Your thinking is a little bit backwards. The $70 price point of video games was not set by digital storefronts… it was set by physical media.
$70 is where the development cost, marketing, physical production and shipping can be sold at a profit.
So maybe you should be asking why I can buy a disc of Madden 27 at $70 while you can’t buy it at $50.
Where are you getting hundreds from? If a $30 sale is $13 digitally, that means the production overhead can be no more than $17 for the media… and it couldn’t be that high, because LRG needs a cut as well as the publisher and developer.
Wow, at those rates Limited Run Games must be hemorrhaging money by selling physical media at $30 a copy.
So looking at the projected earnings of 190,000,000,000 yen, that means they are a-okay with losing 10%, which comes out to a missing $11,996,123 in sales.
I wish I was in a position where I could shrug off 11 million dollars.
We’ve slid so far that the Xbox One reveal with internet verification of every disc is now celebrated.
The title changed, and the article got an edit at the end saying they used “reverse engineering” incorrectly.
AI slop has affected all those things to some people.
Have you had your insurance claim get denied by AI yet? Have you started rationing your remaining medication? Did you lose sleep over it? Did you stress out so hard that you developed a twitch? Pushing away family and friends so they wouldn’t see you at your worst? Have you tried searching for where to get your medicine only to find… slop?
Have you had AI increase the shelf price on a food item because you looked like you could afford it? Did you skip a meal because you know you can’t qualify for SNAP, but also don’t have income because you are one of the 101,000+ laid off due to AI? Have you tried searching for sales and coupons only to find that they are all slop?
How demoralizing do you think it is, having all that happen, yet spending hours daily on job applications, only for them to be dumped in the trash by AI before a hiring manager even sees your qualifications? or even better: the job you found online was never real to begin with.
Do you know what it feels like to have a countdown to homelessness? Unable to find any helpful resources online because every. single. website. is. slop.
Do you know what happens to a person who recognizes their deteriorating mental health, goes to a therapist, and is forced to first converse with an AI?
Thankfully I’m nowhere near that deep in the hole, but there are people out there that are. I’ve got coworkers who fell hard. It’s not pretty.
I value my privacy too much to elaborate on how AI slop has fully impacted me, but I am confident you would agree I am not living a good life at the moment.
The destruction of the internet was merely the cherry on top that everybody can relate to.
One of my coworkers was once tasked with taking an encrypted database over to a hospital via sneakernet. He posted a selfie to twitter while on the subway with the handcuffed device, saying he was doing James Bond missions or something to that affect. He got a call SO FAST by our irate director asking him WTF he thought he was doing.
I used to go to a movie theatre that made their own skits to play before a movie would start. They’d take public domain movies, yank about 3 minutes out of it and dub them with corny dialog.
Man… I miss that place. 10000% beats commercials and the same exact trailer design for every single movie preview.
I don’t know if this is a hot take but-
In my mind, Aero is peak UI. It had contrast, depth, high information density in all the applications. Well… high-ish. That’s also when they started putting Ribbon in everything. I’m not a fan of Ribbon menus.
I honestly cannot believe how bad the new UI feels. It’s like they just flattened all elements and reduce information density by increasing whitespace, followed by a shrug and no additional thought into what was lost and what should be added. Which… now that I think about it, is Windows 8. hmm.
I don’t know about you, but AI slop has made my quality of life considerably worse. I can’t find anything online. It’s all slop sites.
I still keep a WRT54Gv3 around with DD-WRT because of devices that require WEP. (cough cough)
It’s really nice having it set up as a subnet with a ton of restrictions. Something it would be incapable of stock.
Yeah… I’m going to shut up now. I wasn’t trying to have any argument. I was only saying that putting a specially crafted media into hardware designed to play that specific media has always been nice.
surely you see the irony in suggesting a person wanting to play a PC title use a PS1 emulator. An emulator only possible because it targets a very specific set of hardware.
Nah, I’ve hit stuff that can’t run in it. No amount of futzing with the IRQ settings would restore audio, that kind of stuff.
Regardless, the issues you describe is not necessarily the way things have to be. I mentioned the Evercade in another post elsewhere. It’s a console made with cartridges. You put the cartridge in. You play the game. You don’t need to subscribe to anything. You don’t need to upgrade to another version. You don’t need to purchase the missing chapter.
If I made a game today for the Evercade, yes it would need to go through certification, but in 20 years, if I put that Evercade cartridge in my Evercade… It’ll play. No ongoing maintenance patches. No workarounds. No troubleshooting by the end-user.
perfectly tuned for it… for how long though?
That’s why GoG introduced the preservation program. So they can continue maintaining that software. But it’s a strict list.
How many indie titles on PC aged out of the platform and have no maintainer?
You get what I’m saying? Even the older console titles can still play on the console they were designed for… but PC is so nebulous that both software and hardware can age out of use.
A person who purchased Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for PC would be unable to launch the game in any modern OS. But if they have it on PS1, it still works.
A person who purchased Minecraft in 2011 can no longer play that game on the same computer they purchased it from. But if they purchased Minecraft on PS3… it still works today the same as the day it was purchased.
And once again, I must insist, I am not saying PC is a bad platform. I’m saying PC is a moving platform. Having a set target is a good thing for development and playability. We here are all a-okay with workarounds and emulation layers. But sometimes it’s a good thing to just have the person sit down and start playing without troubleshooting.
alright boys, we have a mission to take out SirSamuel’s sister so we can use “anywho” again.