I agree we don’t know if they’re loss leaders yet. I will say that even if the hardware is priced at a loss, though, it’ll sell more Steam games. Ultimately I don’t know if it really matters.

Though yeah, people should get past headlines. Lol

Before the Internet got social media, we had the GameFAQs voting thing; you’d get head to head popularity contests of coolest characters. Cloud always won, but it was nice to check daily to see who was most popular.

I still use GameFAQs, though. Even after the buyout, the guides are important to those of us RetroAchevement-ing through some older titles.

This is such a weird timeline. Or maybe not, I guess I could also imagine Mr. Rogers doing what Ms. Rachel’s been doing.

Haha, your quote is almost the exact line I’ve read. HR email was literally saying how they should talk to them first and about them failing. Lol

I wish Nancy Pelosi only the best in private life, but let this be the final time we utter her name.

I can’t speak to Rockstar directly but I do know some game companies send anti-union propaganda emails regularly. To take the next step and fire people is entirely believable given when I’ve seen HR push out.

You basically described the economic concept of consumer surplus. When a product is entirely dependent on the price a consumer is willing to pay because the supply is infinite, the natural result is… this.

Except they shouldn’t be price discriminating; it’s easier and more effective to just offer tiered pricing structures (e.g. collectors editions) and eventual sales (e.g. 50% off after a year) to hit people at different places on the supposed consumer surplus curve. As you note, the undermines your confidence in the prices but you’re likely a little lower on the curve compared to the “must have on day one” crowd.

That said, the whole theory also explains why freemium is so attractive. When there’s no price minimum, the optimal price is 0 and you work your way up with features and perks (while also raising the price people are willing to pay by getting them hooked). It’s all nasty business, lol

Oh no, Trump’s gonna enact more tariffs in retribution isn’t he.

Mumble was… fine. My friends actually moved to Discord from Mumble for our MMO stuff but that was primarily because it was easier to invite randos to the chat. That quality makes it almost impossible to break away from atm.

I recall the latency being only a little worse than Discord, but I think that’s because a friend set up the server at his work as a side thing (he also hosted Minecraft and Terraria). It’s not too complex to setup, but your quality will depend a lot on the computer and network you’re running. At least, it did for us, back in the day.

We’ve thought about alternatives to Discord. Old names were Ventrilo and TeamSpeak but they’re just not very modern. Plus, now almost every chat app has voice, too. Just, for features, it’s hard to beat Discord at this… though I’m willing to read the other comments to get for ideas, too. Lol

If it makes you feel better, I’ve noticed a lot, lot more private security in the uber-rich neighborhood I have to pass to get to work.

They’re scared.

Sounds like some Filipino style crackdown, which did actually eventually lead to ICC arrest. Trial pending, anyway.

Imagine if they went full exploitive and made the ice cream flavor but then added an Israel flavor in some twisted fair and balanced way to undercut Jerry’s wishes.

Um… Slay the Princess, like, last night. Sure it’s marketed as a psychological horror game but it’s actually pretty funny.

That said, I’m also often streaming things with friends and we riff the whole time so even the least funny games ever will get a laugh at some point. Lol

Seeing CA propositions get rigged with misinformation and tricky language suggests to me that direct democracy might also not work without proper safeguards.

Marketing weirdly effective, for one. They pump a large portion of their budgets into hype and they make just enough back to keep going. It’s like the same people who watch an ad for a fast food place and go even though it’s never as advertised.

And most isn’t direct marketing. They very much pay influencers to buy this slop and worse. You pay a half million to a guy to make something look popular and it becomes popular. It’s very annoying.

Oh that makes sense, the codes probably open source. Those goons probably have minimal experience actually developing an app from scratch.

Oh no this one I know is real, I just mean, imagine how incredibly unlikely a story it’d be if they joined Lemmy or a Piefed instance.

They don’t really fit bluesky either but it’s popular enough I can see them try, lol

Edit: or wait, did you mean Truth Social being federated? Cause that’d be Not the Onion material lol

Now we need a parody article telling us the Whitehouse started hosting a fediverse instance. For once I don’t think people would eat that onion, lol

This is the worst Weekend At Bernie’s sequel, and that includes the weird, racist voodoo one.

Yeah, that tracks with what I see, at least. Either it’s used as an excuse for layoffs that likely would happen anyway given the market, or they’re just included in a workflow without firing (the US was already in bad shape after COVID, with tech companies already laying off people they over-hired during lockdown)

I’ve got a friend who pays under the table to a guy to write and edit instructional videos, and still does that since there’s never enough videos to produce for her project. Just, now, the guy uses AI in his workflow and… I’d say maybe produces at about the same pace (fact checking the AI takes time, lol).

But basically, AI didn’t replace her copy writer / editor, they just scaled up (or at least, attempted to, lol).