If they don’t spend enough money to differentiate themselves then they risk being drowned in a sea of indie games.

Every year the number and quality of indie games increases. The ferocity of competition makes it extremely hard to get anyone to play your game, let alone survive as a developer. This raises the bar on quality to a ridiculous degree.

Take any AAA game from the 1990s. Today that’s a single person project which can’t even compete with the most basic of indie games out there. To actually make money and support yourself as an indie developer is ridiculously hard!

Or if you’re like me and don’t care about the latest big studio games. I play games by development teams with less than 10 people, tending towards just one person. I have no desire to play any of Nintendo’s newest games.

Good take. That’s the only way I can get any wholesomeness out of the comic. Otherwise it just feels awkward and bad!

It’s also Minnesota Nice for yes!

I never use AI. Can’t stand it. Wish it would go away!

I also think it’s completely stupid and overhyped. I took a course in 4th year on building and training neural networks with PyTorch. I know how it all works at an intimate level. It’s not going to lead to a singularity any time soon (as so many people think).

I think there’s a lot of explanations for the decrease in value of the ads:

• ad market saturation
• user ad fatigue
• rampant ad blocking
• less engagement overall

I’ve heard YouTube video ads pay a lot less to the creator than they used to. A lot of creators are struggling and feel pressured to release a lot more videos and more consistently. But this can all be measured by view counts where the numbers drop off as engagement disappears.

One of the worst things a YouTube creator can do is completely change the type of videos they make. This often gets people to stop clicking videos and YouTube’s algorithm takes this as a sign to stop recommending that creator, causing their views to drop off a cliff.

I wonder if there’s a similar issue with the ads on game review sites today. I have seen some YouTube video reviews that include a sponsored segment for a game I’d never in a million years consider playing (which has no relevance to the video at hand). Maybe if people are reading reviews the ads aren’t relevant to the games they’re playing so they never bother with them?

Video game reviewers used to provide a valuable service. Back when all video games were Nintendo expensive, we needed trustworthy reviewers to guide us towards making the correct purchase. Paying the inflation-equivalent of $100+ for a single video game made a single bad purchase really hurt.

Nowadays, people log on Steam and scroll through hundreds of previously purchased (never played) games they picked up for a few dollars each during a Steam holiday sale 3 years ago. They can just click download and start playing anything that tickles their fancy!

Plus I’d also add that many gamers have found games that have enormous replay value (especially multiplayer games like League of Legends or Hearthstone or Fortnite) and they sink thousands upon thousands of hours into that one game.

What room is there for professional game reviewers reviewing new games every week and writing about them? Most gamers seem to have more games than they could ever want, plus single games that could last a lifetime by themselves.

The same could really be said for music reviews. People used to read magazines like Rolling Stone in order to get reviews of the latest songs from the hottest bands. Nowadays people just listen to the music themselves and decide whether or not they like it, no reviewers needed.

Edit: I forgot to mention streamers and lets players. People can watch a lot of these videos by amateur or professional content creators and judge whether or not they like the game based on how it plays. Reading an article, even a very well-written one, pales in comparison to a gameplay video at the job of communicating how a game looks and sounds in motion.

James Dean. Credited in only 3 films (appeared in a few more as an extra):

• East of Eden
• Rebel Without a Cause
• Giant

All 3 are above average on IMDb (> 7).

Plan 9 from Outer Space!

Dubbed the worst film ever made. To be fair to Bela Lugosi, he had no choice in the matter as he appeared in the film posthumously.

Remove the need to exercise, like an anaconda. The ability to just lay around doing nothing and still be ripped to the max. That would be cool!

I’ve never been to NYC. In general I would say I’m not a fan of big cities. I guess I’m biased though.

I will say Toronto has some very nice areas where I wouldn’t mind living. They’re extremely expensive though!

I’ve been to Toronto many times and talked to loads of people who have either lived there or visited there many times. You’re the first person I’ve ever heard say that!

If you’re looking for an alternative to the USA’s big landscapes and natural parks then Canada is your best bet. If you’re looking for more cultural stuff and things to do in cities then Canada only has a few nice cities and they’re spread across the country from coast to coast.

Yeah. Today the means of production is your laptop!

There’s also short sellers who eventually have to buy the stock to fulfill their obligation. A stock in terminal decline can go through many rounds of short selling which creates these bounces.

Stocks never just plunge straight to zero. Stocks in decline can have many bounces on the way down.

If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!

I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.

I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.

Yes and men are better at recovering from injury. Testosterone causes both effects. It’s a tradeoff!

It’s Synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to refer to the whole.