Damn $32.50 a month for the full tier? That puts them way above every other MMO.

In functional programming, everything is an expression (of frustration).

Who would buy cigarettes? Who would buy a Cybertruck? Who would buy meat? Just because you wouldn’t choose it doesn’t mean it’s a choice that must be banned.

Would you rather buy a game that you know is going to die in a year, or the same game but that can be played for as long as you want?

I would rather I get to make that choice instead of it being imposed onto me. You can make your choice. I can make mine.

Companies dont tell you beforehand that they are going to shut games down. They usually dont even know they will, so I dont see how your example holds up here. Maybe you could explain.

But what if they did? Some places have already put laws requiring sellers to inform purchasers if they are selling a licence instead of ownership. If the terms were clear at the point of sale, and I agree to the terms, what’s the issue? You’re allowed to think it’s a bad deal, but why does that mean I’m not allowed to accept it?

Its like if Samsung would remotely lock your TV making you unable to turn it on again because they stopped “supporting” it.

Right. If they explained that at point of sale they would be doing that, and I was alright with it, what’s the problem? I understand you wouldn’t accept that deal. That’s fine. You wouldn’t buy that TV. I don’t see why I must be prevented from buying it too.

The government should update consumer law to prohibit publishers from disabling video games (and related game assets / features) they have already sold without recourse for customers to retain or repair them.

If a company says they’re going to disable a video game a year after I purchase it and I won’t be able to retain or repair it and I agree to those terms, can I still buy it?

It’s not going to get the signatures because the average person does not care about this. I play a lot of games and even I don’t care. If you don’t like the game, don’t buy it. Why does there need to be regulation to stop me from buying it too?

It’s a Japanese patent. I’m not sure how it would hold up internationally, but Pocketpair is also a Japanese company and this lawsuit is entirely within the Japanese legal system. That probably gives Nintendo a bit of an advantage since they’re such a large and iconic Japanese corporation.

The “update” is from a month ago. Pocketpair shared the patents they are accused of infringing and the payments Nintendo wants.

The patents are for “throwing an object in 3D space to capture a target” (throwing a pokeball) and “moving characters to a virtual field when an event is triggered” (entering a battle) the payment requested is 10 million yen or 64,000 USD. A paltry sum for a billion dollar company suing over a game that made tens of millions.

The patents were awarded to Nintendo after Palword had already released a trailer for their game showing gameplay. Pocketpair also released an earlier game called Craftopia which is Palworld but the pals are just straight up animals. It has the same systems Palworld does but didn’t sell very well.

A newer update is that Palworld has since released a patch that modified how their capture and summon system works, likely in an attempt to make Nintendo happy.

Palworld Update v0.3.11 Notes:

Player: Changed the behaviour of summoning player-owned Pals so that they are always summoned near the player

UI: The reticle will now only be displayed when aiming

Edit: there are actually 3 patents. The third one is for the player character being able to ride on another character.

Last Week Tonight has an episode on food delivery apps. They talk about how these apps don’t seem to help anyone. The customer pays more than before, the restaurant loses money, the delivery drivers lose money, and the app loses money.

The general idea seems to be that venture capitalists believe they can change the way the system works so that everyone eventually relies on an app to order food. Once ordering food without using an app becomes impossible, they can charge whatever they want and make a killing.

You hear the one about the COBOL programer? In 1999 many people were worried about a bug with dates that could crash their systems. Unfortunately, a lot of really important systems were still using the outdated COBOL programing language. A search was done to find someone who could fix these systems. The last programmer who knew COBOL was found and they made a lot of money fixing up these systems. So much money that, once they received a cancer diagnosis, they cyrogenically froze themselves hoping that a cure for their disease would be found in the future. The programmer is awoken one day in a lab filled with high tech robotics. A person who is seemingly half machine themseves stands before them. The programmer asks “Have you found a cure for my disease?”. The person replies “We have cured all diseases. You are the COBOL programmer, correct?” “That’s right” “Great! It is the year 9999 and we have a problem we need your help with.”

Anyone who gives steam $100 can upload as many “games” any “game” they want. There is no quality control.

It’s a common scam to throw some free assets together to make “collect coin” and then swap the coin asset out with a stick and call it “collect stick” and then swap out the stick with a brick and call it “collect brick” then upload all of them to Steam and bundle them into a 50 game pack with a sale price of $100 (95% off!) and hope someone buys the collection thinking they’re getting 50 real games at a steep discount.

Here’s an example. It’s a 33 game bundle for 99% off its original price of $8,579! They’re all the same “game” with different free assets made by the same dev who uploaded 167 versions of this “game” to steam on March 28, 2024 and priced each around $200.

What about Japan?

That’s the joke

I would ask for a refund.

He has refused to allow Ukrainian troops to use Starlink within Russian occupied regions to avoid “conflict escalation”.

It seems like it was a DMCA takedown request. Anyone can submit these to content hosters and the hoster has to follow the process, which typically means removing the content until it can be proven that it isnt violating copyright. The problem isn’t the takedown request, but that it was given to itch.io’s registrar instead of itch.io itself. It’d be like asking to takedown youtube from the web because someone reposted your video on it.

It might not be the engine. Some companies just don’t care much about optimization when they can just tell their players to buy better hardware.

Take GTA5 for example. It had a notoriously long load screen when starting up. Ranging from 2 minutes to 10 minutes depending on the read speeds of your storage drive. A modder ended up finding the problem. The code to load up the items in the game opened and read a file, but there was a bug that caused it to read through the entire file for each item loaded. The file was being read thousand of times. The modder changed one line of code and the loading time was reduced significantly. This was a bug that plagued GTA5 for years, caused by a single line of code, that the company didn’t fix because their fix was to buy better hardware.

Oh good, I thought it was just me! I have an older card and can barely keep 30fps with everything set to low. Good to know even top of the line $1,000+ cards can’t keep 60fps on max settings.

I wonder if they’ll be able to patch that. I remember Starfield had framerate issues on launch but a patch fixed it.

It wouldn’t be a STALKER game if it wasn’t filled with bugs on release