Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:

This shutdown doesn’t just affect Ryujinx

Nintendo is rumored to be looking at other emulators like Yuzu, eyeing them with the same scrutiny.

How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?

What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.

For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.

So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.

Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.

Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.

Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.

So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.

Id pay special attention to Study 4 which seems to really hit my key points of criticism as a layman. Study 4 controlled for census region but I’d really like to see this controlled for rural vs urban populations at a finer scale. Without that adjustment I question the validity of other studies included.

That said study 4, if I’m reading it right, still found a correlation with happiness in conservatives but that correlation did not survive when religion was accounted for. Which tells you everything you need to know.

The conservatism isn’t the primary ideology, this is just a roundabout way of asking if religious people report being happier and having more meaning and of course they do. The religious aspect almost overrules the political angle entirely.

Not to mention that some of the cracks are incredibly lightweight in the first place so even disabling a small amount of their code would improve things. Removing the encryption mechanisms alone works wonders.

They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.

It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.

Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.

Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.

Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.

I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.

Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.

That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.

I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.

I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.

And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.

All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.

(A very solid game that openly allows cheating and does little to ensure fair competition)

I think that it’s for this reason that a folding phone will be better as an iPhone mini or regular model and not a folding ultra. In fact, I don’t know that they’ll bother with calling it anything. It would just be the iPhone fold for 1st gen and it’d probably be in an in between size of pro and regular.

To clarify, I was thinking of the depreciating asset part as a loss of value the same way that a subscription is.

What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.

Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.

Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price…

Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.

I agree. But that’s a subjective stance obviously. I think since Minecraft was priced appropriately for its current value, there was no need to consider future value increasing. And on that basis they could have sold the game for more and chose not to. Still the point is that even if most people didn’t consider it, it incentivizes early purchases. If it were priced at the 1.0 build price at alpha launch, only die hard supporters would have bought it. Everyone else would wait. Same thing here.

You’ve just showed me why my point works. If you buy in now, your early purchase of Minecraft becomes more valuable over time as stuff is added. Therefore, buying now is better than buying later.

Whereas with his app, it’s overpriced now and will add features until that value proposition is met for more people. That discourages you from buying it and there’s no reason to buy it. Especially since it’s a subscription.

Now could he have done the Minecraft model? Yes. And since it’s a subscription, the price can go up slowly with no benefit to early adopters. I think the main reason he didn’t do that is because changing pricing this way generally doesn’t go well.

I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. You have to ask yourself a question: is offering an expensive upfront subscription for an evolving product an endorsement of assessing future value into your purchase. In my view, it isn’t and it’s not what he’s saying.

What he is saying is that to the minority who will find this a good value or who are okay donating to help them implement new features, go ahead and hit that button. Then separately he’s saying “the price will make more sense to more people as features are added” which is true but is not an endorsement of paying the current price for those promised features. At least from what’s in the article and what I’ve seen.

It’s the difference between saying that you should buy Minecraft because it will become an awesome game one day versus saying you should buy Minecraft because it’s either worth it to you now or you’re okay with helping to fund the development of future features you’ll receive. Those are very different.

Also depends on where you’re measuring. They make up a ton of the plastics in stormwater runoff for example. Sometimes up to 95% from what I found. And that stormwater often ends up in our drinking water.

Well then explain to me why the biggest capitalist system in the world, the USA, can feed the vast majority of people in their borders. No one here lives with food scarcity… right? Surely they don’t throw a ton of food away either. And homelessness shouldn’t be an issue either with this incredible system. Right?

I believe that Vortex, the nexus mod manager, has Linux support now that I have heard is fairly straightforward but I haven’t tried it myself.

I will say though that I recently used Vortex for modding my Fallout 4 playthrough and it was a breeze on windows while using a Nexus mod collection. Takes a lot of the pain out of modding for sure. So if you can get their mod manager running I think it’s worth a try. Could be as simple as downloading Vortex, finding a collection of mods you like, downloading the collection (usually a temporary subscription is nice for this, and then running the game. You could be done like I was in a matter of a couple hours.