Not really… This isn’t people being empowered, this is people being chewed up and spit out

I’m not sure customers are falling for it - this is why voting with your wallet doesn’t work. People rage against games that launch in an unfinished state, particularly when they’re full price. Steam reviews often incorporate price point - statements like “don’t buy this at full price” or “this might have been worth it at $20, but this is not a $70 game” come up a lot

Sales for AAA games are way down, we just saw the biggest failure in gaming history. Casual reading of steam reviews show people clearly have different expectations based on price, Twitter sometimes explodes with anger at specific moves (like Helldivers requiring PSN) and they back off (temporarily), but they always go back to the bullshit

The feedback mechanism of “voting with your wallet” doesn’t communicate this message. Metrics show purchases, refunds, and active users… That’s what fits on a spreadsheet. They see a game failing, but that doesn’t mean they’ve understood why

AAA studios don’t want to understand what makes a game succeed or fail - they just want a formula to min-max ROI. They want strong numbers at launch, but they also want to minimize production costs, and they treat costs (like developers) as line items - they learn the wrong lessons, because they aren’t concerned with the creative part of game design. They want to be the next Madden or assassin’s creed, they want to figure out how to get players to pay $70 + micro transactions (or better yet a subscription too), but they also want their employees to be interchangeable cogs they can push to burn out then replace

AAA gaming is dying from this, but it’s an oligarchy at this point - large corporations are unable to understand nuance or truly innovate - these are things people do when they have autonomy. They don’t do team building or R&D anymore - that’s a gamble that sometimes pays off big, but not in a quarter or two. They aquire then kill off what made the team work in the first place - any individual can tell you that’s a recipe for failure, but by nature they keep the decision making far removed from the people actually doing the work

But then someone will see a spreadsheet and calculate the “missed” revenue, and whoever made that decision either gets replaced or given strict orders next time

Even if they manage to dig their heels in, it will come up again and again. It looks like a money shaped hole, and so organizationally they’ll keep coming back to it

It is a great way to make games, many indie games do this. A team can do this, but a corporation can’t - subtlety doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet

For all we know, they’re literally just passing massive checks in a circle to one another to say “yes, it says right here in our bank records that we spent a combined $100,000,000”, meanwhile only 25% actually goes into the production, and they pocket the rest.

That would be illegal and easily discovered

But you could pay $10M to hire another company to do the sound mixing. They might spend $500k to do the work. You might also be the owner of that company, and the money ends up back in your pocket…And that’s not embezzlement or a kickback, because that’s what it’s called when poor people do it

That’s the thing - AI isn’t about size, it’s about categorizing the state of the world. If you can understand an action in context and possible responses, a Markov chain can learn and respond appropriately with the processing of a calculator - it really doesn’t take much

I think an individual opinion can matter, even k the face of commercial success

But here’s the thing - “I don’t like it” doesn’t cut it. If you can’t tell me why you don’t like the beetles, your opinion is less than worthless

Personally, I think the beetles were great, and I think rush of rain was too. It was the first rouglike platformer shooter I’ve ever heard of… The beetles consistently pushed boundaries, doing it once doesn’t put you on their level

On the other hand, the beetles were able to to that because no one was there to tell them no. I agree with the sentiment - games are art. I’d happily overlook a dozen failures for each success

They’re trying to hedge their bets. Nintendo effectively dropped out of the home console market, Microsoft has transitioned away from the console, so Sony is dipping a toe in

Going along those lines, treat your people better. Retention is always important, but every role in game creation is inherently a skilled artistic job

You can swap out one cashier or factory worker for another, and after an adjustment period, your revenue won’t change much. You can’t swap out one programmer for another - that’s like changing the artist halfway through building a sculpture

You will not get the initial vision, and you need someone far more skilled to make something good out mid way through

Would you give a few hundred dollars and couple dozen hours of learning? Because this is a very achievable goal

It’s kinda grey area to start with - if I install something on your computer to track what websites you visit without consent, that’s illegal, right? Different countries have different laws, they’re generally pretty broad

So then you introduce the EULA - very problematic (as Disney showed us) and no one reads it, but theoretically this is where they outline what the software can do and obtain your consent

Now, on a website they just have to put the EULA somewhere, theoretically they’re just hosting the content, your browser is in control. The rules are a bit more lax because of the nature of the interaction

But now, you can visit CNN or BuzzFeed, agree with their EULAs, and unknowingly Facebook and Reddit (websites you’ve potentially never visited), are tracking you. You never agreed to this in any form, the fact it’s even happening is obscured from you, even the sites hosting the share buttons probably don’t know

It gets less grey area if you live in the EU, they’ve passed a suite of privacy laws that are sometimes ignored

Oh no, you’re not signing your life away. You’d be dead

You’re signing away the right to get any justice for those you care about

One of the earlier methods was the share button image. That button lives on Reddit’s server, and your browser might set the URL from the referer when it requests the image. It definitely has your IP, so they can try to tie that to an account.

When you click a link, it also likely has a referer URL of the page you came from. These are both things that the browser doesn’t have to do

When you click share, they now often add URL params that track who shared the link and who clicks it

There’s tons of methods, some you can shut down with a browser or add ons, some you

I’m split, but I lean slightly towards no. On one hand, it could be good for discoverability, and it would help my efforts to make a client-side algorithm

On the other hand, it will make one of Lemmy’s problems worse - engagement. Some people will vote less, and it’s already feeling a little quieter around here as the numbers settled after the Reddit Exodus. I doubt it’ll be a massive change, but a .5% decrease in voting, permanently, could make a difference

Ultimately, you can see it on federated platforms, so shrug