Yes! That’s how they can unionize now.

Instagram is, uh, Meta? It was gobbled up just as it was taking off.

Tiktok couldn’t be gobbled, and is being beat down by legislators until they sell to US tech firms.

Well, you see, I deserve free software for my hobbies, or even my business. You deserve to suck shit and die in a gutter. /s

These are usenet data sales. Usenet is an old network of distributed discussion groups that predates the web by about a decade. It contains a large trove of media and software - particularly older media and software - that is easy to acccess because it’s not a P2P network that is reliant others keeping their shares alive.

Many usenet providers offer bulk data plans, rather than continual subscriptions. This means you buy x GB of bandwidth, and you use it on whatever time table you like.These are great if you don’t do a lot of downloading, or if you’re just trying it out, or if you’re using usenet as a secondary or tertiary source for things.

Like the fesiverse, most usenet providers do not provide a full view of the whole network, so it can also be good to have a secondary provider that has different retention policies, so a lot of usenet users will buy these data blocks for that purpose, as well.

GoG isn’t the publisher. Y’all don’t read the shit you agree to, and know fuck all about media distribution. You’ve never owned a video game, a movie, or even a book that isn’t in the public domain. You’ve only ever owned licenses for personal use, and those licenses have always been provisional and revokable. Always. Your ignorance is not change that.

You really need to look at what you’re buying. Whether it’s a download, a DVD, or damn floppy disk, you’re still just buying a license. A very revokable license. If it’s online, the publisher can cut you off.

So, they’re both out to fuck everyone, and just playing for different teams?

The buyers are the Guillmots and Tencet, which are the groups who already control everything. It’s just a way to get scrutiny off of them.

If the people putting money in deserve to be paid for that money, it can be treated as a fixed term loan, with an established interest rate. That makes it a business expense.

Profit is what’s left over after everyone is paid for their work, and the costs of materials, housing, and maintenance - invluding the maintenance of debts - are covered. It’s either what you’ve over-charged your customers, or underpaid your employees.

And that’s wrong.

Oh, he’s not complaining anymore.

Has an MBA ever contributed anything of value?

Nah, they pay so poorly that you actually need to be invested in actually wanting to make games to take a job there. But you have to keep in mind that about 40% of people working on a game are not what the consumer world sees as ‘creatives’. Software developers have to be invested in what they’re doing, and often have to be really creative problem solvers, but it’s not a “creative industry”, so their contributions often go overlooked.

From the game design and art side, though, it’s absolutely not an indie publisher. Development is highly collaborative, often involving thousands of contributors across multiple studios that span 2 or 3 continents. There isn’t room for an auteur junior game designer, intermediate programmer, or individual environmental artist. The people who get to exercise creative liberties are the leads, and there’s a handful of them on any game.

This is true basically on any project at any game studio of any appreciable size.

Where Ubisoft really kills the process is in editorial. All of the big publishers have editorial and marketing departments that work closely with each other to try and guide the creative outputs of those project leads towards an outcome that will see some amount of market success. The expectation and goal isn’t even a runaway hit, just for the game to find an audience large enough to pay for the endeavour.

Ubisoft’s editorial department is very influential, which you can see by how every single one of their games looks and feels exactly the fucking same. Everything interesting, unique, charming, or truly creative you do gets chiseled and sanded down into the same shape as everything else once the project actually starts coming together.

It’s a soul crushing process, and if you resist it, you get labelled as “not a team player” and slowly relegated to the back of the room.

Yeah, product managers and executives will never find a performance metric they won’t immediately pollute. They seem totally immune to the idea that once you start trying to directly impact them, they lose all meaning.

When I was interviewing for my first job in the video games industry, I came across an anecdote that spelled the whole thing out to me. Some game team discovered that players who completed their tutorial in under X amount of minutes (let’s say 10, to have a concrete number to play with) where significantly more likely to make an in-game purchase (I worked in mobile gaming). So, the team was instructed to reduce the length of the tutorial so that almost anyone could complete it in 10 minutes or less.

Weirdly enough, this did not work.

Decision makers who “use data” to “drive decisions” seem to totally lack the ability to consider what the data means, who their customers are, or why people behave in the ways that they do. It’s exhausting.

Ubisoft isn’t a coherent entity. It doesn’t want anything.

I don’t say this to be glib, or to “well acshually” anything. I say it because it’s core to their issues. The place is a snake pit, where anyone with any kind of sway is trying to Game-of-Thrones themselves into higher positions of power and prestige. The people who are supposed to be helping you make better games are actually just focused on getting some kind of win over Jean-Michelle over on that other project, so that when the time comes to jump to a different position, you have the social capital.

This involves focusing on increasingly niche performance KPIs that change at the drop of a hat. I’m talking really boutique vanity metrics that have nothing to do with enjoyment or sales.

On the business end of things, it also means real geniuses saying things like “streamers should have to get licensing agreements before using out games”, and saying so publicly enough that everybody in the company hears that you’ve said it.

And this is without even touching on the sexual assault and harassment allegations, or the abuses of power.

Thr company cannot want anything because its constituent parts are too distracted by and busy with self-interested civil war, rather than working together to establish any kind of coherence.

Ubisoft isn’t a video game publisher. They’re an office politics survival game. I’m very glad I got out of there when I did.

And sitting on the couch with their dicks in their hands is “hard work” for them, but it’s just jerking off for the rest of us. These assholes consider themselves working when they sleep, because them being rested is “good for the business”.

It’s auto-complete. It knows that “4” is the most common substring to follow “2 + 2” in its training. It’s not actually doing addition.

Most people came to Lemmy becaise they felt personally agreived by the Reddit API issue. They don’t give a shit about what’s good for the Internet, or society.

They’re here out of protest, and would happily give their all to the next Billionaire that makes them feel smarter than the average bear.

Ignoring the Nazis in the room, rather than barring them from entey, is enabling Nazis

To a platform that has been on the record about not kicking ouy Nazis, though.

They’re leaving Musk, but they’re not leaving his financial backers, and they’re entering into the same kind of “possibly sold to a fascist despot at a moment’s notice” situation they just left.

It’s short sighted, perfirmative, and doesn’t actually make the Internet better at all. It just tells us that people prefer a closed Internet owned by billionaires.