It’s just like all the other garbage ‘leadership’ decisions based on how it’s always been done, rather than focusing on actual outcomes.
Sadly it’s way easier for underperforming management to say “ass in chair m-f 9-5” as a productivity improvement than to try and quantify reduced turnover as how it relates to output or wasted man hours from training up new people.
Relies on proper leadership that isn’t following current MBA principals.
It’s too easy to go for a cash grab. Broadcom is a great example.
I don’t like the subscription model at all but I spend way more than $360 in a typical year for games.
I probably only buy at most 2 “full price” games in a year, but I usually pick up at least a game a month, and sometimes even more for cheaper indie stuff. My steam library is old enough to drink in the US and i’m just shy of 1000 things, and I haven’t bought anything in a bundle since around reaching ~400.
Most games I pick up I end up spending less than 10 hours on them. Some amount more is 20-40 hours before I drop it and probably never look at it again. A handful of titles I get 100-500 hours, i’d say maybe .5 a year fall into this like Shadow Empire or Age of Wonders 4.
For the indecisive gamer $30/mo is way cheaper than buying a single new release… and since this shit is monthly you just cancel a sub when you’re done. I don’t really do it much, but I have many friends that do.
Have you ever looked at your gaming spend holistically and seen how much it costs a month between electricity, hardware purchases, software purchases? It’s probably way more than $30/mo. I’m not saying it justifies the cost, but odds are with regular GPU refreshes every three years, you’re paying something like $20-55/mo for that one part anyway nowadays.
4x10 is so stupid though. A huge portion of roles could get everything they need to do done in 3x8 or 4x8.
Capitalism doesn’t really see building a well treated highly compensated team of exceptional high skill workers as consistently generating more money for them.
For this to work you need a few people at the helm who actually give a shit about long term results. Capital wants bigger numbers with each earnings report which doesn’t always happen with gaming.
I for one have no comprehension as to how blizzard has maintained it’s following, but it’s a great example for how even the best companies can turn to shit by shareholder/board member directions. The money got too big with WoW.
Stuff like that puts me off. By default it’s basically illegal, so we have no idea when the developers will need to retain legal counsel that explicitly tells them to delete everything and cease discussing it.
Support and maintenance are a nightmare, and based on the other folks here talking about it, it’s certainly something to have to tinker with heavily.
If i’m going to have to tinker, i’m going to go with FOSS stuff if I can. I’d rather learn something that will be useful for a while.
no actual path to profitablity
You don’t think reddit can make money from advertising?
Hey man, when I was a kid it was $5 to rent a single game for a week.
It absolutely sucked when the game was terrible, but what are you gonna do?
AFMF is terrible though compared to a properly implemented frame gen solution. There’s only so much you can do with driver based implementations.
I promise an executive at microsoft is getting a massive bonus this year once they see the earnings increase for this segment that far surpasses the earnings of their xbox hardware was generated.
It’s still a decent deal. A buck a day to play unlimited games is hardly unaffordable in the US or Europe, and even most of latin america.
They won’t stop with this increase though. Look at the price of cable TV bundles and how so many eagerly signed up for $200-300+/mo. I work with older people who still pay this.
The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.
They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.
They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.
This is just the zeitgeist of 21st century capitalism.
✓ Subscriptions. Make them pay you forever.
✓ Low initial price to saturate market share and stifle competition while you operate at a loss.
✓ Drive all realistic competitors out of the market (stadia et al.)
✓ Slow user growth? Jack up prices!
I’m not surprised they got out of the hardware business. Software license protection publishing fees are way more lucrative than hardware sales. The hardware is just there to lock people into the software.
Are there any great alternatives that are easy to use off the shelf (with our own drives) that can compete here?
I’m basically to the point where my next NAS will end up just being a linux desktop running truenas which sounds like a lot of tinkering for something that should have a simple solution. I don’t want to have to buy some big expensive enterprise array for a prosumer use case.
Look on the bright side, in a couple of years they will come crawling back to us, desperate for new things to be built so their profit machines keep profiting.
Current ML techniques literally cannot replace developers for anything but the most rudimentary of tasks.
I wish we had true apprenticeships out there for development and other tech roles.
Please consider getting involved with politics. We need more leaders with ideas like this.
World record for the largest wings ever eaten was a missed opportunity.
I interviewed once for an IT manager role at MIT’s Whitehead Institute and I shit you not the hiring manager actually said the documentation for absolutely everything in their environment was perfect, and that everyone on the team documented things very well.
Almost everybody who works there in IT has decades of seniority. I’ve never met a lifer who was great at documentation, let alone an entire team. Pretty sure the guy was just fulfilling some quota of external interviews so they could promote whatever guy was to get the role internally.
Given that this is a gaming sub, I should mention that you can’t game on these things beyond the most basic things that could run on the cheapest non-gaming laptops from 5+ years ago.
Steam launches, but doesn’t support it natively. Since it’s emulated it tanks battery life. The graphics are so slow that anything other than extremely old games that are emulated in dosbox or similar perform worse than what i’d expect out of a 10 year old business laptop. There are exacly 0 ARM64 on windows game builds distributed by steam.
If you want something “different” to game on the answer is to switch to linux imo. At least there’s substantial development and resources going towards wine/proton and steam/heroicgameslauncher. I moved my current gaming rig with a 9800x3d and 9070xt over to a popular linux distro and it works well, but does require tinkering for things like FSR4. In games without FSR4, it basically just works. The performance can be better or worse than windows, but so far even with bleeding edge games i’m really happy. There’s even native linux builds for lots of games, and substantial overall developer support.
I read somewhere that they did some benchmark result releases for the original chips that put them ahead of everything but could not be verified when users actually got their hands on the chips.
I think any ‘stats’ they try to release relating to performance need to be considered as puff pieces that are more akin to marketing propaganda than any indication as to real world results.
I have one of their Snapdragon X based laptops that retailed for over $2000 on release and i’ve seen how it actually performs in the real world. The emulation layer for windows apps is not great, and there’s incredibly limited support by anything that goes beyond base windows apps, microsoft office, and web browsers. Battery life is atrocious.
Tools that I use every single day like Parsec are basically unusable on ARM beyond the most basic needs- I can remote into something and do a very simple task like running a command or opening an app, the framerate is just too low for it to be worth using for even basic web browsing because of the emulation layer and unsupported graphics implementation. Something like moonlight works, but that requires substantially more tinkering, which is the name of the game with Snapdragon based laptops.
The overall adoption rate is so low that developers don’t even target ARM64 for workstation use cases really.
I went from a 1080ti to a 6800xt, and then a 9070xt. I basically just skip a generation, but the amount of posts from guys out there this year saying “Finally retired my 4090 with my shiny new 5090!” is honestly depressing.
I mentioned the ancillary costs because TCO is relevant. If you’re sweating bullets over $10-$30 a month, but you always buy the highest end gear as it releases and are paying $200-$300+ a month on just being able to play stuff… why the hyperfocus on software costs? Couldn’t more money be saved by doing something differently?
I know guys who buy all the skins on LoL as they release. I know people with thousands of spend in shit like fortnite. I also know people spending hundreds a month on gacha. Financial literacy is terrible.
Anyway, I look at game sub costs as super cheap, especially compared to 1990s $5 rentals for 5 days. There’s a 30 day all you can eat rental option, whether it’s worth it to you really depends on you. I don’t pay for it shrug