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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 27th, 2023
  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.workstoGames@sh.itjust.works•Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey revealsEnglish
    91·
    5 days ago

    Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

    Ban the entire business model.

    Entertainment is a tool for emotional manipulation - usually toward enjoyment. Fiction seeks suspension of disbelief and attachment to completely artificial interests and goals. Charging actual currency for anything under that fiction is an abuse. It’s exploiting your brain’s fuzzy separation of wants. However much you desire a goal in soccer, it’s just a ball going through some posts. It has no economic utility. There is no exchange rate between score and hamburgers.

    Maximizing that mistake is the entire driving force of this industry-swallowing abuse. It’s half of all revenue. Boycotts don’t work. It’s in $70, flagship-franchise, single-player games. It costs nothing to add, even in games you already bought. Only legislation will fix this.

    Now the usual excuses.

    ‘Just don’t pay them.’ The entire game is expertly crafted to make you crave whatever they’re charging for. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that’s what makes them games. Gently convincing you over time is the developer’s job.

    ‘You want it for free!’ You want it ‘for free.’ I want people to buy games. Like how it worked for forty years straight.

    ‘But servers need money.’ This shit’s in World Of Warcraft - a subscription MMO. You think Blizzard is hurting?

    ‘But arcades–’ were renting someone else’s machine. Your own phone doesn’t get to charge you a quarter per minute.

    ‘But cosmetics–’ are still an engineered desire which can be denied until you pay more money.

    ‘But budgets–’ follow revenue, always always always. It has never been easier to make a game. Companies choose to spend millions because they expect to make billions.

    ‘Well it’s better value.’ This bullshit makes them more money… and they get the money from you… so this “free” bullshit costs you more money. You get it? In no reality should it be possible to pay the price of a whole-ass game for one imaginary hat.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.workstoGames@sh.itjust.works•Carmack defends AI tools after Quake fan calls Microsoft AI demo “disgusting”English
    1·
    6 days ago

    Should be simple to do better than the sound designers over at Riot

    Your explicit argument is that “better” isn’t the standard, when it comes to cranking out textures or whatever. But suddenly when it’s your thing - there’s no possible way that passable results could work. Disruptive change won’t affect your profession, because good-enough audio never happens in video games, a medium obsessed with escalating… audio quality? No, right, graphics. The thing you figure AI will be awesome for, when someone needs two hundred variations, to-day. And when that demand becomes reasonable there’s no fucking way the studio will demand two thousand.

    I mean, you clearly know more than me

    ‘You’re being a hypocrite, judged on your own statements, in this thread alone.’

    ‘YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME AT EVERYTHING?!?!?!’

    Jesus.

    I consider myself pretty positive about the potential for generative AI, especially in game development, and it’s still embarrassing watching you aggressively fail to handle polite criticism. You lurched in with ‘I bet people will downvote my lukewarm take!’ and then got big mad when that happened. Like it was a surprise.

    This latest comment is an open wound of grievances which I, personally, didn’t say a god damned word about. You’re just showing your whole ass over… cut content? For some reason? Who asked. And you’re trying to turn measured pushback regarding your sweeping claims into some chest-beating dominance-game, where one of us has to go away humiliated and quintessentially stupid forever, instead of just saying - oh, guess that was a slight overreach, whoopsie daisy.

    My condolences to anyone who works under you. However good you are at your job, the way you handle disagreement is demonstrably miserable. Please get better at it.

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.workstoGames@sh.itjust.works•Carmack defends AI tools after Quake fan calls Microsoft AI demo “disgusting”English
    11·
    9 days ago

    But it’ll never apply to what you do, because you’re special and that’s different.

    Nuance nuance nuance! Plagiarism machine. Zero cognitive dissonance.

    Generated content is great, it lets you go home early and fuck your wife! But let me ask you, novice: would YOU ever play a game with generated content?

    This whole industry makes impossible broken demands, isn’t it just the tits? We’d never make games under-budget if not for this tech that I myself said was useless shite until just now. There’s no way increased productivity will also be crunched to demand 2000 textures in this eighty-hour week.

    Obviously that scaling for selection doesn’t apply to MY job, because AI will never do what I do, unlike how I think it can handle everyone else’s work. Everyone insisting I’m not superior to all these NPCs I work with must not experience nuuuaaance.