Broadly speaking it sounds a bit like Antitrust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

But I haven’t seen it in quite a while so I’m not sure how well specifics line up.

Over the years, I’ve become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn’t, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.

For retro games, that means my process is:

• Evercade - I’m a huge fan of the Evercade ecosystem and if a game is available there I will play it there first.
• NSO - For games not available on Evercade, my next stop will be Switch Online.
• Collections - If a game isn’t available on NSO, I’ll see if it’s available via a collection. Think Castlevania Collections, Arcade Archives, Namco Museums, etc. For these I’ll typically check reviews before picking it up and make sure the games play well as that’s not always a guarantee.
• Unlicensed emulation - Only at that point will I fire up a game on my raspberry pi.

Though honestly I can’t really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I’ll just decide to play something else instead.

Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.

I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.

Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.

They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.

Oh, interesting. I also initially read it as a thinly-veiled threat but I think you’re right it was more of a “will i be assaulted”. Still a weird thing to say.

Certainly I’m not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn’t cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult’s life.

We’ve already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?

You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I’m misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I’m not sure I’m following.

Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?

Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?

I agree that an apprentice working with a single “master” probably wouldn’t work very well. But I’m also not sure how frequently other apprenticeships still operate on that model. Perhaps it’s more common for other trades due to a preponderance of independent contractors, but there’s no saying that the apprentice needs to be beholden to one individual “master.”

You’re right, you’re probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the “college intern” grunt work of a software dev team.

The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.

But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I’d just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don’t have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.

It really, really, really doesn’t take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I’ve worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.

Let’s make that even easier to do.

Well maybe you couldn’t, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to set up appropriate technical instruction infrastructure as part of a union or guild through which this apprenticeship would go. Or even that one doesn’t already exist.

Often, a plumbing or electrical apprentice will come up through a technical high school. Either a technical high school or a technicial continuing education program at a community college, say.

Heck my local technical high school offers an “Information Technology” vocational program that sounds an awful lot like that program I went through in college. Wouldn’t it have been great to save 4 years and countless dollars?

For programming jobs, this gap is currently mostly filled with “bootcamps.” Increasingly you’ll find bootcamp programs that are free but garnish your salary for some time after you’ve been placed in a job, or the bootcamp is run by a company directly and you get paid to go through the bootcamp after signing a contract saying you’ll work for them for a year or two afterward or else need to pay back the price of the program.

These can vary from “pretty good, actually” to “predatory” to “a little bit like indentured servitude.” Wouldn’t it be great if there were a union or guild around these practices? Or to encourage more kids to enter trade schools that offer vocational programs they’re interested in?

Not really into travelogues like this (and this was no exception), but I will say I love me an Amtrak trip.

In 2015, I rode from Portland, OR to Boston, MA. Took 5 days, through Sacramento, Chicago, and DC. I was traveling alone so every evening in the dining car I was seated across from a different Giant Train Nerd and got to learn about the engine on the current train, the type of track we were riding on, who owns or owned the land, really interesting stuff.

Both before and after that I’ve taken trains between Boston and NYC several times, and taken the Auto Train (which carries your car!) between DC and Florida.

Every trip makes me wish I had the leisure time and the country had the infrastructure such that I could avoid even more plane travel and take a train instead.

So I definitely get the urge to write a meandering travelogue about just such a trip. But as you can see, the same information fits just fine into a reasonably-sized internet comment.

I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.

Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.

Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.

I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.

Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.

I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.

I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.

I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”

Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.

But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.

I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?

I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.

But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.

Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?

Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?

Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?

If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?

I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

Okay. If the article is misleading or wrong, it shouldn’t be posted. If it is found to be incorrect after posting, is it better to fix the title and let the comments sort it out or to fully delete the post?

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.

I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.

It seems to me that this is a dangerous game being played here. There is no ruling here that will lead to an overall positive outcome or be seen as legitimate by broad swaths of the country. I see any ruling creating more trouble than it solves.

To be clear, defeating Trump one last time in an election also isn’t going to solve anything, given how far gone the GOP is at this point. But it’ll be a damn sight better than the kind of political games that will start popping up if this works and better than giving Republicans a way to claim Trump was found not guilty of insurrection in court if it doesn’t.