Having worked as a game designer, I humbly disagree with your instructor. No amount of brilliance or success makes it okay for someone to be ac douche

I mean, gaming exploded over the pandemic. Anyone who thought that was going to become some kind of norm was an idiot. Have we shrunk below pre-pandemic levels? Or is this just idiots who thought they could keep skimming free oil off the surface once the leak was fixed?

Also, I disagree with the idea that AAA games are performing poorly. Bad ideas in AAA games and chasing “easy money” in AAA is performing poorly. Helldivers 2 seems to be doing well, whereas Suicide Squad isn’t. Baldir’s Gate 3 killed it while Starfield kind of flopped. Final Fantasy 16 didn’t meet expectations, but we know Square Enix regularly sets expectations too high anyway.

Are people tired of the same Call of Duty games over and over? Are people full up on live service games and looter shooters? Yes and yes. But are people crazy excited for the new Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth? From the communities I’m in, very much yes. Did Alan Wake 2 release and sell faster than any other game from that studio? Pretty sure I saw that headline recently, yeah.

So when Diablo 4 dies on impact, was that the fault of the gaming landscape? Or was it because Blizzard execs pushed the team to maximize systems and balance they thought would bring in easy money but actually ended up alienating their core audience and reviewers?

I’ve seen this before when working in mobile. Execs want to chase the whales so badly that they don’t allow designers and devs to make the game actually fun to play. Doesn’t matter how “well” you monetize your shitty game if nobody wants to stick around to play it.

I have a 2Gbps internet connection, and at my desktop running Firefox, I can’t reliably stream anything fancier than 1080p60. In the next room on my TV with an AndroidTV box attached, 4K60 streams flawlessly.

I never see ads because I pay for Premium, yet they still fuck me over.

The clickbait headline has made me angry enough I don’t even care what feature they’re talking about. They can get in the bin.

Is there a community where a take like this would be considered and welcome? Asking because I would like to follow that community…

Weirdly, I read this as “Reddit doesn’t think it needs search engines,” and was confused about seeing everyone discussing Google specifically. That’s a bit stupid to try to block only the one search engine.

For some definitions of “play”, absolutely!

The Twitter experience for me is BETEER now if I’m not logged in. Someone links a tweet, I read it, and no longer get sidetracked by comments and responses. Just the linked tweet, and done. That’s what I always wanted, and now I get it just by not logging in? Sold!

I was VERY confused about Counter-Strike 2 having any kind of urban planning at all… and then I saw the screenshot better and worked it out. 😅

I imagine it takes a certain kind of narcissism to look at “leading an entire company” and think, “yeah, I bet I’d be great at that!” The best CEOs are the ones who let their employees come up with the ideas and just make the final decisions. When the top is driving, IMO, the company falls over.

Meta is in it for profit. So you have to ask what they’re stand to gain by offering a federated service (presumably for free). Do they think they can get free data, perhaps? I have no idea, but it’s tempting to want to block them just in case. Costing ActivityPub maintainers money so you can steal user data to sell for money isn’t exactly ethical…

I’m trying to think generously, but struggle to imagine other ways they might be able to profit off the Fediverse.

Don't get me wrong, I use ChatGPT more days than not for my job; but I use it to help me find things I might not have known about... and then I go and actually look up those things to get correct information. It's really good at helping you find words to google to get at what you want. It's really BAD at always giving you good information.