Besides the ones that they listed, I’ve also heard complaints about a lack of multi-monitor support and ads in the Start menu and login screen, though I believe the ads are only in certain versions of 11 (the home/personal editions, but not the more expensive company editions). I think the ads have also been limited to Microsoft products and apps from the Microsoft store - stuff like Word and Edge - but it’s a really bad path that they’re going down and it’s only a matter of time until that becomes targeted ads to go along with their tracking and selling data.

It’s Doritos all the way down?

Always has been.

There’s a difference between having Dorito dust on your fingers and having it massaged/injected into your skin via microneedling. It’s closer to “don’t tattoo yourself with Dorito dust” than it is “don’t let it get on you.”

Do this have something to do with the ducks I always hear about?

Accurate, though I would say that the rot started earlier than that. Most of the companies we know and love were started and run by people who just liked making games. But those people have long been replaced by money extractors. I think it really started in earnest around the early 2000s, but it took a long time for it to start to show. There’s also the fact that we look back and forget about all the shovelware from decades past. And that’s not even getting into the working conditions, which easily goes back to the 80s.

The indie scene today is the strongest it’s ever been, thanks to the rise of digital distribution and access to game dev tools. We live in a world where little indie teams can get their games released on Nintendo digital storefronts and there are websites dedicated to just indie games. Social media has made it easier than ever for small creators to gather large followings of dedicated fans. But at the same time, the gulf between the indie scene and the big companies has never been wider. I can’t think of a single time where an indie team has gone on to create a new AAA studio.

It’s frustrating to watch both as a gamer and as somebody who once dreamt of joining that industry.

Absolutely, I hate it, too. It’s like how the more I learn about advertising, the more disgusted I become as I discover that it’s all just malicious psychology to push the buttons in your brain to get you to do what they want, but it’s still brilliant psychology that they’ve honed after more than a century of practice. I hate it, but I can’t deny it works.

As they say, there’s a sucker born every minute. The mobile market is gigantic. Like, bigger than the rest of the gaming industry combined big. Activision-Blizzard-King makes more off the mobile company part, King, than they do from both Blizzard and Activision. That’s more from mobile games than from CoD and WoW combined, two of the most golden of geese in gaming history. I think there’s just too many people in the mobile market to have any noticeable impact on the customers of your specific games.

There might be a case to be made for long-term damage across the market, but even then, you’re talking easily a billion users with more joining all the time.

I think a good comparison would be to Amazon and those drop-shipping sites that sell cheap junk from China. For every one customer burned, there’s probably a dozen more gobbling up the low prices and “sales.”

This is brilliant for them. They basically take the elevator pitches from the concept phase of design and toss them at players to see what sticks. Don’t even have to get to the point of a vertical slice to playtest, just a conceptual animation of gameplay.

As somebody who almost got a degree in animation to go work at the big AAA companies, everything you’ve said in this thread about the industry has been right on the money to the view I got that made me bail out in college. There’s plenty more that can be said about working in the industry, but suffice to say they play in their own cesspool, and unless you’ve got serious financial backing, it’s not worth trying to compete.

Even speaking of just the indie scene, don’t go in expecting to make anything on a game. Many of the indie studios you see on Steam will never go on to make a second game because their first never became profitable and the company went bankrupt. Even plenty of the more popular indie games will never make back what they cost. There’s those one in a million games like Lethal Company, but you should do it because you like making games, not because you expect to quit your day job.

You’re only about a month in, aim to release on somewhere like itch.io instead of a mobile store. Join some dev communities and game jams and the like. Building up a following like that is a million times easier than trying to get noticed in the sea of SEO games in an app store.

Has it? The last I heard, the new strains were even more infectious and more dangerous, but people weren’t getting as sick thanks to the vaccines.

But that was before this current strain, which is resistant to boosters from before late September and is the cause of the second highest spike in infections the US has seen, with an estimated 2 million new cases on the 11th alone. Hopefully, this new strain has mutated to be less dangerous than the original, and that’s why it’s resistant to the vaccines/boosters except for the most recent.

Yeah, imo the way to handle it is to be straightforward about it, but ultimately leave the choice to her. Something like, “We love Stevie too and want to help any way we can, and we know how hard an unexpected expense like this can be, so if you’ll let us, we’d love to pay for the vet bill so you don’t have to worry and can have a nice time on Monday with your kid.”

As I saw somebody once say, “The US is a 3rd world country in a Prada belt.” If we didn’t have that big chunk of post-WW2 money keeping our economy chugging along all these years, we probably wouldn’t look all that different from them.

It was 15 years ago or so that I heard that in a TV show, so I don’t really remember any specifics, but I think it would mostly be isolated islands and the like, as I think Hawaii is another place with no native reptile species. Imported myths from other places would be my guess as well.

This reminded me of an interesting fact I heard like 15 years ago: apparently, dragon-like animals show up in folklore across the world in areas with no native reptile species often enough to be considered an anomaly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHqma3rx-xI

I saw somebody saying how these companies are going to start crashing and burning in the next few years because they’ve never been profitable but the low interest rates have allowed them to keep burning new investors money to fake it until they make it. They’ve been following the greed of infinite profits through infinite growth, but that growth suddenly isn’t infinite anymore, and now they’ll be getting to the find out stage after fucking around for so long.

To this day I wish I had been able to take a year off after high school, maybe just taken some classes like life drawing classes or something that didn’t have the pressure of getting good grades attached to them to break out of that fear of failure habit and avoid burnout. I went to college for art&animation in the game industry, and stopped drawing for 10 years because of the burnout I got after 2 years of college.

It sucks because I absolutely love learning new things, but can’t stand a structured learning environment anymore. Give me YouTube videos and online guides and I’ll suck them down all day. I’d love to be able to do a lot of traveling again for the same reason, seeing new things and learning new stuff about different people and places is a joy. But put me in a classroom and I’ll fall right asleep and retain nothing.

Maybe, but Christmas (as in the day of, December 25th) is still a Christian holiday. It’s a pretty safe assumption to make that the majority of people celebrate Christmas, especially the commercialized version that’s ingrained into our culture, but it’s still an assumption made with Christianity as the default/majority that doesn’t take into account anybody else. Unconsciously assuming everybody is one thing because the majority of people are that thing can silence/oppress those that aren’t.

This is why the big stink every year over Merry Christmas vs Happy Holidays is inherently antisemitic/anti-other religions. Because it refuses to acknowledge that there are other people in this country who practice other religions with other holidays (or don’t practice any religion at all). If you make an exception for one (making Christmas a federal holiday), but not for the other (Passover in this case), then they’re being treated unequally and therefore you don’t have freedom of religion and are biased against the second one. Because the followers of Judaism in that example cannot practice their religion and celebrate their holiday to the same degree as Christians can.

For true equality you either accommodate all religions by making every single religious holiday a federal holiday or you accommodate none of them. Obviously, the first option is impossible, so you limit federal holidays to days of importance outside of religion, and allow enough vacation days to ensure people can celebrate at least most of their holidays. Days like the 4th of July, voting day(s) (a big one that we don’t do), etc should be federal holidays, but not Christmas or Easter. Outside the government, this is how it’s handled. Businesses are free to choose what holidays they close to celebrate or stay open for, and cannot get in trouble for what holidays they decide to give off or not give off for their employees. This is why the Jewish and Chinese communities are historically so close in the US - neither celebrates Christmas, so Jewish people go to Chinese food restaurants and other Chinese businesses that would otherwise not get much business on the holiday. It’s also why retail stores can make their employees work on Christian holidays, regardless of whether or not they’re Christian (speaking of which, you never hear an outrage about people being forced to work on Christmas day, yet there’s a guaranteed frothing of the mouth over the Happy Holidays thing every single year).

That’s the antisemitism inherent in our culture. That people are willing and want to support allowances for Christian religious institutions and values like holidays and prayers in school, but would not be okay with the same allowances for Judaism or other religions. In the same way that the architect I mentioned making the bridges too low so black kids couldn’t go to the beaches near his house was an act of racism.

I used to train kids at their first job and used my experiences in a similar fashion to push them to try new things and go for what they want without fearing failure. I would always tell them, “The biggest difference between you and me is that I’ve been on this floating rock longer than you have, so here’s my experience and the results. Use that info however you want.” Kids should be allowed to make their own choices and mistakes, but be informed on their options as much as they can be so that they can do so safely.