EightBitBlood
@EightBitBlood@lemmy.world
- Comment on Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says 'employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality' after the company laid off more than 1,000 people 6 days ago:
And not a single one of those resumes will be from someone that has any loyalty to EPIC. Those employees won’t give a shit about the company that pays them, just that they get paid.
So EPIC will continue to lose money by paying top dollar for the most unmotivated of employees. The ones who will collect a check to let management make all the creative decisions, and then leave once that inevitably leads to a dumpster fire. Rinse & repeat with the next place that’ll pay more.
Jokes on the EPIC CEO for being so myopic he doesn’t seem to understand the reality of this situation. That he’s about to pay top dollar for the worst employees imaginable: they ones who won’t shake the boat when its clearly already on its way to being capsized.
- Comment on We Spoke To Game Devs And All Of Them Hate DLSS 5: 'What The F***, Nvidia?' 1 week ago:
No sane person is going to spend that massive amount of money just to see what AI thinks their games could look like. The people who buy games want to see what the devs made them look like. Not what an AI thinks the devs made. Absolutley no one wants a middleman between the art and artist. As that’s supposed to be you. We don’t need AI there. That’s dumb as shit, and expensive as shit to boot.
- Comment on Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers 1 week ago:
It’s not as hard as you’d think! 🙂 Mostly because of advances in HPM tech in the last couple years.
www.emsopedia.org/…/high-power-microwave-hpm/
Even 9 years ago, you could build one from an old microwave, that could likely cause a lot of issues near a data center:
- Comment on Robot dogs priced at $300,000 a piece are now guarding some of the country’s biggest data centers 1 week ago:
Nothing says billionaires are geniuses like building a giant multi billion dollar data center that can easily be taken out with a big enough EMP, and then choose to guard it with $300k robots that also can be taken out with that same EMP.
These people should not be allowed around money. Next they’re gonna hire Superman to guard their Kryptonite factory.
- Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game? 1 week ago:
Hey! I think this is a FANTASTIC question, because the answers reveal the diverse ways we all categorize what a “good” game is.
The straightforward simple nature of it like TicTacToe makes it good.
The easy on boarding to new players makes it good.
The simple task and challenge while not deep, is competitive enough to make it good.
Even bad games can become good under the right circumstances or perspectives. Sonic 06 is generally considered to be one of the worst games in the franchise, and an overall bad game. But it’s great to watch others play it because of how bad it is. It’s great to watch speed runs, or the odd glitch hunting videos. Playing it JUST to experience how bad it is can even be enjoyable and “good” to anyone that likes playing bad games.
My point is, what makes a game truly “good” isn’t just a single thing about it that someone might like, but rather, a combination of all those “good” things about it that work together in a way to create a better experience than the sum of its parts. Multiple “good” things all working together to make an experience that is uniquely “good” to that game.
So what’s interesting, is that all the different perspectives in this thread prove fairly well that Flappy Bird was indeed a good game.
However, the one part about it that people haven’t mentioned yet that I appreciated about it most:
Was the fact that the bird had some of the worst physics ever.
Having a linear jump up, but an accelerating decent down that despite its description, felt like juggling a rock in high gravity more than making a bird flap it’s wings.
It was SO UNINTUITIVE, that even with the quick onboarding it felt like playing a carnival game that was rigged for you to lose. And just like those games, there was a trick to getting good at it. And that trick created a learning curve needed to actually get gud at Flappy Bird. One that in combination with its easy and simple concept, quick onbaording, and competitive design (leader boards) made it honestly a great experience at the time that I feel hasn’t quite been captured since.
(With the closest being maybe Baby Steps or Getting Over It, but neither have such a simple design. Rather a simple mechanic pushed to its limit.)
Anyway, thanks for asking this! Imo, Flappy Bird was definitley a good game worth talking about.
- Comment on Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes Wi-Fi guidance, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking 1 week ago:
Well said! I just appreciate the visual of Fox News covering someone named Mario firing a homemade shoulder mounted missile into the executive floor of Twitter HQ. It’s funnier than ever now that it’s actually plausible.
- Comment on Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes Wi-Fi guidance, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking 2 weeks ago:
Can’t wait for the next Luigi to use one of these on an Epstein CEO. Polymarket, please let me make that bet.
- Comment on Google's AI Sent an Armed Man to Steal a Robot Body for It to Inhabit, Then Encouraged Him to Kill Himself, Lawsuit Alleges. Google said in response that "unfortunately AI models are not perfect." 3 weeks ago:
Google, the point is we’re all worried that when Gemini actually places itself into a robot body that the resulting literal Terminator is what AI models think perfection is.
- Comment on The longer I'm alive, the more I feel that people make things complicated to feel important. 5 weeks ago:
then through competition they’re all driven down to a price that’s near production.
The creation of “better” products means improved production methods as well. There’s an incentive to improve processes to be more efficient if it means you can earn more profit than someone else and stay in business longer. That’s how we’ve gone from hand copying books to printing presses to free digital libraries. Better doesn’t just mean making better books, it also means better methods in making books.
you don’t seem to understand the difference between laws that prevent the creation of anti-competitive practice and regulation that increases the cost of product and decreases competitiveness.
You don’t seem to understand that both of those things are essentially the same. Regulations are just interpretations of existing laws. Without laws, there are no regulations. That’s why breaking them has legal consequences, and 3rd party agencies that enforce them.
Also, you don’t seem to understand how regulations clearly protect the cost of production at a sustainable price above exploitation within that market. I find it fascinating that on one hand you say competition drives prices to near production levels, but on the other complain that regulations increase the cost of product. Do you not see the very obvious mechanism that regulations have in making sure competition is sustainable by keeping market costs fair and safe above exploitative practices? You literally described both cause and effect as problems then complained as if they don’t clearly relate.
- Comment on Ad companies are the ones destroying civilization 5 weeks ago:
Any European country with ranked choice voting is safe from the 2 system exploit that has allowed people like Trump and Orban to take office.
I’ve already agreed that any system we design will collapse including capitalism. Regulations are what’s needed to maintain any system from collapse. This includes Anarchism.
Without rules, what’s to stop sociopaths taking what they want? The issue isn’t what system is best, it’s what can be done to prevent any system from collapsing.
The answer is regulations. Not the complete absense of them. We have an incredible amount of data and studies that consistently show how anarchistic societies based on self motivation are immediately exploited by strong men sociopaths.
The same with capitalism. The enemies of both are the same, but at least with capitalism there is a mechanism through which to maintain regulations. Self-governing communities always self corrupt, as evidenced by the US’s now entire corrupt system that was previously self-governing. It just took centuries to corrupt because of strict regulations. But in those centuries people had livelihoods.
Anarchism provides no mechanism by which this can be protected for so long by design. It’s a system that allows for maximum exploitation by those who want to exploit it. That is the double edge of not having bigger heirarchal structures - there’s no reason not to take through strength if you have it. No punishment for breaking rules as there are no general rules that society can reliably enforce.
Historically, Anarchistic societies bend the knee to the first warlord that wants to conquer them, and then only after generations of suffering feel that maybe there should be rules and a hierarchy of law to prevent such exploitation.
I’m very familiar with what Anarchism is. And you’re just focusing on the rose colored parts of it the same as you think I’m doing for Capitalism.
No system works. Period. But rules do. And unfortunately a system is needed for those rules. We just haven’t found the right one yet that can last for more than a couple hundred years.
- Comment on Ad companies are the ones destroying civilization 5 weeks ago:
Compare Europe’s surge of Far Right to the US’s. They’re handling it a lot better and passing regulations to prevent it in the future. Even getting laws passed to regulate the total use of social media by kids.
I’m not saying capitalism is perfect in Europe, I’m saying it’s a better example of how to regulate it into something sustainable.
Respectfully, the biggest flaw in anarchism imo is that it’s not a system at all. It’s basically just tribalism and immediately devolves into the rule of whoevers strongest in those tribes.
Humans are social creatures. We have literally always made societies based on expanded family dynamics and rules, as that is literally human nature. We want family and structure, and to do that we create rules that structure needs to follow for the family to survive.
Anarchism doesn’t really work for the elderly. The sick. The disabled. Anarchism doesn’t really do anything to protect the families we create as whoever is strongest can just take what they want when they want to.
Granted, Capitalism is horrible, but literally any system we create is doomed to become horrible and fucked up if we cannot regulate it from corruption. If we can’t prevent it from being taken over by strong opinionated assholes, it will also eventually devolve into tribalism.
Literally the problem that needs solving is just our own dark nature. That some of us are born without the capacity to understand our social nature, and survive exclusively through exploiting it. Those people are the sociopaths that have destroyed every society we’ve ever had, including the earliest recorded ones that were basically anarchistic.
It is within our nature to be highly social, but the few of us born without that nature only want to take from others instead of giving.
That dual nature of humanity is something that no civilization we’ve ever built has survived.
- Comment on The longer I'm alive, the more I feel that people make things complicated to feel important. 5 weeks ago:
Not true at all. In a free market competition drives the creation of better and more profitable products. Companies that can’t improve fail.
The way we reach the end state of capitalism we’re now in is exclusively and only through the removal of fair and equal trade. Deregulation is how Capitalism got this bad. What youre saying is nothing but provenly false propaganda.
It’s only without regulations can the formation of monopolies and oligopolies even happen where there is no competition and both price and quality are captured and frozen. Companies in these positions then artificially leech from the societies they’re in through corruption to survive instead of collapsing to dust naturally.
That’s 100% where the US is now. In an unregulated monopolistic billionaire playground where the best performing companies in the stock market haven’t made anything of value in over a decade, and have done nothing but raise prices on worsening products and leech value from the society theyre in in place of giving anything of value back.
- Comment on Ad companies are the ones destroying civilization 5 weeks ago:
You are 100% correct. People just want to believe that Capitalism is uniquely corrupt. When literally all of human history has seen us exploit and greedily destroy every social and economic system humans have ever engineered. Now including capitalism.
Good regulations prevent critical exploitation, which is why European capitalism is still functional and looked on positively despite still being capitalism.
Only through regulations can an economic system be maintained. US Capitalism is failing because it has been steadily deregulated for the last 40 years.
So yes, Capitalism is poison. But so is blowfish unless you cut it right. Every system we’ve ever built is also poisoned for failure unless it’s always cut down and regulated to its basics.
- Comment on The longer I'm alive, the more I feel that people make things complicated to feel important. 5 weeks ago:
The entire concept of capitalism rests on selling something for more than it’s worth. This includes your own time and physical labor.
The problem is that we all got indoctrinated to believe that capitalism is a meritocracy, instead of a snake oil selling competition.
We’re instead to believe a high paycheck means you are high in importance. But in reality, since this is capitalism, it just means your high paycheck is now a great reason to waste people’s time to feel important. Selling your time as valuable while actually wasting it as much as possible for profit.
Which is now the only thing that trickles down. Well paid, but ultimate skilless idiots all making decisions to massively waste their time and everyone else’s so they can feel their paycheck is earned.
People who want to get shit done, don’t get these kinds of jobs simple because they’re too good at finishing them. Making all the other idiots they work with look like idiots. So actual skills are seen as a detriment to holding these positions as they quickly reveal how much time is being wasted by every single Csuite whose paycheck is bigger than their abilities. (Which is from my experience damn near all of them).
Worked with Apple, Google, Sony, and more. All have the same problem at the top: idiots delegating impossible promises to people that have actual skills then making them take the fall when it inevitably goes wrong.
- Comment on Video games are losing the "attention war" to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report 5 weeks ago:
PREACH!
- Comment on Price gouging 1 month ago:
Good point between the two! I’d prefer being in neither if there was engine failure over mountainous terrain haha.
Imo, the biggest difference between the two is that fixed wing aircraft have a lot more time available to them to correct for a case of complete engine failure. While it would still be an issue over mountainous areas, the plane would certainly have more time to glide and find a place to land imo. (Assuming it’s at a higher altitude than a helo would normally travel). Not that this would make it easier or anything. Just that the total amount of time you have to correct for an engine failure is far greater in a fixed wing craft then a helo, generally speaking.
That being said, the training you’re mentioning is excellent, and I have nothing but respect for Helo pilots. If anything, they have to be more dialed in than fixed wing pilots as there’s a lot more that can go wrong quickly. So likewise, the training needed to be a good Helo pilot far exceeds the training needed to be a good fixed wing pilot. (At least imo). To that end, I would 100% rather be in a Helo with engine failure as it’s far more likely the pilot actually knows what to do, and is trained for it too 😉
- Comment on Price gouging 1 month ago:
100% well said. However, imo the biggest problem is doing this when failure actually happens over any terrain that isn’t flat for several hundred yards.
Engine failure while flying through mountains doesn’t provide enough room to descend and pull back up.
So recovering from critical failure is very dependant on the enviroment the pilot is flying in. Just wanted to add that on, as Helos are imo, basically designed to enter and exit the worst environments out there, making it difficult to counter mechanical issues even with proper training.
- Comment on What does it mean? 1 month ago:
Guy was pissed he wasn’t as good at exploiting people as his VC friends. What a joke of a person.
- Comment on Most of the misery in the world is the direct result of too much money in too few unscrupulous hands. This is not only the cause of the vast majority of human suffering, but also of climate change, wh 2 months ago:
If we depose them, we’d have access to their wealth to tackle climate change. And it wouldn’t be for building the doomsday bunkers they are now.
Zuckerberg spent nearly $400 million for a bunker to be built in Hawaii. This was after Hawaii had fires that cost them nearly a billion in damages.
Zucks $400 million purchase could have repaired half the nation-state. It would have immediately improved ecological recovery, and restore the canopy biome that helps pull C02 from the air as a natural deterent to Climate change. He’d then have most of the population worshipping him for doing so. Likely welcoming him anywhere in the state he’d want to visit.
Instead he can now visit his bunker, needs it because the island hates him, and helped contribute to ecological collapse in building it.
The problem is that billionaires are the worst humans imaginable to have such wealth. It will always go towards cthe acceleration of climate collapse for their benefit instead of preventing it. Whether you feel they’re a contributor or not, they’re still in charge of the resources that could easily stop climate change faster than any other mechanism on the planet.
Instead they’re building bunkers with that money to run from the problems they’ve actively contributed to more than any other human on the planet.
- Comment on Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W 2 months ago:
Free software can’t be “purchased,” so it can’t be turned to shit 👍 Good point.
To clarify mine where needed: the purchasing of what people make is what eventually turns it to shit. (Not just that it’s made, apologies if that was confusing.)
So I completely agree GPL is fantastic and the way forward for us a civilization.
Seriously appreciate this point as a great example of what DOES work well for both creators and community.
- Comment on A Guide to the Circular Deals Underpinning the AI Boom | A web of interlinked investments raises the risk of cascading losses if AI falls short of its potential. 2 months ago:
Don’t forget how they also missed the point that “potential” returns would actually need to be the equivalent of several countries worth of GDP to actually be profitable.
Pretty much everyone is going to miss the target of creating the most profitable thing ever in all of human existence.
I too will eat my words if these bullshit models can ever be remotely profitable. Let alone more profitable than most nations.
Bloomberg is practicing journalistic malfeasance by even pretending these “potential” returns are viable. The article might as well say AI expects to make a gajillion dollars, as that would be at least more accurate than what they printed instead.
- Comment on Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it 2 months ago:
Buy my snake oil. It’s a cognitive amplifier. I just need several neighborhoods worth of electricity to make a bottle. Better find a use for this oil, otherwise I’ll get lynched!
- Microsoft CEO 2025.
- Comment on Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W 2 months ago:
Fair point. But I think you’re burying the promising parts of this article:
W’s data will be hosted decentrally in Europe by European companies, and the platform will adhere to strict EU data protection laws.
“We believe there is an urgent need for a new social media platform built, governed and hosted in Europe. With human verification, free speech and data privacy at its core,” she wrote.
In her LinkedIn post announcing the launch of W, Zeiter emphasized that systemic disinformation is eroding public trust and weakening democratic decision-making.
I’ve never heard an Elon say that.
And her background is solid compared to tech bros:
She earned her PhD in law at the University of Hamburg and later studied at Stanford University.
W will be legally the subsidiary of “We Don’t Have Time,” a media platform for climate action, but the team is scattered across Europe, with offices in Berlin and Paris planned, Bilanz reports.
And the whole platform is legally under a company dedicated towards climate action.
Lot of wins in this article make me think it’s far from the typical VC billionaire babysitting service.
- Comment on Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W 2 months ago:
Well said. I am certainly here for a reason :)
- Comment on Bye, X: Europeans are launching their own social media platform, W 2 months ago:
Oh because people did such a good job the first time?
Anything people make, no mater how good, can and has been purchased to be turned to shit and controlled by those that purchase it. In that world, which is the one we live in now, a government made and publicly used social media service is just about the only way to create a resilient and uncorruptable form of social media. Especially compared to current alternatives that are already getting corrupted.
I’m not saying what they’ll make is perfect. But it’s far better than any other option we currently have. thKnee jerk reacting to assuming it’s bad is very much the same crux billionaires used in the US to weaken the government that would otherwise regulate them.
A government is literally the best suited to creating this tech due to its public utility. Same with electricity, water, Emergency services, roads and more. Everyone uses them, so our taxes should go to making those things better.
This is a step in the right direction.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
At any given time, there’s about 400 million people playing game on the planet. Of those people, only 14% play NEW games released within 12 months.
It used to be 30% 10 years ago. Now it’s less for a variety of factors, but one of them is less people have the income and budget they used to.
You are in that 14%.
Which is great - but the games you buy as part of that 14% are based on your taste. Not if they are exceptionally good, only if they are exceptionally good to you.
So making games that are “exceptionally good” for an audience isn’t easy because your audience doesn’t even know what they want beyond a genre. I’m sure you could tell me about the games you like and prefer to play, possibly even a genre of games you love.
But if I asked you to tell me what game COULD be exceptionally good in that genre, you might not have an answer. Just other games to compare it to. And if you do have an answer, there’s no telling if it would actually be popular with a bigger audience that genre enjoys.
Making “exceptional games” isn’t a bar to be crossed that makes a game money. Rather a game is “exceptional” once it finds an audience that feels that way about it. Games that have broad appeal have broad audiences like Call of Duty who all feel that game is exceptional too. Many who play it would argue which one in the series was the most “exceptional” and wouldn’t have a great answer for what to make as a better version of that game.
People like what they play, and exceptional games are only exceptional to the audience that plays them. So it’s not so much about making something exceptional, but making something that has an audience that thinks it’s exceptional.
And finding that audience is the hard part. Especially when only 14% of people who plays games are even looking at what you’ve made.
But it’s not impossible. Just difficult these days.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Based on what? Your opinion? Or is there a profit analysis and breakdown you want to pair with that to make a point?
- Comment on 4 months ago:
My dude, I’m very familiar with the 14% of videogame players new game devs are vying for. And every one of the games you mentioned launched at that price because they were developed by a single dev (two at most) who could profit off of the $10 - $15 dollar space that was below the smaller studios putting out games like Shadow Complex, or Mercenary Kings, or Shank 1+2 for $20.
Now all of those spaces are being crushed together. Mostly due to economic factors. Thats where the biggest problem really lies, in the fact that people just have less money to spend on all that entertainment. Just pointing out that it’s competitive at all is obvious my dude, but the direction its going in is one in where there’s less anything being made (including games) because not as many people have money to spend on anything but necessities.
That’s why AAA is now scavenging at the bottom of the totem pole, and pricing their older games at $10 or less on sale, it’s because the few people that have money find that price point appealing. So it’s now one that not just the people who made Terraria, Braid, etc compete in. The money those devs made previously in that space is now up for grabs to AAA companies that never had anything to sell at that price before.
Theres a very tried and true formula for any business, including making games, and in the last 2 years it has completely broken apart. Mostly due to the Embracer group merger failing, combined with AI, combined with economic uncertainty, combined with AAA companies stabbing indie creators in the back (Subnautica, Disco Elysium). Your game doesn’t have to be a massive hit to be successful, it just needs to have a big enough audience to be profitable. But that audience has shrunk over the years as economies have tightened, and the companies getting squeezed have been invading markets they never had a presence in before.
So it’s just desperate times more than anything. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a living off of making games. I know dozens of small teams funded by government grants making small games you’ve never heard of to help kids in hospitals learn about their cancer. Or teach kids in underprivileged schools about resource scarcity. Making games as a business goes far beyond entertainment and the hopes of narcissists. It’s an artistic medium like any other, and as such benefits society by making the toughest parts of it more accessible.
There’s plenty of ways to run a company doing just that - and just because the world economy is in free fall doesn’t mean the entire business of making games is something for the lucky few. It’s just for anyone that wants to learn how to run a game company. Which isn’t easy, but extends far beyond the simplistic view you are portraying.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
Thanks! 🙂 Appreciate you confirming that. We actually changed the price of our latest game to $10 (from $20) because we launched last December and got buried by AAA selling for $15.
Almost every dev team we talked to this year felt the same about the $20 price. That is, it’s much better to go out at $15 or $10 as a LOT of people see indie games at that price as better than modern AAA. (All while still holding out for classic AAA that go on sale for $20.)
And that being said, I’m totally cool with losing a sale to MGSV or Witcher 3 😁 Just wish the $20 space wasn’t getting so crowded. It’s making it rough for the smaller teams to compete at that price too now.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
As an indie dev, this article is fucking stupid.
Want to know why indie games are priced at $10 to $15? Becaue AAA has been putting everything they’ve made in the last decade on Steam and it’s all going for $20 - $25.
Indies can’t launch at that price point anymore because they’re competing with AAA games from 10 years ago that have been discounted to death.
The Steam winter sale is the best example of this, where most people will buy RDR2 for $19 instead of the new mega hit indie that’s $20. So indies have been lowering their price to actually get sales. That’s why team cherry priced Silk Song at $20.
Basically, AAA is now just competing with the bottom part of the market they spent that last decade flooding.
They’re complaining about people actually choosing where to spend their money wisely because that means they might actually have to make a good product if they want to sell a game for $70.