not be much difference.
I don't know how amenable django-wiki is to partitioning things up like that, though.
EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki/ has a brief summary.
The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.
They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don't believe that that's what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.
EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.
EDIT2: Okay, here's an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:
https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277
In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.
Yeah, so it's just that these "mezha.media" guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.
But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it's not like the US says "if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him".
EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.
Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.
Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary – and I am not sure that it is – that seems like the EU is saying "you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe". Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that'd kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.
thinks
If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it'd be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it'd basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don't know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company ("Valve Germany") or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.
I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.
I'm a little suspicious that this isn't a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it'd create too many issues.
EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that's exactly what the situation is.
Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.
Wait, outside Europe?
Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can't geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?
I remember that the EU didn't want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn't heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.
Development costs now are about 100 times more than they were during the Famicom era, but software prices haven't gone up to that extent," he explained. "
Number of copies sold has gone up a lot.
3·1 year agoSetting aside the online/offline issue, I think that there’s a fair argument that this shouldn’t happen for online games either.
If it’s not the case already, I’m kind of surprised that there isn’t a “server engine”, the equivalent of what a game engine is for the client side.
I would guess that an awful lot of what game servers do is reinventing the wheel.
Matchmaking and lobbies aren’t a new problem.
It is possible to get a USB power station. The Deck can charge at up to 45W.
I wish that power stations acted more like “external batteries” (would automtically be flipped on by devices when their internal batteries get low, will be charged after their internal batteries are charged), but even as things are, they do let one extend battery life on portable devices dramatically.
It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.
The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.
I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we’re getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that’s definitely not a constant; some people aren’t going to care much about openness.
That said, if I were trying to compare Valve’s offering and Microsoft’s offering, I’d probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they’re more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn’t have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.
I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I’d bet that it’d be more-limited than a Series S.
That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-says-xbox-consoles-have-always-been-sold-at-a-loss
As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there’s ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.
The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it’s still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.
We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately – that’s why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that’s to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.
If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.
Now, all that being said, I don’t have a Series S or a Series X, and I’m not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I’d rather have, you’re preaching to the choir. I’m just saying that I don’t think that I’d agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.
The Steam Deck is more expensive.
Series S: $274.95
https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
Steam Deck: $359.10
And that’s for the low-end Steam Deck. The nicest one is $519.20, almost twice what the Series S runs.
I loved my Dualsense too, and then the left stick started drifting so badly, it’s completely unusable now. It’s only about a year old, too
I really think that something changed with a major potentiometer manufacturer in the past few years. I don’t recall stick drift on a PS2 controller that I used for many years, but I’ve seen it on a number of controllers from different vendors recently.
Only thing I can think of other than recent hardware problems is that maybe the controller hardware imposed a certain amount of deadzone at one point in time and stopped doing so in newer gamepads, and that masked the drift.
What is Microsoft even making money on these days?
googles
https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
Azure, Office, and (still) Windows, apparently.
Only 8% of revenue is gaming. They sure do went to grow that.
I’m a little fuzzy as to why the first-sale doctrine exists for physical goods but not for digital goods. It seems to me that any reasonable economic rationale should affect either both or neither.
modular thumbsticks
Hmm.
So is this modular thumbsticks akin to the Microsoft Elite controller, where you can put taller or shorter stems on or different tops?
Or is it like the Thrustmaster eSwap Pro, where you can remove the entire mechanism beneath, and put something else in (like, say, a more-expensive-but-immune-to-drift Hall Effect thumbstick)?
It’s not as critical for Bethesda’s series, because the stories don’t intertwine, but one good reason to update some series is that the games span a really long period of time, to the point where only players who grew up with the series will have played the whole thing. Otherwise, players can only play the later games in a series.
Heh. Porting Skywind to an Oblivion remaster might make sense.
It’d be interesting to see Tamriel Rebuilt ported to Skywind ported to this Oblivion remaster.
Need some kind of automated migration tools to help.
The Fallout 3 remaster (fiscal year 2024)
If you consider that A Tale of Two Wastelands – where people forward-ported the Fallout 3 world to the Fallout: New Vegas engine and ruleset – was successful, that could be pretty solid. I still think I’d forward-port Fallout: New Vegas to the current Bethesda engine before I’d forward-port Fallout 3, though. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas#Tale_of_Two_Wastelands
Tale of Two Wastelands
Tale of Two Wastelands is a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that merges the entire content of Fallout 3 and its DLC and New Vegas into one game. The mod implements features introduced in New Vegas into Fallout 3, such as the Companion Wheel, crafting recipes, and weapon mods. Players can freely traverse between the two games on a single save file, keeping all of their items and their progression between game worlds.[76][77][78][79]
Also, most Fallout: New Vegas mods worked with Tale of Two Wastelands, which was pretty cool.
It’s not new today, but it post-dates “AI” and hit the same problem then.