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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 14th, 2025

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  • If you go back 20, 30 years ago you would never be able to make a living as a musician in an indie project. Nowadays you have an amazing and frankly mind blowing amount of very talented artists making wonderful and unique music that also affords them a living. I love music man, so I know that it’s never been a better time to be a fan of music especially if you like stuff that breaks boundaries. There is more difficulty becoming huge, but again that’s how it works now. huge artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé etc are basically a dying breed. The AI slop thing is more about chillhop artists etc having difficulty because their music is not differentiated in any way and the people who listen to it are not actually looking at who the artists is 99% of the time. Artists will have to adapt and make music that is more unique now instead of hoping that they get on the queue of people who are not paying attention to what they are listening to.

    The layoffs are proof of what I’m saying. Huge studios with thousands of employees are no longer sustainable, therefore they need to shed weight. The era of AAA 500million+ budget video games is coming to a close. More studios will close, more people will lose their jobs. From there a lot of smaller companies will spring up and that will be the gaming environment for the next 10 years or so.

    I’ve been gaming all my life, I turned 30 recently. And I think the last 5 years have been some of the best the industry has ever had, and it was all thanks to the indie scene and the AA scene. There has never been more variety at this level of quality ever before, that’s for sure. The only thing that may come close was the 90s when you basically had a similar scene to what we have now.

    All of this to say that from the perspective of the consumer, gaming/music/movies and tv are fantastic right now. But it’s become much more atomized, you have lots of niche shows, music acts and videogames as opposed to what we had before were there were a lot of larger properties but they all were a little dumbed down because they had to appeal to a large demographic within its niche.

    The people who most praise Gamepass are indie developers. All the time. The ones that complain the most are the AAA studio employees for a reason, it threatens their entire model.

    Does it suck for the developers, yes, I feel for them. But this is the market shifting to reflect consumer behavior and preference.

    Edit: Btw it really shows you haven’t even looked at gamepass, because it hardly has any AAA games that are not MS properties. And the ones it’s has are quite old. So it’s not how people find success in Gamepass, at all.




  • I disagree, because fundamentally Gamepass is a great deal for consumers. And it’s also a good deal for developers if they know how to use it strategically. Like if your game came out a year ago, and its sales are stalling you can go to Microsoft and ask for a big lump sum, put your game there and stop worrying about month to month sales while you develop the next thing. People like me get to play a game they wouldn’t have never bought otherwise and they get the money to develop the next thing.

    It’s not the best deals for all consumers, but it is for many. For example I don’t give a rats ass about owning a “library” because I very very rarely replay games, I have very little time for gaming and the type of game I prefer tend to be on the longer side. Gamepass is great because in between those 50+ hour games I have a large selection of games to choose from and I get to play a bunch of games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise because I wasn’t willing to pay $50 or more for them, like for example Lies of P. Then there’s the exclusive AAA from Microsoft which I happen to enjoy like Doom, Halo, and Gears of War. It saves me a lot of money.

    Will Gamepass die at some point? Maybe. Probably. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s no signs that it is dying right now, nor that it is harming the industry at all. In fact it has allowed games that otherwise not see the light of day to become viable.









  • If I lived in a city where there are lots of different retailers that carry varieties of products then maybe I wouldn’t use Amazon. But when you live in a more rural area where the selection is limited and you like better stuff, there’s really not many other options.

    It also seems like a very one sided criticism of Amazon. No corporation is good, and Amazon might very well be evil™️ but not everything about it is negative. It has also brought thousands of jobs to rural or semi rural areas that pay better than anything else in the area. They increase access to products that people like me wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. And they are actively trying to disrupt the healthcare industry by lowering prices and giving greater access to healthcare to people who are far from cities.

    I also suspect that these descriptions of working conditions at Amazon centers seem to be cherry picked and might be attributed more to bad managers than company policy, because I’ve met people who work at Amazon warehouses and they don’t complain about this kind of stuff at all. In fact they seem to generally like their jobs.








  • I don’t think that’s true, the game ran very well on Series X on release. I know because I sunk like 90 hours on it in the first week. It ran like shit in all last Gen hardware including PC, because people with the then new 30 series Nvidia graphics cards were also reporting the game ran fine. I think CDPR just did not optimize it at all.