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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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    • The alternative to current model of game launch + DLCs/features added over the year is that the game is not launched at all until ready and full featured.

    I haven’t seen significant numbers of people complaining that their drip feed of content isn’t coming fast enough. I’ve seen people complaining about spending a non-trivial amount of money on a visibly broken game that clearly had plenty of developer resources for microtransactions and loot boxes.

    Gamer audience is privileged, consumerist and impatient. And most of the audience is either autistic or neurodivergent with impulsive and/or compulsive disorders, and have unstable hyperfocus and obsession issues.

    Being a game developer had its moments but was still easily the worst job I’ve ever had, predominantly due to the community.

    That said, I still wouldn’t go diagnosing millions of people with some bullshit I just made up.




  • Steam got to where it is by good will, good prices and good features.

    Well, eventually.

    When Steam was first released, the running joke was “steaming pile of shit”. It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of “always online” games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.

    It’s not exactly unassailable now either. It’s my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.

    It’s ahead of the rest but I think “good will, good prices and good features” might be an overly romantic take on “it’s where all my games already are”.





  • Would it change anything besides their technique?

    They almost certainly already have vote manipulation tools for reddit that work via browser automation, because someone offered me money to build one 10 years ago.

    Those tools and a handful of accounts+vpns would already be borderline undetectable without the access needed to see that 25 accounts always voted the same way.

    At least on Lemmy, you have that access. Reddit not only makes zero effort to prevent it, they actively obfuscate the information needed to spot it.


  • Was she? Any posts about “why isn’t X banned too?” were buried under an avalanche of reactionary tantrums about losing their platform to discuss hitting children. For the overwhelming majority of users, it was “this goes too far”, not “this doesn’t go far enough”.

    Which means that realistically, she never got past the low hanging fruit. These were the days when a lot of these places still had plausible deniability so it was easy to pull in wider support.

    My baseless guess is that she came in as CEO and noticed they were handing over some very predictable post histories every time there was a mass shooting but couldn’t come out and say “check out all these domestic terrorists” because it would damage the brand.