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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Which part of my comment was denigrating indie devs? Indie games are great. Android gaming is currently not.

    If I’m looking for a good non-mobile game, I don’t go looking in the mobile game store. I go looking on PSN or PC, where the focus is on the kind of game that wasn’t designed as a phone-first experience.

    The fact that Android has some good traditional games or ports of indie gems isn’t something inherent to Android. The overwhelming majority of those games were on PC or console first.



  • You’re comparing apples to oranges.

    The mobile gaming market is leagues larger than every other market combined. That doesn’t mean the games are even remotely comparable to console games.

    It’s an entirely different target audience. Mobile games are focused on quick sessions and design patterns designed to encourage spending money on microtransactions. Games made for the traditional gaming market are mostly designed for longer play sessions with more mechanically complex gameplay. I as well as many others prefer the latter.

    Nintendo’s store is full of shovelware, but at least you’ll find more traditional games than just ports of indie hits. Or, buy a Steam Deck and enjoy something better than both.





  • Steam will end up pushed out of the market

    This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.

    Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

    EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

    And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

    Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

    or they will also become Streaming Platforms

    Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

    I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.



  • std::string doesn’t have a template type for the allocator. You are stuck using the verbose basic_string type if you need a special allocator.

    But, of course, nobody sane would write that by hand every time. They would use a typedef, like how std::string is just a typedef for std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char>>. Regardless, the C++ standard library is insanely verbose when you start dropping down into template types and using features at an intermediate level. SFINAE in older versions of C++ was mindfuck on the best of days, for example.

    Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying Rust is much better. Its saving grace is its type inference in let expressions. Without it, chaining functional operations on iterators would be an unfathomable hellscape of Collect<Skip<Map<vec::Iter<Item = &'a str>>>>




  • Rust is verbose, but C++ might still take the cake with its standard library templates. Especially when using fully-qualified type names…

    auto a = ::std::make_shared<::std::basic_string<char, ::std::char_traits<char>, MyAllocator<char>>>();

    A reference-counted shared pointer to a string of unspecified character encoding and using a non-default memory allocator.




  • Ok, now suppose you want to release a game for any of the modern Nintendo consoles.

    You need to get a devkit. To get it, you need Nintendo to approve your request, and you need to pay them for a license to use the devkit hardware. And, to actually use the devkit, you need a PC running Windows.

    Sure, to develop a game for PC, you need a PC. But do you know what you don’t need on top of that? A devkit and a Windows license.

    Edit: Two downvotes in two minutes? Oh my, the sockpuppets are angry today.


  • The magic cable typically goes into ISP-owned hardware sitting in a box somewhere down the street. From there, it’s either converted into fiber optic signals or repeated until it reaches an ISP-owned building where the data can be exchanged with the wider internet.

    How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable?

    It uses multiple channels (frequency ranges) in parallel, bonding (combining) them to increase throughput.

    A surprising amount of bandwidth can be achieved this way. DOCSIS 4.0 can do 10 gigabits per second in download and 6 gigabits per second in upload.



  • Might be. It is definitely a thing, though.

    When I used to work for a large American corporation that sold products to consumers, they took it extremely seriously and breaking it would result in disciplinary action. It probably had something to do with advertisement laws, but it also easily could have just been because it makes the company look very bad.

    one place even asked people to write fake reviews on Trustpilot/job sites

    That sounds unethical, to say the least. Did they verify if you actually did it, or just “suggest” you do?