The only solace I take in the enshittification of the web and the resulting rise in prices, is that we might see (be forced into) a return to the small web and an escape from the stranglehold that big tech and social media has had on us for the last 15 years.

If we’re lucky, the late-stage capitalism effect of ruining companies long term futures for short term gains might happen to entire industries instead of companies.

The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.

I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.

It would have been during your last state elections, the option with the little “R” next to its name.

I like my kindle as much as the next person, as well as self host a book repo, but physical books are absolutely not a novelty of the past.

Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.

I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.

I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:

• They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
• Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
• Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
• Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.

Valve literally can’t charge you for their user services because you’re not stuck on their hardware. The very moment they do, they’ll lose all the user goodwill that has made them the default in their space and everybody can just pack up and move to another storefront or even just pirate their games. Valve has to eat those costs at the expense of everything else.”, they have no choice.

Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online

What you’re both failing to grasp here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.

As console adoption increased, so did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.

it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player

Every other console did not have free multiplayer. Xbox Live always cost money.

You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…? Buddy that shit costs literal millions a year.

Nintendos online user services were never free. They went from not having them, to having them and charging money.

And yes Steam is eating a metric shit ton of costs to give you those services for free. Because PCs are an open platform, they have to compete to keep you on their storefront. They eat all those costs because you don’t have to buy new hardware in order to switch.

These are very, very simple concepts you’re failing to grasp.

I’m not super familiar with Syncthing, but judging by the name I’d say Syncthing is not at all meant for backups.

Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.

They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.

I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.

Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.

Platform infrastructure like PSN costs an inordinate amount of money. People owning games they paid for does not cost you any money.you already made your money back by selling them the ownership.

No lie you can and do fix Minthara and become one of the most wholesome a devoted couples in the game.

I don’t mind subscriptions for ongoing infrastructure as much. My problem is with using a subscription to replace ownership.

I’m not much of an Apple fan, I just like to get my privacy where I can. And with over a decade of experience in cybersecurity I can confidently say that as much as you shouldn’t blindly trust Apple, they at least give you a number of tools to increase your privacy out of the box.

Android on the other hand is a nightmarish hellscape of data mining and user profiling. There is GrapheneOS which is as of today a great option to circumvent Google’s data mining, but now that its future is at stake I worry for the future of privacy on Android devices.

But we get it from your post, you’re a pro-Google shill bot that didn’t actually read my comment and is just regurgitating nonsense to muddy the waters.

I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.

I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.

Every major OS can be secured to the highest security standards

Has Android added E2EE to their cloud backups yet like Apple has?

Apple is no friend to any of us, but Google openly and shamelessly scrapes every piece of data you put on their phones. Apple is absolutely the lesser of these two evils with out of the box functionality. I say this as a lifelong Android fan and Apple hater that entered the cybersecurity space and am only interested in the most private option I can get out of the box.

Like an Android can be more secure and private than an IPhone, but afaik that involves owning a Pixel specifically and installing an entirely different OS on it, one that Google a Is also out to get.

I read on my phone a lot and I’m a pretty fast reader so having to stop reading every time I have to scroll down a bit and find my place again is really irritating after anything more than a couple paragraphs.

With a higher frequency screen you can slow scroll as you read which is still faster than you can read so when reading content that isn’t heavily paginated you can just keep reading indefinitely without having to pause almost at all and it’s just a much nicer and fluid experience.

When reading on a smaller screen there is more scrolling, and on a phone with a lower frequency screen there’s significantly more blur to the text as you scroll.

When I was in the same spot, the only camera that hit all the bullet points and didn’t cost a fortune were Reolink cameras

Fret not, anything they aren’t going to actively milk will likely be sold off to try and pay back the $20 billion dollar loan they took to make this purchase.

Well there was just some base level of hope in the back of some people’s minds that one day they might get their shit together and now that hope is entirely gone.