The huge majority of indie games never make any money at all. This link is a little older, but it claims that 50% of indie games on steam never make more than $4000, only 25% ever make more than $26 000 and only 14% cross the $100k mark.

Considering the cost of developers, that’s about 1-2 man years for the $100k mark, and then there’s only a 14% chance of even recouping that.

Passion projects work out because the people making them don’t value their time as work time, don’t make a salary from it, and even then in the huge majority of cases, it doesn’t work out financially.

Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.

This statement holds true for pretty much every other corporation. Imagine owning a huge farm and not setting aside a few farm hands to grow old artisan vegetables. Imagine owning a supermarket chain and not setting aside a few shops for exotic sweets from Central Africa. Imagine owning a fast food chain and not setting aside a few restaurants for artisan burger variations.

Yes, every corporation could afford to do stuff like that, but they aren’t there to advance humanity by investing in arts and crafts, but for making every last drop of money they can. And yes, there’s much to criticise about this goal, but making little indie passion projects doesn’t work well with corporations.

Less so though.

Yes, being “safe” means you won’t make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin’s Creed will also buy it.

These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don’t experiment and do something new that bombs.

As sad as it is, it actually does work out.

That’s why we gamers shouldn’t trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven’t played before, then go with lower-budget titles.

AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don’t go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.

Is there any decent way to run Plasma Mobile in Termux by now?

20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.

You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.

Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.

To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here

This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.

And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.

This is spot on.

In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).

A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.

Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.

Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.

But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.

Nope, win64 works as well

That’s why I chose a laptop without iGPU, because only one GPU means less hassle.

Guess what: the Nvidia drivers aren’t setup for laptop dGPUs without iGPU. It’s horrible, even worse than my last laptop with two GPUs.

And the battery life is ridiculous.

Talking about it, which arch flavour is “btw”? /s

GNOME is horrible. Looks pretty, but it’s opinionated approach means that nothing works as expected and you have to relearn how to use a stupid window manager.

I prefer Ook! Ook! over Ooga.

Are you using Arch btw?

This is it. Yes, a registration/ID system can make the tasks of a tyrannical government slightly easier, but not having one didn’t exactly stop ICE raids. On the contrary, having such a system would make it much easier for legal immigrants to prove that they are legal and it could help them against illegal deportation due to misidentification.

And in any case the problem is the tyrannical government, not the ID system.

Beware, there’s a difference between “push notifications” (which is what your links are talking about) and “notifications”, specifically with the “notification history” feature.

Push notifications are a mechanism to transport messages over google services. What that does is that the backend service of some app (e.g. the Signal server) can send a message to an app that’s currently not actively running to tell it that there’s something new happening, e.g. a new incoming message. This goes via Google services because that way, the app doesn’t need to be constantly running. Google services then wakes up the app and allow it to do something with that info, e.g. display a notification.

The alternative is that the app is constantly running, constantly actively checking for new messages and thus constantly consuming power.

This can be e2e encrypted by the app, and then Google can only see metadata.

Notifications, on the other hand are the things that show up on your phone when you swipe down from the top navigation bar. These notifications can be read in plain text by any app on your phone, including the OS. If you have Notification History enabled, they can be backed up (again in plain text) to Google’s servers. And any old app you have on your phone can silently do the same. That’s why Signal allows you to hide the text content and/or sender name for notifications.

Google backs up a history of your notifications, so if you have signal setup to show notifications, that’s on Google’s servers.

I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I’m on the train.

Don’t want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.

And that’s 60W while charging. In idle with the screen off, low end laptops often consume as little as 2-3W. Which is not far off from a pi.

• People who don’t play games because they are too grown-up to have fun aren’t grown-up but sad.
• Catch-up mechanics even the playing field, so that people of different skill levels can have fun together.

Amazon games does it too.