Heck a tiny regional bank I worked at with less than 2 dozen locations was constantly flinging data between its Primary and DR datacenters, and they were too small for any dedicated fiber so that was just over standard ISPs (with some locations technically on residential plans because the ISPs didn’t offer any better options than that in the small towns the bank supported)
I think you’re misunderstanding what people are saying. The author of the article is clearly trying to say that major video game studios should stop focusing on high fidelity games, making unrealistic statements about market demands (let’s be real, that’s not how people select what games to purchase. The art style is certainly a factor, I’ve not played games with art styles that don’t jive with me and I’ve certainly had gaming experiences elevated by brilliant artwork, but regardless of art direction, of the gameplay isn’t for me I’m not going to play it) and honestly it feels like the author was told to write an article to support the title rather than reporting on actual industry trends or providing real criticism ongoing industry trends. The entire argument the author is trying to make falls over when you consider any market segment other than the AAA developers
I think the worst part is the author even points to freaking Minecraft and Roblox, both were indie titles when they first launched, and also compared triple-A titles to a live service game and Epic’s tech-demo-turned-Roblox-clone.
Honestly it reads more like they set out to write an article supporting a given narrative and carefully tuned their evidence to fit that narrative.
How about some studios that aren’t hurting and don’t fit that narrative? SCS software which makes Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator hasn’t released a new game since ATS’s launch in 2016 because their business model is to keep selling DLC to the same customers, and invest that money in continuing to refine the existing games. Urban Games has openly stated they exist solely to build the best modern Transport Tycoon game they can, releasing a new iteration every few years with significant game engine improvements each time. N3V Games was literally bought out by a community member of one of it’s earlier titles when it was facing bankruptcy and simply exists to refine the Trainz railroad simulator game. Or there’s the famous example of Bay12Games which released Dwarf Fortress (an entirely text mode game) as freeware and with the “agreement” that they’d continue development as long as donations continued rolling in
The answer isn’t a move to live service games as the author suggests, nor is it to stop developing high fidelity games but simply to make good games. Gaming is one of those rare “if you build it they will come” markets where there’s a practically infinite number of niches to fill and even making a new game in an existing niche can be extremely successful whether that be due to technical differences, design differences or just differences in gameplay. RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Banished all have very similar basic gameplay elements but all can exist without eating eachother’s market share because they’re all incredibly different games. Banished focuses more on city building, RimWorld focuses on story and your colonists ultimately escaping the godforsaken planet they’ve crashed on, and Dwarf Fortress is about building the best dwarf civilization you can before something ultimately causes it’s collapse (because losing is fun!)
Having read the article I don’t see how the comment your replied to is out of context. It’s very in context, especially given the article literally points to highly successful indie games as examples of low fidelity games that are incredibly popular
When I worked for a phone manufacturer I learned that their market research found that features like a headphone jack and SD card slot were pretty exclusively needed at the budget end of the market while the higher end generally didn’t care about the lack of these features. I don’t know that I fully agree with this, but to some degree it kinda makes sense
The offline installers literally are the files to install the game.
It’s as close as we can get in this day to having the disc and installing from disc long after the publisher was bought out and absorbed so many times nobody truly knows exactly who owns the rights to the game anymore. As long as your disc (in this case, offline installer) was stored safely and is still readable you can install it on a compatible computer (and that’s often the harder part is finding a compatible computer!)
changed it from the side of union men to the side of flamboyant, sensitive baristas.
Lol based
Basically all media ratings bodies are weirdly corrupt and apply ratings without any clear rhyme or reason. There’s good reason to largely ignore the ratings as an adult and even as a parent
Bro, they politely asked you not to use potentially hurtful language in an open forum.
Is that really how you react in the real world of someone says “I don’t like that, please stop?” Because that’s some abuser-coded behavior right there
Yup that checks out. Say hi to Betty White for me!
Ah I thought I had remembered their hard drive division being aquired but I was wrong! Per Wikipedia:
At least 218 companies have manufactured hard disk drives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several entrants (including IBM, who invented the HDD) continue in the industry today. Only three manufacturers have survived—Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital
I doubt the high pitched whine that you’re hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is…honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I’ve got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!
And oftentimes some or all of the metadata that helps the filesystem find the files on the drive is stored in memory (zfs is famous for its automatic memory caching) so seek times are further irrelevant in the context of media playback
SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs
Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it’s being backed up (and if it’s not backed up it’s not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I’ll happily give real backup advise if you need it)
In my anecdotal experience across both my family’s various computers and computers I’ve seen bite the dust at work, I’ve not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I’ve only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I’ve never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)
Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don’t need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don’t even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB
Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.
Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)
So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh…check your backups I guess?
ABA was highly recommended for my 3 year old, but we did some research and were put off by some of the horror stories. My local school system fortunately has a 3K program for children with developmental disabilities so we decided to just lean on that and revisit our ABA decision later if needed
US Healthcare is in a pretty bad spot as it is, any durable improvement would be an improvement nonetheless. Just like how the Affordable Care Act was a significant improvement over the wild under-regulated denial-fest that the pre-ACA insurance industry was
I worked in a call center for several years and received no shortage of bizarre threats. Never once did I feel that any of the threats were worth being concerned about. Granted these would be threats over lack of warranty coverage on usually budget model phones so very different from health insurance where the dollar values and stakes are many orders of magnitude higher
Remember, one of the provisions of the ACA was requiring insurance companies to ensure at least 90% of expenditure was directly towards covering care, meaning insurance companies are legally permitted an incredible up to 10% profit margin. For context most retailers have profit margins of 1-2%
That’s relying on them having the political will to do more than half-ass it. Let’s be real, everyone loyal to trump is loyal for one (or more) of three reasons:
These are the same reasons people joined the first Trump administration and literally none of them are attempting to join his second administration meaning they were not able to realize any of their goals through Trump (or they were shown exactly how far they could go before they found the line they could not cross)
Simply put, it’s not an environment conducive to actually realizing policy goals in any incredibly complex interconnected web. The last trump administration tried to block China from international logistics and instead made logistics more robust (and helped the Mexican economy by accidentally encouraging significant investment in manufacturing and logistics there) and got completely deadlocked by infighting when they attempted to realize their wet dream of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare/The Affordable Care Act. I’ll be extremely impressed if a trump Administration manages to actually achieve a meaningful disruption of the Internet, especially with how the rest of the world largely refuses to support his policy goals