I hope so, but it’s still too early to know for sure if this the main event or just another temporary hickup.

The insane investment in data-center capacity stinks of capital misallocation - actual productive capacity being used to make things that in average have a negative ROI - rather than merelly money gambled in the modern day casino.

The Find Out stage is way worse when actual economic value has been wasted in useless stuff during the Fuck Around part than when it it was just money being used to buy overvalued virtual-value-tokens, since whilst in the latter case the money just changed hands, in the former the economic value was wasted and is gone for good.

Bear hugs?!

So, both technically and rhetorically a wanker.

Last time they tried it for gaming - with Stadia - it failed miserable.

It makes some sense for things like office applications (though of late the trust in using American and American-owned service providers for that has plummeted, at least in Europe), but for gaming it has so far failed miserably.

Even the whole artificial bottleneck of data centers being the only place where the most advanced hardware can be found would only translate into gaming moving to be cloud-based if game makers did not react to the current PC components crush by reducing the hardware demand of their products and instead all fully bet on cloud-based gaming as the future, a stupid bet at multiple levels not only due to the risk that gamers would overwhelming chose the games of those game makers who dissented and fit their games to the available home PC hardware instead of the cloud-based one but also because it could give massive influence over the success or not of those games to the cloud gaming services suppliers who could just demand more money to run it in their systems at all or to run them at higher speeds.

In summary, the idea that gaming would shift towards cloud-based gaming instead of going in the direction of continuing supporting last gen hardware, isn’t really supported by the results of past attempts at that or the comparative business outcomes for game maker from chosing one over the other.

Looks like the good old “Didn’t took a right at the crossroads and continued forward instead and then kept on insisting ‘I know the way’” driving problem.

Lebensraum

* POP *

I think we have some competition against Kissinger for the top of “Dead Evil Americans” rankings.

Not the previous poster, but personally I prefer that the application I use to organize my games collection and launch games is store independent, so something like Lutris or Heroic Launcher.

The independent launchers actually integrate with multiple stores, don’t constantly shove adverts under your nose, aren’t designed to try and make you buy more stuff or be tied as much as possible to a store and, at least in my experience of using Lutris and Steam side by side, tend to be way more flexible in terms of configuration around and use of your games (for example, I can launch my games in Lutris sandboxed with networking disabled using with something like Firejail, which I can’t with Steam).

Frankly, even only the first of those things - integrating with multiple stores, thus supporting my entire games collection - would be enough for me to favor independent games launchers.

So libraries have turned in to dens of Hookers & Blow?!

It’s a great way of doing something that was already done a thousand times and which will never need to be supported or improved on.

The very opposite of the kind of software that’s either need in a company large enough to need in-house development or whose business model is software products or services.

I’ve lived in a couple of countries in Europe, including The Netherlands.

The Netherlands is extremely Neoliberal and has been for decades now - politicians there would NEVER have the government own more stuff, no matter how much good that could do for the population in general.

The entire system is setup to amplify the power of Money and the single biggest form of Discrimination out there as measured by the Hurt and Harm it causes is Wealth Discrimination.

This shit is not an unexpected flaw of this system, it’s a desired feature by those who have been shaping it over the years.

Yeah, I used almost exactly the last method you described.

It’s the same kind of advice that used to float in the Tech Startup world before it became dominated by money men and frauds: the best project is one that scratches an itch you have.

If you’re to the left of Kissinger, you’re a “leftist” to the kind of people who think secret shadowban lists which are dynamically fetched from an external server are a good thing.

Name fits!

Judging by their push for things like Civil Society Surveillance and making Money and those who have most of it be a higher Power than a state controlled by democratically elected representatives (i.e. to turn Democracy into Oligarchy), I would say it’s actually Fascism-adjacent.

It’s not paranoia when somebody was, in fact, watching you.