It’s okay, I understand it came off a little snarky. I have a hard time not adopting the “reddit” tone in my comments. Lol

not at all! it’s an ageless topic. just wild to read an article from almost 10 years ago that feels like it was written yesterday. Esp when Civ 7 is the new hotness, but Civ 6 still has more players.

Published Nov 1, 2016

Basically I want Cyberpunk where all the lights and movement actually mean something.

totally valid desire, but I don’t think AI would give you that solution. If you went into a building and it was a weird, hallucinated backroom, would that give you that feeling that you’re looking for? Or would you be left feeling disappointed in a different way?

It’s astounding the way Republicans will ruin literally everything they touch. They can’t even keep a grant program running without turning it into an extortion racket.

when your job is to report on the truth, it’s natural to become pretty woke. you become less susceptible to the bs.

Seems like that is Microsoft’S new strategy, pivot to PC where their storefront is just one of several options for buying games. Their super premium console they are teasing is probably just a Windows computer. Unclear what will happen with older Xbox purchases/if back compatibility will continue to be a concern. Might end up being the sacrificial lamb to our open future.

I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments

You and every other corporation, pal

I’m actually not sure who this affects. Initially I thought maybe you were right, until I considered that indie devs have this workaround. But I don’t think AAA devs will be affected by this much, either, because they already have all the dev kits they need. I guess there’s a possibility that a developer might want to make something bigger than ever for Xbox, but that possibility seems lower and lower every day. Even if they didn’t raise the price on the devkits, we probably won’t see another huge third party game come out for Xbox. When I think about something like GTA6, I think either they already have all the devkits they need to complete a port job, or else they will just skip releasing on Xbox entirely.

as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you’re playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it’s easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you’ve been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven’t you? In a way, it’s like you’re showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you’re like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It’s actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you’ve been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.

That’s been my experience. When we talk about the potential for “billions”, most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn’t bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there’s also a collector’s mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.

My understanding is that the damage from this specific move will be minimal, because everyone that wants to develop for Xbox already has a devkit. This is mostly just Xbox acknowledging that they are barely moving devkits, and devkits are getting more expensive because of tariffs, so they may as well raise the price on the devkits because they are gaining no benefit from eating the cost.

I would assume that the devkit has more features to make developing easier, and testing on the Xbox console is probably a little janky without a devkit. Maybe it’s the kind of solution that makes sense for a small studio, but doesn’t scale up for a larger one?

yeahhh at least in this context there’s a built-in playground where you can show off your expensive purchases. NFTs are insufferable because NFT owners are always trying to talk to you about their NFTs. I think CS players know that their skins are only cool to other CS players. lol

Spinoff:

A spinoff or spin-off is any narrative work derived from an already existing work that focuses on different aspects from the original work.

If it takes place in the Oldest House, a narrative location that originates from Control, it is a narrative work derived from an already existing work. ie. a spinoff

In our post-Cinematic Universe media landscape, I think it’s easy to forget that we used to just call all of these spinoffs. I guess the difference between “cinematic universe” and “spinoff” is scale?

that’s 1200 highly self-motivated workers that are now competing with you and me for the “boring” jobs. Not to wish ill on these former journalists - I hope all these people have landed in good places with stable incomes. But man… this job market just keeps getting more and more brutal. Jobs are eliminated and more and more workers are competing for the same tiny pool.

idk, i have a hard time imagining a scenario where AI output is preferable to the alternatives. If one “needs” an AI to do something, they should just hire a human. They will get better results than they get from the word-association machine. Once AI companies stop subsidizing the cost of AI to attract users, the human will probably be the cheaper option, too.

no one “needs” AI, imo. I think I know what you mean, I just don’t think there is any use case that rises to the level of “need”.

Are we defending the Saudi regime with whataboutism? Is that what we’re doing now?

So far, they are continuing to say they are still working on it.

thx, beat me to it, and your sources are excellent.