paultimate14
@paultimate14@lemmy.world
- Comment on HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue 2 days ago:
It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.
That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.
- Comment on What are your gaming highlights of 2025? 2 days ago:
I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica
I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.
In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.
By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.
So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.
I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.
- Comment on 6 days ago:
AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.
However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.
Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 6 days ago:
AW2 is going to be a while. Not only because I’m a patientgamer, but because it was published by Epic and I have no interest in setting up an account and dealing with their launcher, plus jumping through all the hoops to be able to play it on my Steam Deck. I’ve already switched a couple of my household’s PCs to Linux, and I’ll probably do the rest eventually. Maybe I’ll pick up the PS5 version some day, but that severely limits the different ways I can play it. I might get FBC Firebreak if it ever goes on sale- I don’t play a whole lot of multiplayer games generally but I’m interested to see if they put any lore in there.
Disco Elysium is great, but at times the “gameplay” so basically just reading a polysci textbook. It’s a very heavy game that deals with a lot of heavy topics. Often I’m tired of processing all of the terrible things happening in the world and look to videogames as an escape, and Disco Elysium is up there as one of the worst games for that lol. Even just seeing the ZA/UM logo starts to get me going from thinking about what happened to the studio and the main creators of the game.
There’s also a lot of friction that just comes from it being a text-heavy game. I had my retina surgically re-attached in one eye a few years ago- it was largely successful compared to going blind in that eye, but that eye is not as good at focusing at screens further away. Action games like Alan Wake and Hellblade are fine on my living room TV, but for Disco Elysium I mostly need to use my Deck or some other screen that can be closer to my face.
Another factor is sobriety. I feel like this doesn’t get talked about in gaming communities a lot- a lot of gamers are children, or adults who are sober for a variety of reasons. I’m adult who does not have any of those reasons, and even a medical marijuana card for my arthritis. I have a full-time job, a house to maintain, and several relationships to maintain. So on the rare occasion that I have an evening to myself to enjoy, I often want to get high (responsibly) and play some videogames. It’s kind of a difficulty customization too: often the difficulty settings in-games are just boring number changes that make enemies bullet sponges. So I’m more entertained by playing on Easy and getting high than playing on Hard sober. Disco Elysium, for as much as it features drug-use in its world and gameplay, is nearly impossible for me to play while high. It’s not a huge deal, but it often means that other games are just more appealing when I’m planning any given evening.
- Comment on How does the private equity bubble compare to the AI bubble if at all? 1 week ago:
I would not call PE a “bubble”. It’s not something people are just tossing money into because there are nebulous promises and the numbers are going up. PE is involved in EVERYTHING - restaurants, housing, tech, manufacturing, finance, marketing. It’s not an industry, just a way of investing that bypasses pretty much all of the safeguards and regulations societies have put in place for public trading. And I don’t expect it to “pop”. Either it continues, and all of the wealth continues to be concentrated towards the top, or the populace manages to take enough power back to get legislation, regulation, and enforcement to add transparency and rules to private equity.
- Comment on There are first person shooters and third person shooters, but what about second person shooters? 1 week ago:
I don’t know if any whole games, but a lot of games have boss battles or segments that are in 2nd person. Where the perspective is from the target, and you can see the character you are controlling through their eyes.
Off the top of my head, this boss fight from Ratchet and Clank 3 comes to mind.
It’s hard to do this for extended periods for a few reasons. Part of why this is reduced to boss fights so that if you have sections with dozens of enemies, whose perspective do you take? What happens when that enemy dies, or if that enemy needs to suck under cover or go down a stairwell or look down at their weapon to reload?
Even for boss fights, it only works if the boss’s behavior is controlled pretty strictly, like in that Ratchet and Clank example.
You could kind of make an argument about sections where you view your character through some sort of diagetic device, like a security camera. Technically you could count Lakitu from several Mario games in that sense.
Talking about this is giving me ideas though, especially for stealth games. Something that lets you see through the enemy’s eyes and make sure that you do NOT appear in their line of site could be really neat. Maybe.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 1 week ago:
Just finished up the Alan Wake 1 DLC, and the American Nightmare spinoff game. I really loved Control and had decided to go back and play the Alan Wake games. The base Alan Wake game had some good ideas, but the controls and balancing were clunky and the combat was tedious. The DLC’s got better, using the dark/light mechanics in much more interesting ways. American Nightmare had controls that felt much better and a neat structure of more open, less linear levels. Still nowhere near as great as Control was imo.
So now I’m playing Disco Elysium. I had tried to start it a few times and bounced off- it’s great, but a TON of heavy text and political theory. I managed to make some headway a couple months ago when I was traveling with my Steam Deck. Figured now is as good for a time as any to try to beat it at least once. It is truly great, and I think needs to be in the conversations for best game of all time. But it also takes a lot of energy and a specific mood to play.
Another game I tried to go back to was Hellblade. I’m, idk, about a third of the way through I guess? First started over a year ago. I love the initial concept of the character’s psychosis manifesting in-game, but it seems like 90% of the gimmick was done in the opening sequence and the game got incredibly repetitive after that. It’s so slow it’s hard to play. My hands hurt after a bit because I find myself pushing on the joysticks harder, pushing on the “jog” button harder, trying to make Senua move. It’s really frustrating to have a puzzle mentally solved but needing to spend 5 minutes moving her slow ass around to execute the solution. It’s a good thing exploration is pretty useless because it also takes forever. The combat is also boring and repetitive: the enemies take way too many hits and there are way too many of them. Even just starting the game, sitting through all the stupid splash screens and the same trigger warning is tedious and dumb. I feel like I’ve put dozens of hours banging my head against this game, but when I look at steam I’ve only put in a little over 5. I think I might retire the game and just watch a lore video of it instead.
- Comment on Usually, silicone nippled showerheads aren't replaced or cleaned regularly. 2 weeks ago:
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This is one of the most shower-related shower thoughts of all time. Kudos!
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A lot of people clean their bathrooms regularly. CLR or generic knock-offs are great for mineral buildup on faucets, drains, handles, etc.
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My local water company regularly takes the main treatment system offline for maintenance and switches to the backup system. I don’t know all the details but every time they do it the water is heavily chlorinated for a week or so, and this happens roughly every 6 months. So until I can afford to get a full-home filtration system installed, I bought a shower filter that goes between the water pipe and shower head. It needs changed every 6 months so I might as well clean everything while I’m at it.
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- Comment on The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme 2 weeks ago:
Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.
The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.
- Comment on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today's infrastructure costs 2 weeks ago:
The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?
- Comment on The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme 2 weeks ago:
Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.
Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.
I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.
I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.
- Comment on To celebrate Oxford Word of The Year, Submit your worthy ones for rating in the comments 2 weeks ago:
It’s hard to generalize, but often it’s really just a few whales propping the whole thing up.
The linked article is referencing Candy Crush, not AAA games, but it’s hard to find published data on the matter. Different games and communities will be different, but I would hesitate to broadly blame consumers for this.
- Comment on Nature 2 weeks ago:
Somehow I don’t think Trent Reznor wrote “Closer” in an attempt to get laid lol.
- Comment on Jeff Bezos reportedly launches new AI startup with himself as CEO 4 weeks ago:
at a concert
There’s your problem. It doesn’t matter if you’re buying Dasani or Aquafina or Arizona Tea. Venues have captive audiences and jack up the prices because they can.
- Comment on Jeff Bezos reportedly launches new AI startup with himself as CEO 4 weeks ago:
As of June 2025, Mike Cessario’s estimated net worth is around $80–100 million.
The CEO is wealthy, sure, but very far away from being a billionaire.
I’ve occasionally bought liquid death at my local beer distributor for parties, and it’s a bit expensive but not crazy. Pretty much every drink at a festival is incredibly overpriced - that markup is usually going to the vendors selling it and the venue, not the manufacturer.
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 4 weeks ago:
In order to be incorporated, a company has to have stock. Private companies still have shares even if they aren’t traded on public exchanges.
It’s possible that Gabe owns 100% of Valve’s stock, but it’s also possible that he’s sold some to other people or entities. Originally when Valve was founded, it was a split between Gabe and Mike Harrington, but Harrington reportedly sold his shares to Gabe when he left.
It’s also very likely that Gabe owns shares in other corporations, even just as personal retirement investments. But that’s not what I was talking about.
- Comment on Scandal 4 weeks ago:
This is exactly why I’m wondering if “Bubba” could be referring to someone else. Maybe not a celebrity.
Heck, could be a giant novelty dildo. Or a dog.
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 5 weeks ago:
“Billionaire” is a convenient modern buzzword. It used to be “millionaire”. The classic joke from Austin Powers where Dr. Evil demands money is a good example. It’s just inflation.
Plus, a lot of “billionaires” are only considers such because they own shares in their corporations. It’s a “theoretically if they could find a way to sell all of those shares at the current price without tanking the market value of those shares in the process, they could get $X billion from that”.
If there were a theoretical global revolution, on of the the first steps of eating the rich is to seize and nationalize those businesses. Later, land reform will seize the extra mansions they own. They will still be left with adequate personal property to live quite comfortably. Finally, the justice system will need to evaluate what labor laws (or other laws) they may have been violating for years and using their wealth to get away with.
Start with the biggest fish and watch as the rest start to downsize voluntarily and cut deals to avoid jail.
I don’t expect to see any of this in my lifetime. Not in any major country, and certainly not globally.
- Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No? 5 weeks ago:
None of that was invented by Valve. “Normalize” is subjective but I would argue they didn’t do any of that either.
Launchers existed for a long, long time before Steam- part of what made Steam so successful was having a centralized launcher for games from a lot of different companies together. Before then there was usually a separate launcher for each game.
Online DRM has existed for as long as the Internet was ubiquitous enough to get away with it. Offline DRM existed before that. Even back in the 80’s games would ship with all sorts of anti-piracy mechanisms. The only 2 Valve games that ever had DRM were Artifact and DOTA 2, both of which were online multiplayer-only games, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Maple Story is pretty widely considered to be the first game with micro transactions, and they were in the form of loot boxes. By the time Team Fortress came out the concept was already popularized in MMO’s, Facebook games like Farmville, and FIFA.
Achievements aren’t something I really care about, but game had those concepts for years. I remember playing Spyro 2 as a kid and tracking down all the skill points. Sure it doesn’t use the word “achievement” but even today Sony uses the word “Trophy” to mean the same thing.
Corporations aren’t your friend of course, it’s just weird that people think Valve invented these things. And Valve’s implementations are some of the most benign and consumer-friendly cases in the industry.
The launcher i consider a positive - it’s a great way to organize my library, including non-steam games. There’s tons of free features I use all the time, like Remote Play, free Cloud Saves, friend management. It’s great for managing inputs from all sorts of different controllers, managing systems with multiple displays, allowing me to control everything with a controller without having to set it down to use my mouse and keyboard. They have great mod support for the games that use it. There’s tons more features I don’t use. It’s not just a launcher like EA Play or UPlay- it’s a full platform. It’s so useful that I even added GOG Galaxy as a non-steam game.
Any business needs to balance the needs of its stakeholders. Owners, partners, creditors, consumers, employees, governments, etc. Valve is one of the fairest companies left alive in 2025 at balancing all of these entities, and yet in every online discussion about them someone always feels the need to pipe in and be like “well aktually they are secretly very bad!”, just because they don’t have the power to stop other companies from being shitty. They don’t have the bargaining power to tell Sega to get rid of Denuvo on a games from prior generations selling for $20. They don’t have the bargaining power to Ubisoft or Larian to drop their annoying launchers. They don’t have the power to tell other publishers and devs to stop adding pay-to-win mechanics. They don’t have the power to stand up to payment processors that are demanding certain content be removed from the store.
Valve DOES have the power to promote Linux as a legitimately viable operating system for gamers, behind Linux enthusiasts. They have the power to get Microsoft to drop their ridiculous store. They have the power to get Ubisoft to at least add their games to Steam, even if you need a dumb launcher still. They have the power to clearly and consistently label games with DRM in their store so consumers can make informed decisions without spending hours digging through the legalize or EULA’s or doing research on enthusiast forums.
It’s fair to question whether Valve’s 30% cut is justified for every publisher, though we also know that some publishers have been able to make separate deals at times. I’m sure you can find other things that are fair to question. It’s really weird to accuse people of “kissing Gabe’s ass” just for recognizing that Steam is the best platform for a consumer to use right now.
- Comment on Steam Hardware Announcement 5 weeks ago:
I think the main hangup is going to be: how easy and simple is this thing for the average person?
The Steam Deck is, any way you slice it, a better value than the Switch or Switch 2. The Steam Deck has sold roughly 6 million units in 3 years. The Nintendo Switch 2 has sold close to 11 million units in about 5 months.
I hope you’re right and that Valve really shakes up the whole industry, but I’m not going to start expecting that until I see it.
- Comment on Rush 5 weeks ago:
I started typing up my own personal observations about Rush lyrics changing over time, but then I found this quote from Geddy Lee himself:
A few songs may have also been a little naive in their original intent. The nasty little tale called “The Trees,” of course — a comment on forced equality. Being a much more liberal-minded adult, I now have a softer approach to things in life and I’m much more open and willing. I put a lot more importance on social responsibility now than I ever did. I talk about that, of course, when I’m referring to free will. There were a few things we sang about in our early twenties that seemed very important. But as time has gone on, you ameliorate those views because life has told you it’s not so simple. Once you encounter problems and you begin to help your family or friends with some of those problems, you learn a lot about how much of life has lived in the gray areas as opposed to the black and white areas.
The Trees was, and still is, one of my favorite songs for the sake of the music. And I can see how the lyrics may have worked a lot better back during the cold war, just a couple of decades after genocide and famine wiped out millions in the USSR and China.
I grew up listening to both a greatest hits CD that has libertarian tracks like Freewill and The Trees and 2112, but also listening to Snakes and Arrows that had polar opposite messages in songs like Far Cry, the Way the Wind Blows, and The Larger Bowl. They got smarter and more aware of their own privilege as they grew older and saw more of the world.
- Comment on And now I'm reminded I have two of these to repair. 5 weeks ago:
Pro-tip: I invested in rechargeable batteries, including 9v’s. Every solstice I just go ahead and change out the batteries proactively. (Could use the equinoxes instead but I usually have a bunch of other chores winterizing or de-winterizing the house at those times).
It’s annoying and probably overkill, but it’s way better than dealing with those annoying low battery beeps that always seem to start happening at 3AM.
- Comment on Germany 1 month ago:
China kind of depends on who you ask and how you look at it. Some historians argue that if you remove a euro-centric bias, WW2 really started with the 2nd Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Or you could look further back to territorial disputes and skirmishes between Japan and China going back to 1931.
India was a British colony until 1947 and participated as part of the British Empire.
- Comment on Good Halloween Games 1 month ago:
Pumpkin Jack. It’s a 3D platformer. I haven’t played it in a couple years, but I remember it being mostly linear. Not a ton of collectables, but some. 11 months out of the year it’s a pretty “meh” game, but it absolutely NAILS the Halloween aesthetic. Not “horror” or “scary” or “autumn” but very specifically Halloween.
MediEvil is similar, though much older. I have only played the original for PS1, though there is a modern remake on all platforms that looks pretty good. Not quite as explicitly Halloween-y, but still pretty close. Flawed in its own ways, but I would still say a better game overall than Pumpkin Jack. The levels were a bit less linear and it was a bit more like an adventure game than a platformer.
Luigi’s Mansion is a classic too.
A lot of other games have levels or worlds that are good for Halloween even if the whole game isn’t. Like Pumpkin Hill in Sonic Adventure 2, or Subcon Forest from A Hat In Time. Honestly one day I want to compile a list of all of these themes areas across my favorite games and the play all of these levels seasonally.
- Comment on PC Master Race 1 month ago:
They’ve increased in other countries too. The PS5 digital edition costs £70 more today than it did at launch. In 2024 Sony increased the Japan price of all PS5 versions by ¥13,000.
The tariffs aren’t helping, but this has been a trend for years. The gaming console market is not very volatile- prices changes in the US usually happen once every few years, not every few months. The tariffs keep fluctuating all over the place and I would not be shocked if there are more pricing adjustments for consoles specifically next year.
- Comment on PC Master Race 1 month ago:
That’ll get you… The lowest storage tier Series S. Or a Nintendo Switch OLED. Yay.
- Comment on PC Master Race 1 month ago:
Nah it’s the GPU market. Cryptocurrency briefly exploded and now AI is sucking up all of the GPU manufacturing capacity. Back in 2019 I got my RX580 for $175. The AMD 9070 that released this year is a tier down from that and had an MSRP of $550, but an actual price more like $650. The sweet spot of value PC building has shifted from $750 to $1,500 in just a few years. Some of that is just general inflation that affects all parts, but roughly half of that increase is just from the GPU.
It’s impacting consoles too. Consoles uses to get cheaper over time, with both price drops to existing models and new, cheaper models being released (Sony’s Slim models, things like the Wii Family Edition and Wii Mini, the DSLite, etc). Looking at this generation… The original PS5 with a disc drive debuted at $500 in 2020. The “Slim” version also debuted at $500, and just got a price increase to $550. They released a PS5 Pro at $700, and just increased it to $750.
Nintendo is doing it too. The Switch was $300 for its entire life, and now that the Switch 2 is out consumers would typically expect a price cut to move the existing stock. Instead, Nintendo raised the price to $330. The OLED model went from $350 to $400, and the Lite went from $200 to $230.
And of course Microsoft is in on it too. It’s more complicated to write up since they have different storage variants of the Series S|X, but for example a Series S 512GB was $300 at launch (For some reason I remember seeing them for $250, but maybe that was a Black Friday sale or something). Now it’s $400!
- Comment on 1 month ago:
I hope that once my account turns 18 they will stop asking my for by DOB to look at mature content.
- Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC 1 month ago:
You have a much more optimistic memory of gaming review platforms than I do.
I remember getting several different magazines in the 90’s and they were always the same thing. Any “professional” journalist knows that their livelihood is based on selling games. Journalists have to strike a balance between their audience and publishers, which makes negative reviews incredibly rare.
It’s not just videogames. Music, movies, TV shows, books, comics, consumer products. Unkess you’re paying out the nose, reviews almost always have some sort of bias towards trying to sell things. I find the best opinions come from other sources: people I know personally, organic community discussions on the internet (though those are not immune to corporate influence), or when products are only mentioned in contexts where the author clearly will not benefit. For example, a journalist making a list of the top-10 games of all time putting Ocarina of Time on it is probably not incentives to do so… Unless Nintendo is trying to promote a re-release.
- Comment on Corcoran Group CEO says Gen Z’s housing market struggles mirror what boomers faced 30 years ago: ‘Stop buying Starbucks coffee,’ she advises 1 month ago:
Who is drinking Starbuccks in 2025? Just last month Starbucks closed 400 stores and laid off 900 employees in North America.
This will inevitably become “Gen Alpha is killing coffee shops”. Fewer Barista jobs are available. The small, local coffee shop that is a nice quiet place to hang out or meet up with friends closes.
The problem is ghouls like her scraping value off the top of everything and hoarding that wealth like a dragon. Removing it from the system so their own personal number goes up.