comic_zalgo_sans

@comic_zalgo_sans@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  People are always looking for get rich quick schemes, especially when interest rates were minimal. NFTs was another application of the tech behind cryptocurrency, which was relatively straightforward “buy GPUs and electricity, get money” for a while. It helped that it was useful for speculation, crime, taking advantage of people who wanted easy money, mixed in with the reputation art has for moving money around.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sony expects a delay in smartphone market recovery till 2024⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Even if you are into the premium end of the market, I think the reality is that smartphones is a mature market now. They’ve been around since 2007, and even before that it wasn’t like every model was a nokia 3310, so we’re at the cumulation of 16+ years of iteration and for most people it’s well past the point of diminishing returns. So we see companies try new angles like foldables to keep the upgrade cycle going. Their main consideration is whether they can produce something to sell, and if they can do something their competitors can’t so the smartphone doesn’t become a generic thing entirely.

  Improving the camera has been a bigger draw for a lot of people so they have a high quality point and shoot constantly with them, or memory/storage, or screen size/resolution, or CPU, or battery life, and I’d assume that’s also getting to the point of diminishing returns.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In 2023, console video game players will spend $21B on in-game items and subscriptions, as "live service games" make the market more akin to mobile⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re saying that like people haven’t been voting with their wallets all along. Huge amounts of companies aren’t going to design huge amounts of games around this style of payment if it didn’t work.

  Besides, not spending on a thing isn’t a “no/negative vote”, it’s just not counted because there is no “no/negative vote”, they do count “yes votes” those that are spending on something. You can’t outvote them as that’s not how it’s measured.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Madden should not be 70$⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Go take a look at www.cgwmuseum.org - Computer Gaming World scans from when they started in 1981 and the primordial soup of the games industry was still trying to figure things out. There’s a variety of prices in the mail order listings, but within a few years there’s a bunch of titles that go for around the $50 level.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft’s Xbox Series S Parity Demands Are Now Handing Sony Free Wins⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not just graphics, if anything BG3 is light on graphics horsepower needed, and from a quick scan around is a bit heavy on RAM.

  From previous developer comments part of the issue seems to be the world simulation plus split screen. If you split your party the whole current map has to be running/simulated all the time, you can’t freeze/unload different areas as you walk away, and that includes keeping track of objects for physics - ever notice how bethesda games don’t have many physics objects outside? Think along similar lines to a dedicated server that runs without graphics - just all the world, characters and object meshes, or a large world MMO that has to keep track of what players are doing at different ends of a continent.

  Adding graphics back into it, when the party splits up they’re probably looking at different things increasing the breadth of content that has to be loaded. They might be able to cut down textures, but it could mean being more brutal with cuts than Larian wants because they don’t want their game to look like shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do developers keep adding virtual cursors to console games?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I think another aspect to this is that a lot of games aren’t “one and done” release it and move on any more. Big titles can get supported, changed and added to for years, and if you’re doing multiple UIs for each mode of input that means more work each time.

  Plus if you allow players to swap what they use in the middle of a game, going from mouse+keys to/from joypad (on PC, but can also be done on console) then you’ve got to handle that in the UI, mirroring the same state in both of them as you switch without error/jank, and that’s a lot easier the more they have in common. If someone nudges the mouse and the UI refreshes back to the base menu, resets all they did or they lose their place, people will moan too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨FTC withdraws its in-house challenge to Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  To me Kotick seems like a scapegoat/hate figure, he’ll (probably) go because he’s already made his billions and this is a nice off-ramp. As much as some gamers will try to frame this as a win, he’s not losing, lots of people would love to ‘lose’ like Kotick has. Whenever he leaves (if he does), he’ll sail off into the sunset or with his track record of results find some other organization that’d love to have him running the show.

  It’s also not like he’s been single-handedly running Activision for 30+ years, there will be tiers of leadership running the show and the structure of the organization. After having paid tens of billions to buy it, MS aren’t going to tear down the well oiled and profitable machine, especially if they have their “hands-off” approach, and it’s not as though MS themselves are saints when it comes to how they handle staff. If anything MS would want to retain leadership for a while through any transition to make sure things keep running well, and if they do get ejected/leave the games industry has a reputation for good leadership elsewhere that MS can head-hunt to replace them.

  There’s a lot of people that really want to paint this as some great drama where ‘good’ will win out, I think they need to temper their expectations, a lot.