If a company stole your art and copyrighted it such that it no longer belonged to everyone, in the same way that a Beatles record cannot be freely and openly shared, would you be fine with that?

I use Symfonium. I typically organize and listen by album, but there is functionality for listing by title.

Navidrome music server is really the only thing that I actually use. I love it.

While I have no clear opinion on this, it’s hilarious that people who have had over 11 years to purchase the game, often at extreme discounts or in bundles, are rising up to proclaim that they won’t be buying this game. Damn dude! I’m sure the developers are sweating bullets!

One enables the other, or rather the snake is constantly eating itself. SEO content and clickbait were already plagiarizing and consuming human communication, polluting the web by crowding out actual information – ChatGPT and LLMs calcify and turbo-charge this. Tech companies are reacting by piling their own LLMs on top – ingesting garbage and generating yet more garbage. Soon enough, appending " reddit" to our search terms will not be enough to quickly and freely get human information from the web.

Meanwhile – laymen are being told that ChatGPT is an oracle, an intelligence, by companies and enthusiasts trying to build a crypto-style hype train. And the laymen are reacting accordingly. They are being told that ChatGPT knows everything. It doesn’t even know what a pineapple is.

• Rookie Level 1 Gamer: “They’re called boomer shooters because they’re old like baby boomers”
• Veteran Level 20 Gamer: “Baby boomers thought Doom was satanic, that’s a stupid term”
• Enlightened Level 60 Gamer: “They’re called boomer shooters because of the huge debt they owe to the original Doom modding scene and therefore “Boom”, one of the first limit-removing source ports”

The game itself is a workmanlike Battlefield with a few oddball choices. I hope they never “fix” the vaulting behaviour that lets you break a 20-storey fall and make massive jumps across rooftops.

But I’ve specifically been having a lot of fun with the proximity chat. Remarkably robust, has an opt-in “broadcast your mic for a few seconds when you die” feature, and somehow isn’t a sluice of slurs / edgy crap / etc (at least in my experience).

The anticheat news is really depressing though. Cheaters are out there and will come to this game, and EAC at least has a reputation of being quite weak. We’re not allowed to have nice things.

I find that I totally switch off as soon a game starts to feel like a big checklist of “Content” to check off. For open world games, this is usually as soon as there’s a fast travel feature. For me, it’s not that I’m overwhelmed, I just feel that this framework makes for an incredibly samey experience.

Huge Dr. King Schultz energy from this video

It’s not exactly the same thing, but itch.io allow developers to have a “reverse sale”, where the price goes up for a given period. It was mostly a joke feature, perhaps intended to provoke a little thought about sales culture.

Unless they’ve got an instant breakaway hit (which not even Factorio was), they’ll see a ho-hum launch week in terms of purchases and an almost complete flat-line beyond that. Consumers are trained to wait for the sale. And so if they want to eat and have a roof over their head, there’s only one option left. It’s a vicious cycle, and very few are in a position to try to break it.

I really wish more indies could take on the no-sales policy. It’d give me tons more peace of mind to buy a game when I actually want to play it, rather than always waiting and doing weird backlog hoarding when Valve decide it’s wallet-opening-time.

But as the video shows, the policy was a risk for Wube even back in the day – it’s an even bigger risk now that everyone and their dog expects to wait for the sale, and especially if you happen to have a game that’s not quite as incredibly popular as Factorio.

It went 30 USD in March 2018. It went 35 USD in January 2023. FOMO really hardly seems like an issue, especially if you compare it to the usual time-limited event sales.

I really liked the priorities this game had. The endless mode (and to an extent the basic gameplay) wasn’t the strongest by city-builder standards, but the four or five “story” scenarios the game presented were all really unique and had their own twists and turns. Not incredibly replayable, but was super memorable.

I hope the sequel understands how good this tradeoff was and doesn’t try to become someone’s forever game.