... the big sucking sound for software is coming to close down PC's. We've seen huge gains by Vavle and the game industry to lock down PC's, couple that with smart phone games and emulators like nox and then top it off with windows 10. There is huge pressure to keep taking away control of the machine from end users largely because customers can't reach these companies to punch them in the nads for their theiverous practices. The internet has allowed companies to force policies on populations that don't want them through attrition (aka, are you not going to buy videogames forever if devs choose to release drm infested games?). The market is over and we're finally seeing our society enter a feudal like faze where capitalism is transforming itself into a new feudalism of serfs who have no rights to own the things they buy and lords you extract tribute through simply not being able to be reached by the peasants.
Too late, you missed the fact that companies can basically steal and lock down products from the safety of their offices and extract "tribute" from the masses. This happened to videogames. Ultimately all the big videogame companies are looking to lock software inside the "cloud".
You'd need physical proximity to the business to force companies to give you the software you are paying for. They can just steal it and call it a service.
To call a society where the big software companies make software and never give it to their customers a "market" is laughable on its face. You have no power in this relationship to influence this company's behavior as you are 100's of miles away.
Regulation is not going to stop anything in a nation that worships corporations. It's in too many big companies interest to spy on everyone and remove their ability to own their own software. Mere regulation isn't going to help jack squat. The best security is not to have software and hardware unnecessarily connected to the internet for instance.
If we were really interested in security drm would not be a thing and all game would be be able to be playable offline. The best security is not to put it on the net in the first place. Too many big companies have too much power and mere regulation is not going to do jack shit in government that is bought and owned by corporations. Like the man wasn't paying attention to the bail outs of the big banks in 2008 or the last 40 years of repeals of various acts that were designed to protect the public.
.. like 90% of the channels you can tell people of low education and people who are young tend to be moderators. AKA people with lots of free time.
The reason reddit is so popular because it is a confirmation bias wonderland for people who are not very bright and that is most of our species. So reddit is a wonderland of egoboost for the none too bright and uninformed. It's just 100% drama generating machine between the informed, uninformed, young and old and it has to do with the karma and moderation system. Reddit is just one monkey ego war where opinions no matter how dumb are fought and defended by drive by upvoting and downvoting of whatever subgroup is most dominant on the sub unfortunately for our species .
The whole thing thrives off putting people of various ages and education backgrounds together and watching them go at it. It's just a battle royal, to a large extent.
Why not just buy cheap games that are good so the people that make them can afford to make another?
E.g. Stick fight.
Because the problem is the tools to make the art and animation are what need advancing, aka say you make something like metroid, the problem is many of the tools to do the art are still dark age level. You want to get to a point where you can imagine an art style and know how to execute it and not struggle with the look of the game. Consider pixel art of a given artist or small group of artists, the problem becomes if those key team members leave your style for the next game is shot full of holes, thats the whole point of not just buying games. When you buy games from small indie developers, they may have no skin in the game - aka they are a one game wonder, they're not really interested in solving problems related to making games. The reason why indie games suck so badly is because there is no consistent group of people working on tools that speed up the translation of art and code.
Consider something like final fantasy 2/3 (us) level pixel art, many of those art styles have game objects that are tractable to algorithic generation. So that you can learn the mathematical rules behind an art style - aka you can understand specifically what the rules and methods are to produce x so you can always reproduce x.
The problem the modern game industry has at all levels is having consistency of execution on large teams across a team of a wide range of skills. You want to turn that into a process so that you're not dependent on these all star team members who are basically unconsciously doing a lot of heavy lifting. You want to make it easier to execute art at a given quality level - aka give the power to produce high quality art to a wider range of people. That's just one example, I could write a whole book on the subject of what is wrong with modern game production.
Hmm, even with small games isn't the content more critical than the code?
No they both matter, consider racing games - most of the need for speeds post Most wanted 2005 have sucked BECAUSE the mathematical characteristics of the cars feel off, aka you can't go and modify the physics code and change the car feel. The way the game feels to drive makes or breaks a racing game. The problem here is the tools that make the content are languishing. If in doubt go pick up a copy of Overload on steam and the level editor. Just tool around inside it for a bit. Notice that it has been one of the few games recently released to have a full blown level editor, an even better example is the original NWN. The problem is something like NWN was going in interesting directions but publishers cut it and have fucked up gaming royally going for gambling and selling skins bs. It's the main reason why AAA games have a content crisis, we get these short bursts of movie like games where they focus on sticking a bit of movie inside it because hollywood is easier for the industry to understand then the pure abstract mechanics of games that built the industry like doom 2 for instance.
I think it's a mistake to look at AAA game development as a software development project.
I don't, that's the whole point of going back to 8 and 16-bit games, aka the games are small enough to change the model. The problem with game development is how games are funded, what happens nobody on the finance side wants to fund a game to the point where its saleable. The reason they don't want to do that however is because they are not fully aware the tools are in the dark ages, when mmo's and f2p games proved gamers were stupid, AAA game companies stopped focusing on level editing tools for users because they saw there was enough stupidity among the masses for people to buy skins that are already on their computer because they know nothing about technology. League of legends whole business model is based on fucking morons buying skins that are already on their computer and the game client just sets a flag for the skin and model to display.
So that means interesting developments in tools that were happening in the late 90's and 2000's basically stopped completely, Neverwinter nights was going in interesting directions tool wise. So resources going into tools making content easier to produce for people external to the company stopped. Big publishers have basically shot their content production in the foot because of that. Tools are still bad, janky and god awfully designed largely due to lack of funds and vision on behalf of the industry itself, which is why they are having so many problems executing internally.
The problem is, you strongly limit yourself to a very small niche of people who either choose to remain with the same-old, or are mentally locked to it due to having a hard time dealing with change from what they grew up with(autistic people often have severe problems with that issue, for example). So, how do you get that business to sustain itself when you lose a large part of the initial customer base?
Because many game developers within the industry are creatively frustrated, it would be a godsend for something like that. When I came up with the idea, I am thinking of gonig directly to many people in the industry and just slapping them upside the head and the lights would go on. I'm certain many people would be up for it since they are passionate about games and also frustrated by many of their evil publishers business practices.
I thought hard about how to sustain it, I didn't just drop the idea out of the sky, there are tonnes of passionate people in the industry. More than enough to sustain small scale AAA game development.
What in hell do you mean by AKA? You've used it at least two different ways not using its common meaning (also known as).
Language evolves with use, aka words and acronyms acquire new meanings and additional definitions in terms of the intention of the author. This is the way language has always worked.
So more along the lines of Star Citizen or chapter subscription games like Walking Dead or Sin Episodes? The problem with working on a game incrementally is that players won't replay the same content over and over again unless it's PvP. That's probably why all subscription based games are mmo or episodic. We'll see if Star Citizen proves successful using a rather unique funding strategy.
That's the whole point of going back to 8 and 16-bit level games, aka you go back to a problem where the model makes sense and is actually tractable, you learn the ins and outs before you even attempt anything like a mid tier AA game or above. That's the whole point of catering to true tech and game enthusiasts (aka people who have genuine interest in seeing cool things done for the sake of cool nerdy things).
So do you want a subscription to Origin Access or GameFly?
Not quite, the service would not be for the mass market, aka you sell games as a service to true enthusiasts until there was some kind of critical mass where you could build a AAA game the masses would be interested in (aka basically think of it as a club of developers and hobbyist developers where the hobbyists split the bill among 1000's of paying enthusiasts to defray the cost amongst a large group), you use enthusiasts to help pay for development and sell the game differently to different markets, aka nerds who care about games would be subscribers, then you can sell complete game or change the model for different audiences who don't give two shits about game ownership or open source (aka exploit the uncaring masses like the corporations).
To give you an idea, say we take a game from the 90's that cost 400,000 to develop, but that 400,000 is spread over months to a year of development time it doesn't all just disappear instantly, so say you're doing 10K a month in expenses to develop a AAA NES/SNES level game. Those costs are much more managable once you have a steady income for developers so then you don't have to worry about the code being open or whatever since the whole model is based on basically game enthusiasts being brought into a kind of developer club, whether you'd want to go full 'early access' or simply pay membership dues and get bascially feedback monthly (similar to kickstarter) would have yet to be determined, I'd want to experiment to see what works best.
One of the reasons videogames are so fucked up is because the are not a market, the market that functions rationally is a minority which is why you get bizarre schizophrenic behavior on the behalf of game companies with drm, gambling, lootboxes, etc. AKA most PC gamers today are not technologically literate vs the past in the 90's.
... requires developers to develop software people are actually already paying for. I've thought long and hard if I could find investors to change the AAA videogame industry from the bullshit payment models and shit service to "buy to own" and "game development as a service model".
AKA there should be enough nerds for us to basically revive 8-bit and 16-bit type AAA games as a service model (aka we build games together that we ultimately all own and the code is open) for those of us above average incomes and who are true enthusiasts, basically take advantage of enthusiast interest in technology and turn it into a "sams warehouse club" for nerds. I was thinking about this with how costco has membership. If you want to do OSS then you're going to have to do so with a product that there is a known demand for. People don't want the boring shit, they want entertainment and shit that actually is valuable enough to pay for, aka you do the shit people want and use the funds from the shit people want to do more serious stuff.
For instance game development requires tools programmers that could make dents in the CAD and Image processing industries - aka take potshots at the crappy tools made by Autodesk and Adobe. Now this is not to say that many private sector products are bad, but Open source software versions developers have no discipline because they are free, when your job or your company is on the line with the quality of your work it forces you to stand up and take notice.
Now while windows had huge problems as we all remember from an engineering standpoint, you have to acknowledge the savvy of making computers user friendly enough for people to actually want to use them. That was microsofts genius. People used DOS and windows back in the day because the market was big enough for games and other apps.
was solved ages ago by Slashdot and it's system of moderation and meta-moderation. If only other sites would adopt the system.....
No, slashdot over the last 10-20 years has been on a huge decline, I rarely if ever see truth based posts about US politics for instance. (aka if you are voting for any rightwing party you are too stupid to understand what the bank bailouts meant in 2008). Our whole species is just stupid, no amount of moderation can cure that level of stupidity. Slashdot suffers from popularity as much as any other site because newer generations of kids and 20 somethings don't have the same experience as the best informed among the older generation and they get downvoted.
I'l give you an example from the videogame industry watched for the last 20 years as videogames were literally stolen once high speed internet penetration reached critical mass around 2005-2006, and the software you control inversion began as a rise of the masses of internet and smart phone connected idiots came online.
The rise of drm, mmo's, f2p games, steam are all signs that our species is a race of morons from all walks and classe of life. The fact that something like world of warcraft can even exist even though that was one of the trial balloons to normalize software you don't own an part of the evil plot to take games out of gamers hands. The entire industry won hands down because they know the literate PC gamers can't reach their offices they are now trapped 100+ miles away from the business and have no market power, now we got shit like League of legends and fortnite, people paying for shit they don't own inside a game they don't own because they are fucking morons.
A giant wtf. I watched my hobby be literally destroyed, level editors and SDK's we got in the 90's literally disappear and were massively curtailed. All the textures and models people are "paying for" are on their computer already, the program just sets a flag to display it. We truly live in a world of morons. Just try insulting steam or mmo's and watch the mmo mouthbreathing brigade come out and downvote you. People who can't reason themselves out of a wet paper bag.
And CEO's pushing for the end game of software files they stream encrypted from servers form their office for all AAA games eventually going foward.
Do some conspiracy theories turn out to be right? Actually yes. 20 years ago something like "the government is tapping every conversation on the internet and recording it all" would have been chalked up as a conspiracy theory
Except that's proof of how easily indoctrinated we all are. When every generation who's been educated has known spying and power have gone together since time immemorial, only ignorant and illiterate people would gullibly believe everything they were fed during their education.
It really isn't, money "invested" in stocks is money just shuffling zeroes and ones between different banks. If you're going to try to tell me the market is efficient I'd laugh in your face. Try to at least be educated enough before participating in a discussion.
Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.
... money has been decoupled from productive activity and investment seeking the highest returns and so gone largely into speculation and basically sophisticated forms of rent seeking and fraud. Let's be honest, technology just speeds this along by enabling big compaies to engage in labour arbitrage. Taking advantage of the huge wage differences of people across the globe thanks to the internet and most people don't have the money or are incapable of moving from where they are at from different reasons. This naive idea that human beings are fungible widgets has put a serious strain on society.
Let's not forget the concept of dead money, corporations are sitting on billions they are not investing in anyone or anything. We're experiecing total failure of capitalism and nobody noticed. AKA money is pooling in the hands of ceo's and the ceo's are just sitting on it, at sane society woud intervene and just start investing in people, tools and jobs if the corporate fatcats won't do it. So it's pure politics and mass political ignorance that's at the root of our problems. Basically people are rotting on the sidelines because our corporate leadership is an emporer with no clothes.
... and stupidity of society. I don't mean it to say gaming is bad, gaming is just the latest scapegoat.
Many men checked out because well, men have been mistreated and abandoned. When men are seen as tools and to be used as cheap labour for the rest of society. Why wouldn't they check out? Videogames is the latest scapegoat for a society so up its ass in predatory business practices and corporate lawlessness. Our entire society is just one giant highschool of stupid human predatory bullshit. I don't blame the poor and downtrodden for checking out. Especially after the big bank bailouts of 2008, and our corporate masters trying to scrub the internet of their plutonomy memo's...
Yeah it is stupid to make sure the apps are safe. It should be a free service. College for all, free medical care, diners that stay open for nostalgia while losing cash, you know the old smash and grab politics of the left. Wave the flag get your head beat in because fascism or whatever they hate today. But it has to be free see.
Gee it's shit like this that makes me think the world has gone downright insane, there is no real left wing movement in america. There is one party, the party of big business with it's two wings republicans and democrats.
Indeed america is filled with raging communists given the bottom 80% of society holds a meager 5% of the total financial wealth of the economy.
If numbers and science were anything to go by, if you are working class or poor and aren't left wing and american, you are pretty damn uninformed. But that's america for ya.
George carlin said it best about american citizens:
... the average american doesn't give two shits about tech. That is why videogames is such a clusterfuck of greed, corruption and outright fraud. Just look at the BS copyright laws. In a just world we'd be able to own and repair our own software we paid for. The reality is in tech land its lawless capitalism all the way, broken software and games all around because the average person is technologically ignorant and retarded while keeping feeding money to companies exploiting them (mmo's, steam, f2p games, etc).
... all it takes is time and effort. The idea that computers can be "secure" when they need to be fundamentally honest if one is to maintain performance of being demanded its a bit of bullshit. You can have slow and secure or you can have blazing fast and honest. Many "Security issues" are really just artifacts of hardware or software architecture.
The reality is security has to be designed from the get go from both a hardware and software standpoint, you can't just do it when fundamentally for most of x86's history it's been an open platform. Security can't be had on open platforms, in fact most issues would never have arisen pre-internet.
The reality is the speed at which computers operate and the demands for security are at odds, no one is willing to pay the true costs because it's just not worth the time and resources unless you are a big organization and have lots of money to throw around.
It's laughable that they are trying to somehow dry up the game aftermarket for their titles and then shucking and jiving around what the meaning of "is" is.
Wake me up when they go tits up.
Not going to happen, the average gamer is a fucking moron. The last 20 years of PC gaming we've seen a shift from games we owned and controlled to games companies own largely because gamers are morons and technologically illiterate. The fact that mmo's and f2p microtransaction games even exist is proof the average person on our planet is a moron.
Instead of technology making us more free it helped the oligarchs to control us even more.
That's because you and most people are politically illiterate, rule of law protecting the bottom 90% of societies and capitalism are not compatible. No one has learn anything from labour history. People had to fight for the right to vote, for environmental rights, for worker rights. Many people died. Most kids these days conveniently believe whatever the state education system tells them, even though they are setup to protect the interests of the oligarchy and corporations. That means if you're right wing and not rich, you have no idea how capitalism even works, you are a member of the class of worker or professional that the upper class openly despises.
I hear what you're talking about but I'm speaking from experience. Sometimes the technological path you've traveled down is fundamentally wrong conceptually. Consider polygonal modelling vs nurbs. I've been working on something that radically conceptually breaks with the idea of modelling as we know it completely but it takes time for these ideas to be researched and fleshed out - it's non trivial - aka time consuming. I agree that things can be made easier, the problem is whether or not we are even aware of what mistakes we've actually made, aka we're too stupid at something to fully grasp how stupid we are at said thing.
Implied is a fundamental trade-off between simple development and simple deployment. The theory is that one MUST make this trade-off; that it's hard-wired into the Universe.
You just restated that tools are hard to make... the reason is nobody has come up yet with a better way of modelling the problem. Whenever we try to solve a problem it is dependent on how we conceived it in the first place. AKA tools are dependent on their conceptual / theoretical foundations, figuring out how to observe and correctly conceive a problem is the hardest part before designing the solution.
We lost the internet, and it's time we accept that and move on.
We didn't lose anything, "We" never had it to begin with. De-centralization conflicts with the private ownership model of capitalism. Don't think so? Think of all the games that are now drm infested and the software and hardware is slowly being removed from users control due to the technological illiteracy of the masses. Game software has literally been stolen but the masses are too stupid and illiterate to care... while the elite educated minority can't hold these companies accountable from 100's of miles away.
Slashdot Mirror
... the big sucking sound for software is coming to close down PC's. We've seen huge gains by Vavle and the game industry to lock down PC's, couple that with smart phone games and emulators like nox and then top it off with windows 10. There is huge pressure to keep taking away control of the machine from end users largely because customers can't reach these companies to punch them in the nads for their theiverous practices. The internet has allowed companies to force policies on populations that don't want them through attrition (aka, are you not going to buy videogames forever if devs choose to release drm infested games?). The market is over and we're finally seeing our society enter a feudal like faze where capitalism is transforming itself into a new feudalism of serfs who have no rights to own the things they buy and lords you extract tribute through simply not being able to be reached by the peasants.
Dictators do not work for industry or countries.
Too late, you missed the fact that companies can basically steal and lock down products from the safety of their offices and extract "tribute" from the masses. This happened to videogames. Ultimately all the big videogame companies are looking to lock software inside the "cloud".
You'd need physical proximity to the business to force companies to give you the software you are paying for. They can just steal it and call it a service.
To call a society where the big software companies make software and never give it to their customers a "market" is laughable on its face. You have no power in this relationship to influence this company's behavior as you are 100's of miles away.
... largely in denial.
Regulation is not going to stop anything in a nation that worships corporations. It's in too many big companies interest to spy on everyone and remove their ability to own their own software. Mere regulation isn't going to help jack squat. The best security is not to have software and hardware unnecessarily connected to the internet for instance.
If we were really interested in security drm would not be a thing and all game would be be able to be playable offline. The best security is not to put it on the net in the first place. Too many big companies have too much power and mere regulation is not going to do jack shit in government that is bought and owned by corporations. Like the man wasn't paying attention to the bail outs of the big banks in 2008 or the last 40 years of repeals of various acts that were designed to protect the public.
.. like 90% of the channels you can tell people of low education and people who are young tend to be moderators. AKA people with lots of free time.
The reason reddit is so popular because it is a confirmation bias wonderland for people who are not very bright and that is most of our species. So reddit is a wonderland of egoboost for the none too bright and uninformed. It's just 100% drama generating machine between the informed, uninformed, young and old and it has to do with the karma and moderation system. Reddit is just one monkey ego war where opinions no matter how dumb are fought and defended by drive by upvoting and downvoting of whatever subgroup is most dominant on the sub unfortunately for our species .
The whole thing thrives off putting people of various ages and education backgrounds together and watching them go at it. It's just a battle royal, to a large extent.
Why not just buy cheap games that are good so the people that make them can afford to make another?
E.g. Stick fight.
Because the problem is the tools to make the art and animation are what need advancing, aka say you make something like metroid, the problem is many of the tools to do the art are still dark age level. You want to get to a point where you can imagine an art style and know how to execute it and not struggle with the look of the game. Consider pixel art of a given artist or small group of artists, the problem becomes if those key team members leave your style for the next game is shot full of holes, thats the whole point of not just buying games. When you buy games from small indie developers, they may have no skin in the game - aka they are a one game wonder, they're not really interested in solving problems related to making games. The reason why indie games suck so badly is because there is no consistent group of people working on tools that speed up the translation of art and code.
Consider something like final fantasy 2/3 (us) level pixel art, many of those art styles have game objects that are tractable to algorithic generation. So that you can learn the mathematical rules behind an art style - aka you can understand specifically what the rules and methods are to produce x so you can always reproduce x.
The problem the modern game industry has at all levels is having consistency of execution on large teams across a team of a wide range of skills. You want to turn that into a process so that you're not dependent on these all star team members who are basically unconsciously doing a lot of heavy lifting. You want to make it easier to execute art at a given quality level - aka give the power to produce high quality art to a wider range of people. That's just one example, I could write a whole book on the subject of what is wrong with modern game production.
Hmm, even with small games isn't the content more critical than the code?
No they both matter, consider racing games - most of the need for speeds post Most wanted 2005 have sucked BECAUSE the mathematical characteristics of the cars feel off, aka you can't go and modify the physics code and change the car feel. The way the game feels to drive makes or breaks a racing game. The problem here is the tools that make the content are languishing. If in doubt go pick up a copy of Overload on steam and the level editor. Just tool around inside it for a bit. Notice that it has been one of the few games recently released to have a full blown level editor, an even better example is the original NWN. The problem is something like NWN was going in interesting directions but publishers cut it and have fucked up gaming royally going for gambling and selling skins bs. It's the main reason why AAA games have a content crisis, we get these short bursts of movie like games where they focus on sticking a bit of movie inside it because hollywood is easier for the industry to understand then the pure abstract mechanics of games that built the industry like doom 2 for instance.
Overload
https://store.steampowered.com...
Neverwinter nights
https://www.gog.com/game/never...
I think it's a mistake to look at AAA game development as a software development project.
I don't, that's the whole point of going back to 8 and 16-bit games, aka the games are small enough to change the model. The problem with game development is how games are funded, what happens nobody on the finance side wants to fund a game to the point where its saleable. The reason they don't want to do that however is because they are not fully aware the tools are in the dark ages, when mmo's and f2p games proved gamers were stupid, AAA game companies stopped focusing on level editing tools for users because they saw there was enough stupidity among the masses for people to buy skins that are already on their computer because they know nothing about technology. League of legends whole business model is based on fucking morons buying skins that are already on their computer and the game client just sets a flag for the skin and model to display.
So that means interesting developments in tools that were happening in the late 90's and 2000's basically stopped completely, Neverwinter nights was going in interesting directions tool wise. So resources going into tools making content easier to produce for people external to the company stopped. Big publishers have basically shot their content production in the foot because of that. Tools are still bad, janky and god awfully designed largely due to lack of funds and vision on behalf of the industry itself, which is why they are having so many problems executing internally.
The problem is, you strongly limit yourself to a very small niche of people who either choose to remain with the same-old, or are mentally locked to it due to having a hard time dealing with change from what they grew up with(autistic people often have severe problems with that issue, for example). So, how do you get that business to sustain itself when you lose a large part of the initial customer base?
Because many game developers within the industry are creatively frustrated, it would be a godsend for something like that. When I came up with the idea, I am thinking of gonig directly to many people in the industry and just slapping them upside the head and the lights would go on. I'm certain many people would be up for it since they are passionate about games and also frustrated by many of their evil publishers business practices.
I thought hard about how to sustain it, I didn't just drop the idea out of the sky, there are tonnes of passionate people in the industry. More than enough to sustain small scale AAA game development.
What in hell do you mean by AKA? You've used it at least two different ways not using its common meaning (also known as).
Language evolves with use, aka words and acronyms acquire new meanings and additional definitions in terms of the intention of the author. This is the way language has always worked.
So more along the lines of Star Citizen or chapter subscription games like Walking Dead or Sin Episodes? The problem with working on a game incrementally is that players won't replay the same content over and over again unless it's PvP. That's probably why all subscription based games are mmo or episodic. We'll see if Star Citizen proves successful using a rather unique funding strategy.
That's the whole point of going back to 8 and 16-bit level games, aka you go back to a problem where the model makes sense and is actually tractable, you learn the ins and outs before you even attempt anything like a mid tier AA game or above. That's the whole point of catering to true tech and game enthusiasts (aka people who have genuine interest in seeing cool things done for the sake of cool nerdy things).
So do you want a subscription to Origin Access or GameFly?
Not quite, the service would not be for the mass market, aka you sell games as a service to true enthusiasts until there was some kind of critical mass where you could build a AAA game the masses would be interested in (aka basically think of it as a club of developers and hobbyist developers where the hobbyists split the bill among 1000's of paying enthusiasts to defray the cost amongst a large group), you use enthusiasts to help pay for development and sell the game differently to different markets, aka nerds who care about games would be subscribers, then you can sell complete game or change the model for different audiences who don't give two shits about game ownership or open source (aka exploit the uncaring masses like the corporations).
To give you an idea, say we take a game from the 90's that cost 400,000 to develop, but that 400,000 is spread over months to a year of development time it doesn't all just disappear instantly, so say you're doing 10K a month in expenses to develop a AAA NES/SNES level game. Those costs are much more managable once you have a steady income for developers so then you don't have to worry about the code being open or whatever since the whole model is based on basically game enthusiasts being brought into a kind of developer club, whether you'd want to go full 'early access' or simply pay membership dues and get bascially feedback monthly (similar to kickstarter) would have yet to be determined, I'd want to experiment to see what works best.
One of the reasons videogames are so fucked up is because the are not a market, the market that functions rationally is a minority which is why you get bizarre schizophrenic behavior on the behalf of game companies with drm, gambling, lootboxes, etc. AKA most PC gamers today are not technologically literate vs the past in the 90's.
... requires developers to develop software people are actually already paying for. I've thought long and hard if I could find investors to change the AAA videogame industry from the bullshit payment models and shit service to "buy to own" and "game development as a service model".
AKA there should be enough nerds for us to basically revive 8-bit and 16-bit type AAA games as a service model (aka we build games together that we ultimately all own and the code is open) for those of us above average incomes and who are true enthusiasts, basically take advantage of enthusiast interest in technology and turn it into a "sams warehouse club" for nerds. I was thinking about this with how costco has membership. If you want to do OSS then you're going to have to do so with a product that there is a known demand for. People don't want the boring shit, they want entertainment and shit that actually is valuable enough to pay for, aka you do the shit people want and use the funds from the shit people want to do more serious stuff.
For instance game development requires tools programmers that could make dents in the CAD and Image processing industries - aka take potshots at the crappy tools made by Autodesk and Adobe. Now this is not to say that many private sector products are bad, but Open source software versions developers have no discipline because they are free, when your job or your company is on the line with the quality of your work it forces you to stand up and take notice.
Now while windows had huge problems as we all remember from an engineering standpoint, you have to acknowledge the savvy of making computers user friendly enough for people to actually want to use them. That was microsofts genius. People used DOS and windows back in the day because the market was big enough for games and other apps.
was solved ages ago by Slashdot and it's system of moderation and meta-moderation. If only other sites would adopt the system.....
No, slashdot over the last 10-20 years has been on a huge decline, I rarely if ever see truth based posts about US politics for instance. (aka if you are voting for any rightwing party you are too stupid to understand what the bank bailouts meant in 2008). Our whole species is just stupid, no amount of moderation can cure that level of stupidity. Slashdot suffers from popularity as much as any other site because newer generations of kids and 20 somethings don't have the same experience as the best informed among the older generation and they get downvoted.
I'l give you an example from the videogame industry watched for the last 20 years as videogames were literally stolen once high speed internet penetration reached critical mass around 2005-2006, and the software you control inversion began as a rise of the masses of internet and smart phone connected idiots came online.
The rise of drm, mmo's, f2p games, steam are all signs that our species is a race of morons from all walks and classe of life. The fact that something like world of warcraft can even exist even though that was one of the trial balloons to normalize software you don't own an part of the evil plot to take games out of gamers hands. The entire industry won hands down because they know the literate PC gamers can't reach their offices they are now trapped 100+ miles away from the business and have no market power, now we got shit like League of legends and fortnite, people paying for shit they don't own inside a game they don't own because they are fucking morons.
A giant wtf. I watched my hobby be literally destroyed, level editors and SDK's we got in the 90's literally disappear and were massively curtailed. All the textures and models people are "paying for" are on their computer already, the program just sets a flag to display it. We truly live in a world of morons. Just try insulting steam or mmo's and watch the mmo mouthbreathing brigade come out and downvote you. People who can't reason themselves out of a wet paper bag.
And CEO's pushing for the end game of software files they stream encrypted from servers form their office for all AAA games eventually going foward.
https://www.techspot.com/news/...
Do some conspiracy theories turn out to be right? Actually yes. 20 years ago something like "the government is tapping every conversation on the internet and recording it all" would have been chalked up as a conspiracy theory
Except that's proof of how easily indoctrinated we all are. When every generation who's been educated has known spying and power have gone together since time immemorial, only ignorant and illiterate people would gullibly believe everything they were fed during their education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Dead money is mostly an illusion
It really isn't, money "invested" in stocks is money just shuffling zeroes and ones between different banks. If you're going to try to tell me the market is efficient I'd laugh in your face. Try to at least be educated enough before participating in a discussion.
Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you're going to tell me the bottom 80% can't use more money to do more productive things I'll laugh in your general direction.
US distribution of wealth
https://imgur.com/a/FShfb
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa...
... money has been decoupled from productive activity and investment seeking the highest returns and so gone largely into speculation and basically sophisticated forms of rent seeking and fraud. Let's be honest, technology just speeds this along by enabling big compaies to engage in labour arbitrage. Taking advantage of the huge wage differences of people across the globe thanks to the internet and most people don't have the money or are incapable of moving from where they are at from different reasons. This naive idea that human beings are fungible widgets has put a serious strain on society.
Let's not forget the concept of dead money, corporations are sitting on billions they are not investing in anyone or anything. We're experiecing total failure of capitalism and nobody noticed. AKA money is pooling in the hands of ceo's and the ceo's are just sitting on it, at sane society woud intervene and just start investing in people, tools and jobs if the corporate fatcats won't do it. So it's pure politics and mass political ignorance that's at the root of our problems. Basically people are rotting on the sidelines because our corporate leadership is an emporer with no clothes.
https://www.theglobeandmail.co...
... and stupidity of society. I don't mean it to say gaming is bad, gaming is just the latest scapegoat.
Many men checked out because well, men have been mistreated and abandoned. When men are seen as tools and to be used as cheap labour for the rest of society. Why wouldn't they check out? Videogames is the latest scapegoat for a society so up its ass in predatory business practices and corporate lawlessness. Our entire society is just one giant highschool of stupid human predatory bullshit. I don't blame the poor and downtrodden for checking out. Especially after the big bank bailouts of 2008, and our corporate masters trying to scrub the internet of their plutonomy memo's...
https://politicalgates.blogspo...
Yeah it is stupid to make sure the apps are safe. It should be a free service. College for all, free medical care, diners that stay open for nostalgia while losing cash, you know the old smash and grab politics of the left. Wave the flag get your head beat in because fascism or whatever they hate today. But it has to be free see.
Gee it's shit like this that makes me think the world has gone downright insane, there is no real left wing movement in america. There is one party, the party of big business with it's two wings republicans and democrats.
Indeed america is filled with raging communists given the bottom 80% of society holds a meager 5% of the total financial wealth of the economy.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.e...
If numbers and science were anything to go by, if you are working class or poor and aren't left wing and american, you are pretty damn uninformed. But that's america for ya.
George carlin said it best about american citizens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
... the average american doesn't give two shits about tech. That is why videogames is such a clusterfuck of greed, corruption and outright fraud. Just look at the BS copyright laws. In a just world we'd be able to own and repair our own software we paid for. The reality is in tech land its lawless capitalism all the way, broken software and games all around because the average person is technologically ignorant and retarded while keeping feeding money to companies exploiting them (mmo's, steam, f2p games, etc).
... all it takes is time and effort. The idea that computers can be "secure" when they need to be fundamentally honest if one is to maintain performance of being demanded its a bit of bullshit. You can have slow and secure or you can have blazing fast and honest. Many "Security issues" are really just artifacts of hardware or software architecture.
The reality is security has to be designed from the get go from both a hardware and software standpoint, you can't just do it when fundamentally for most of x86's history it's been an open platform. Security can't be had on open platforms, in fact most issues would never have arisen pre-internet.
The reality is the speed at which computers operate and the demands for security are at odds, no one is willing to pay the true costs because it's just not worth the time and resources unless you are a big organization and have lots of money to throw around.
It's laughable that they are trying to somehow dry up the game aftermarket for their titles and then shucking and jiving around what the meaning of "is" is.
Wake me up when they go tits up.
Not going to happen, the average gamer is a fucking moron. The last 20 years of PC gaming we've seen a shift from games we owned and controlled to games companies own largely because gamers are morons and technologically illiterate. The fact that mmo's and f2p microtransaction games even exist is proof the average person on our planet is a moron.
Instead of technology making us more free it helped the oligarchs to control us even more.
That's because you and most people are politically illiterate, rule of law protecting the bottom 90% of societies and capitalism are not compatible. No one has learn anything from labour history. People had to fight for the right to vote, for environmental rights, for worker rights. Many people died. Most kids these days conveniently believe whatever the state education system tells them, even though they are setup to protect the interests of the oligarchy and corporations. That means if you're right wing and not rich, you have no idea how capitalism even works, you are a member of the class of worker or professional that the upper class openly despises.
Princeton study:
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs...
Henry Kissenger, 'the grave period':
https://fortunascorner.com/201...
I hear what you're talking about but I'm speaking from experience. Sometimes the technological path you've traveled down is fundamentally wrong conceptually. Consider polygonal modelling vs nurbs. I've been working on something that radically conceptually breaks with the idea of modelling as we know it completely but it takes time for these ideas to be researched and fleshed out - it's non trivial - aka time consuming. I agree that things can be made easier, the problem is whether or not we are even aware of what mistakes we've actually made, aka we're too stupid at something to fully grasp how stupid we are at said thing.
I'll give you this bit from Neil degrass Tyson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Implied is a fundamental trade-off between simple development and simple deployment. The theory is that one MUST make this trade-off; that it's hard-wired into the Universe.
You just restated that tools are hard to make... the reason is nobody has come up yet with a better way of modelling the problem. Whenever we try to solve a problem it is dependent on how we conceived it in the first place. AKA tools are dependent on their conceptual / theoretical foundations, figuring out how to observe and correctly conceive a problem is the hardest part before designing the solution.
We lost the internet, and it's time we accept that and move on.
We didn't lose anything, "We" never had it to begin with. De-centralization conflicts with the private ownership model of capitalism. Don't think so? Think of all the games that are now drm infested and the software and hardware is slowly being removed from users control due to the technological illiteracy of the masses. Game software has literally been stolen but the masses are too stupid and illiterate to care... while the elite educated minority can't hold these companies accountable from 100's of miles away.