MudMan

You’d be misplacing that anger. He hasn’t been part of a AAA studio or publisher in decades, and as far as I can tell his last venture involved investing in and shutting down some edutainment dev in Malta.

I guess “money guy for a bunch of middleware companies” didn’t get nearly as many clicks as “exSONY BOSS PLAYSTATION MAN”.

It’s probably worth highlighting that, despite the clickbait headline, this guy has not been affiliated with Sony or Playstation for almost twenty years, and these days he’s mostly an investor on multiple middleware and outsourcing videogame-adjacent companies.

Also, to his credit, what he’s actually saying is that he’s optimistic that people and the industry will rebound fairly quickly and may need to bridge themselves over to the next gig somehow. The other thing he apparently proposes is “go lay on a beach somewhere”. But he’s not saying that you should go be an Uber driver if you lost your games industry job, he’s saying it’s likely that your games industry skillset will remain valuable and you’ll find something else soon-ish.

I hate that media keeps making me do this and defend people I disagree with. I think there’s an interesting debate here about whether the gig-fire-hire-repeat flow of the games industry is good or sustainable, and about what alternatives there are. But if you go and clickbait this hard I’m kinda forced to point that out first and now we’re all arguing about what was said and not about the underlying issue.

I mean, presumably he wasn’t wrong. Just… not at Microsoft.

Hi-Fi Rush still has some of the best animation in gaming this generation. I genuinely don’t know where they pulled that from, because it sure wasn’t from Resi or The Evil Within.

He shipped enough clunkers (and terrible design decisions) that I never bought the mythification of Jobs.

In any case, the Deck is a different beast. For one, it’s the second attempt. Remember Steam Machines? But also, it’s very much an iteration on pre-existing products where its biggest asset is pushing having an endless budget and first party control of the platform to use scale for a pricing advantage.

It does prove that the system itself is not the problem, in case we hadn’t picked up on that with Android and ChromeOS. The issue is having a do-everything free system where some of the do-everything requires you to intervene. That’s not how most people use Windows (or Android, or ChromeOS), and it’s definitely not how you use any part of SteamOS unless you want to tinker past the official support, either. That’s the big lesson, I think. Valve isn’t even trying to push Linux, beyond their Microsoft blood feud. As with Google, it’s just a convenient stepping stone in their product design.

What the mainline Linux developer community can learn from it, IMO, is that for onboarding coupling the software and hardware very closely is important and Linux should find a way to do that on more product categories, even if it is by partnering with manufacturers that won’t do it themselves.

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you’ve missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

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Games are so damn cheap. It’s insane how cheap games are now. Final Fantasy XVI is going for 50 bucks on Steam and that’s an expensive release. Yesterday I bought several Disgaea games for like ten bucks each and those are a good hundred hours a pop. The top seller list on Steam right now includes multiple games cheaper than 20 bucks. And that’s not even counting all the free to play stuff and the constant sales.

There are great looking and playing games out there that cost less than a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn. I had to save for six months to get a game when I was a teenager.

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According to the 100 developers asked out of the 300 speakers at the event, 89% said that they believe that premium AAA games can be “financially successful just by being Buy-to-Play.”

Moving on to challenges facing the industry as a whole, 55% believe it’s caused by market saturation while another 46% point towards the rising development costs of games. Regarding layoffs, 57% said that layoffs will continue either at the same pace or a higher pace over the next 12 months.

All due respect to Gamescom speakers, but I may have some follow-up questions for at least 35 of them.

I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.

I keep trying to explain how Linux advocacy gets the challenges of mainstream Linux usage wrong and, while I appreciate the fresh take here, I’m afraid that’s still the case.

Effectively this guide is: lightly compromise your Windows experience for a while until you’re ready, followed by “here’s a bunch of alien concepts you don’t know or care about and actively disprove the idea that it’s all about the app alternatives.”

I understand why this doesn’t read that way to the “community”, but parse it as an outsider for a moment. What’s a snap? Why are they bad? Why would I hate updates? Aren’t updates automatic as they are in Windows? Why would I ever pick the hardware-incompatible distros? What’s the tradeoff supposed to be, does that imply there is a downside to Mint over Ubuntu? It sure feels like I need to think about this picking a distro thing a lot more than the headline suggested. Also, what’s a DE and how is that different to a distro? Did they just say I need a virtual machine to test these DE things before I can find one that works? WTF is that about?

Look, I keep trying to articulate the key misunderstanding and it’s genuinely hard. I think the best way to put it is that all these “switch to Linux, it’s fun!” guides are all trying to onboard users to a world of fun tinkering as a hobby. And that’s great, it IS fun to tinker as a hobby, to some people. But that’s not the reason people use Windows.

If you’re on Windows and mildly frustrated about whatever MS is doing that week, the thing you want is a one button install that does everything for you, works first time and requires zero tinkering in the first place. App substitutes are whatever, UI changes and different choices in different DEs are trivial to adapt to (honestly, it’s all mostly Windows-like or Mac-like, clearly normies don’t particularly struggle with that). But if you’re out there introducing even a hint of arguments about multiple technical choices, competing standards for app packages or VMs being used to test out different desktop environments you’re kinda missing the point of what’s keeping the average user from stepping away from their mainstream commercial OS.

In fairness, this isn’t the guide’s fault, it’s all intrinsic to the Linux desktop ecosystem. It IS more cumbersome and convoluted from that perspective. If you ask me, the real advice I would have for a Windows user that wants to consider swapping would be: get a device that comes with a dedicated Linux setup out of the box. Seriously, go get a Steam Deck, go get a System76 laptop, a Raspberry Pi or whatever else you can find out there that has some flavor of Linux built specifically for it and use that for a bit. That bypasses 100% of this crap and just works out of the box, the way Android or ChromeOS work out of the box. You’ll get to know whether that’s for you much quicker, more organically and with much less of a hassle that way… at the cost of needing new hardware. But hey, on the plus side, new hardware!

Neat.

It really doesn’t.

He’s not talking about The Sims 4, he’s talking about the terms of the strike and how they align with the games they have in production, as well as expressing confidence that they’ll reach an agreement. Full quote above.

The full quote, which people are clearly not reading because everything sucks:

“We deeply value our talented actors who are an important part of the work we do to deliver the incredible entertainment experiences that our players enjoy around the world. We’re working very closely; this is not an EA-specific situation, this is an industry-specific situation, and we’re working diligently to negotiate at the table. The way it works now in terms of our product specifically is that the strike is limited to games commencing production after September 2023, including live service games. So we don’t expect any near-term disruption to any of the games we have in development or any of the live services we’re currently running. That being said, we’re committed to continuing to bargain in good faith and are hopeful that the parties can expediently resolve our issues at the bargaining table. But we’re not anticipating any significant short-term impact at EA.”

It got marketed mostly as a visual remaster, but it looked similar to the original at a glance. And everybody owns a couple of copies of the original.

It really wasn’t very well marketed at all.

Yeah, this seems like one of those things where people casually discussing the issue are talking about wildly different scales. I, to be clear, am talking about having a hangover or sleeping in a rough position and pinching my neck once in maybe two or three months and refusing to take an analgesic to get through it faster. I get the feeling that what you’re describing is either on a way different level or a rarer interaction or side effect.

Which is why my other comment below still goes: if you need to deal with pain beyond sporadic usage to get through a one-off event, please go talk to a doctor and don’t listen to me or anybody else on the Internet.

Old USB implementation used to be a finicky nightmare, though. You make it sound like it wasn’t changed for a reason, MTP connectivity on Android as it is now is so much more functional, as well as safer.

In any case, that solves the misunderstanding. I thought you meant you couldn’t directly access phone storage anymore, which isn’t the case.

The printer scenario seems like an edge case to me. I mean, MTP has been the default for what? Over a decade? If you have a recent printer you’re probably fine (also, it probably has wifi and a dedicated mobile app or at least enough third party support to be used from your phone regardless). If your printer is older than that you’re probably better served by going through your PC first anyway. Sure, you don’t get direct USB access to printing photos, but now we’re talking about a very specific feature that was in use for a very specific sliver of time, and it requires you to be tethered to a device anyway. I don’t think that’s enough to justify legacy storage support on phones.