Skip Navigation

Posts
25
Comments
85
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Agreed, totally depends on how much you watch. But shopping used DVDs and like I said banding together with friends to buy content eventually begins to work out better for you.

    I’m not someone who consumes tv and movie content en masse so it works out for me to do this and for a lot of people who watch a season or two of a show a month, it’s not that much more expensive to own.

    What I meant about the capitalism concept is that the core idea isn’t about enjoyment or getting to watch what you want. It’s not about convenience anymore. This is a capitalistic cycle where it stops innovating and starts to poison it’s consumer.

    So shows will now be splintered across services, shows will get cancelled for being less profitable, and the overall quality will dip because we’re driving art to the bottom price. Whatever makes shareholders more money. And is this true? I feel like it is. Quality of shows has dipped quite a bit to fit the streaming service pricing.

    We can argue about whether people want that or not, but it’s basically just what’s been done with every other consumer item. Dominate the market, lose money, get the subscribers, and then make their experience shittier over time.

  • Oh let’s be real here, this is what capitalism does. It chooses the worst possible option for entertainment because it’s what makes the most money. What makes the most money is not making you happy, but getting you to stay subscribed.

    Let me tell you the real secret. You know what it costs to rent a movie online? And stream it? And then never watch it again? Yeah now justify that against streaming services.

    I’ll tell you right now, go get Plex. If you don’t already use a media server, start. Because chances are that you don’t actually watch 90% of what’s on those services. So that $15 a month for content you don’t own could easily be $20 a month on content that you do actually own. Not to mention there’s no ads involved and you can stream as many devices as you want from anywhere. Get friends to pitch in and it’s even better.

    The ONLY argument for this is convenience of all the shows at your fingertips. Except now that’s not the case and they’re on different services, screw it, either pirate the media or buy it used on disc.

  • I don’t think that we need to continue to “think” it’s bad for the games industry. It IS bad for the industry. Period. Very famously, obsidian got less money and lost out on a bonus from the initial release of fallout NV because it didn’t hit 80 on metacritic. We need to stop pretending these scores are objective or reflect anything about user enjoyment of a game. Users maybe, but the critic score is worse than useless. It’s downright misinformation to aggregate critic scores.

    Like the entire point of critics is to provide different perspectives on a game. Why would I want their average? The average of their opinion is not the average gamer opinion and it also isn’t the average of the individual readers opinion.

    I need no further proof than go look up the last 5 games you played on metacritic and try to guess the critic and user score and get within 5 points each time.

  • This will be great considering there is currently little information on which games benefit from the PS5s support for enhanced haptics and triggers.

  • Take a read of this summary (by IGN) of their Madden 22 review:

    “ Madden NFL 22 is a grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution. Face of the Franchise, to put it mildly, is a mess. Homefield advantage is a solid addition, but it doesn’t quite capture the true extent of real on-field momentum swings. The new interface is an eyesore, and the new presentation is cast in a strange and unflattering shade of sickly green. It’s smoother and marginally more refined, but in so many ways it’s the same old Madden. In short, if you’re hoping for a massive leap forward for the series on the new generation of consoles (or on the old ones), you’re apt to be disappointed”

    Now, I want you to read that and ask what you’d rate it based on this info (or the whole review).

    IGN has a scale approximately this: 10. Masterpiece 9. Excellent 8. Great 7. Good 6. Okay 5. Mediocre

    I don’t think I need to tell you that the user reviews for this game don’t even reach mediocre. Not to mention the gambling inclusion that IGN doesn’t take seriously in any sports game it reviews. But IGN still called Madden 22 a 6 or an “okay” game.

    I’m not saying they’re lying necessarily but the result is the same. The honest critiques are ignored to keep receiving review codes. That score should be left out entirely but they refuse because it drives clicks. It’s a joke.

  • Ratings. Are. Stupid.

    When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.

    Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.

    This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.

    Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.

  • I’m not a game dev, but from my modding experience it depends on the game.

    MOST of the games that have these insane file sizes actually do it to cut down on processing and on load time and reduce pop-in. If a texture or level doesn’t need any decompression, it loads faster. So entirely depends on the asset. So a lot of games do still compress textures. That’s why there’s a discrepancy between the data downloaded in steam and the actual runtime storage requirement.

    The 3D models themselves are usually lower space. As is dialog and audio. Though all of those will be mildly compressed probably.

  • Does the patch size even mean anything anymore? It seems like they just ship out anything that can’t be recompiled on the users end

  • This is a position that is held because you believe other people would find your definitions of harm and better as reasonable.

    Consider if you were in the minority here. You’re doing something and wearing something that you don’t view as harmful. And then someone else insists that it is harmful only to you and decides to stop you from doing said thing.

    I don’t know how you’d consider that okay for the state to force you not to wear clothes because its “harmful”. Or for the state to force you to do the thing that others view is better for you to do. People should be free to disagree with the state and take personal actions that the state disagrees with. Full stop.

  • It’s a good thing. Is it a good or bad thing that this child would be forced not to smoke?

  • It does not matter if a vice is chosen or unchosen. Smoking is a great example. You may not choose a tobacco addiction.

    Situation A: you have the freedom to choose to quit or not. Quitting results in more freedom. Not quitting results in less. The total freedoms available to you at any time are the freedom TO quit and the freedom OF quitting

    Situation B: You have no freedom to choose to quit. Your total freedoms are: freedom from quitting.

    So your freedoms have decreased in situation B. We have to ask if personal freedoms are preferable to better outcomes.

    The difference is that freedom is independent of opinion. You are either free to do so lawfully or not. But if I say “it would be better for you to not have that freedom”, I need to demonstrate what “better” means. And there everyone often disagrees.

  • Forcing someone to stop smoking is not giving them freedom

  • I think saying this largely denies the cultural implications of many religiously associated garments and symbols.

    Most religious symbols are not just that, they’re cultural ones. People adopt them, change them, redefine them. Drawing lines between religion and culture is very difficult so attempting to stop someone dressing some way is just a restriction of freedom, regardless of religion.

  • I really think this needs to be fixed by a system that allows for the user to decide on their own content federation.

    I think communities should be able to block users and communities from seeing and interacting with their content, but the problem is that currently defederation means that the home instance can block what you see of other instances.

    This can be fixed either by still allowing data to be sent out to severs but not in from them mostly. Or it can be fixed by making unified user accounts that can persist on multiple servers and therefore go around defederation.

    Why do this? Because I guarantee there are users here like myself who wouldn’t mind viewing content on other servers and so instead we’d be forced to make and use another account. The less accounts per person, the better imo. Because creating many account discourages community and harms vetting processes.

  • I was reserving judgement. Just giving reasons to be cautious going into this. Everyone should still be excited, I’m just saying “expect a Bethesda game” so look at their recent games and that’s what you’re getting into probably. With those expectations, you’re less likely to be disappointed

  • I’m just concerned and will wait for reviews before buying (like everyone should). Bethesda has a reputation for being slow to fix games and having lots of bugs and crashes at release. And even then, they patch them up to being playable and leave the rest for modders to fix.

    What makes you think they stick with their games? They fix bugs for about a year or so after release and move on, just like any other studio. They fix stuff in re-releases but you have to pay for that.

  • Yes but they had an incentive to stay with it. It’s actively profitable. Whereas with star field not so much

  • After fallout 76, I’m worried. After canceling Prey 2, I’m worried.

  • I want to be clear still, piracy isn’t a problem or wrong necessarily. I’m not pushing a corporate narrative by saying this, I’m more concerned about creators and other sites that use ads for revenue such as newspapers. So if you want to “pay” a site without money, don’t pirate their content. That’s all. That’s similar to what Linus has said.

    But I think this is somewhat similar to asking you for a ticket at the door for a movie. If the “ticket” is watching the ad and they’re asking you to buy the ticket (with premium) or get it from ads, bypassing the doorman would mean it’s piracy. Doesn’t even matter if the doorman doesn’t try to stop you. Doesn’t matter if they don’t pull you out of the movie.

    You being the product is irrelevant to the piracy thing. But it is relevant to the moral thing

  • Purchasing and pirating don’t have contractural agreements. You don’t have to have a ToS to pirate something.

    If DuckDuckGo does block the ad in their browser, they’ve done the work for you. And if they do not but instead Google decides to serve it to you without ads in a browser, it’s not piracy to not have ads.

    As long as the intended revenue of the content you’re viewing is being blocked, you’re pretty much pirating it. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it’s just a definitional thing.