Yes.

The third story is a sorority party not having enough money to pay the pizza delivery man

If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.

I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.

Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.

We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.

I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees

In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.

But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.

The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago

I have massive issues with how the game awards runs itself, but the solution isn’t to artificially restrict what a game can win.

It’s an awards show. Everything about it is artificial

Are you trying to say that any game that gets funding of any kind is automatically not worthy of winning?

??? How did you get here?

If a game does the best in multiple categories should it be skipped over just to highlight another game?

It’s all subjective. If you make Balatro and I make BG3, there’s no objective way to evaluate “Best Game” between the two. You’ve got to make some subjective judgement (or just put your hand out and collect bribes).

Giving one of them a full stack of awards doesn’t signal quality, it signals bias.

If an indie studio’s first game wins best indie game how can it not also be the best debut indie game

E33 wasn’t the studio’s first game. So it shouldn’t be winning the “award for debut games” on the ground alone.

But yes, if you’re winning the “indie game” (which E33’s budget shouldn’t have qualified it for anyway) spotlight another game under “debut” even if you’re predisposed to favor turn based RPGs over platformers or puzzle games or simulators. In fact, especially then.

This isn’t just recognizing the game, it’s recognizing the actors.

It’s recognizing the budget more often than not.

Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.

Amazon’s going through the same enshitification cycle as Sears and JC Penny did a decade ago.

It’s not a question of “Will people stop using Amazon?” but “Will people start using <X>” where X is better than Amazon. Solve for X.

I mean, if you’ve got an REI in your neighborhood, that can be handy. But even they still get their merch from somewhere that isn’t the storefront or even the city. There really isn’t a “buy local” option for textiles in a material sense, unless you really know where to look.

The internet was so good in 08. You searched for stuff, found exactly what you needed, and were done.

Shit was bad in 2008, too. The degree to which drop shippers had consolidated down to one mega-wholesaler rather than a dozen crappy fly-by-nights hadn’t happened yet. You got a dozen different flavors of crap rather than just one. But it was still crap.

Poor kids today will never know anything other than ad ridden bot corponet.

Under an Amazon keyword search, sure. You can still find good quality products outside of Amazon. You can even find it inside Amazon if you know what you’re looking for.

The difference between 2008 and 2025 is primarily that Amazon’s algorithmic tools have degraded to the state of Yahoo or Sears.

Freedom To Choose

The important thing is to point them at the correct aircraft.

I don’t think e33 is unreasonable.

For any individual award, sure. It’s an arbitrary decision of taste and people can agree to disagree.

When you’re stacking up all the awards on a single game, you’re effectively ignoring the rest of the releases for the year.

The only issue I have is sandfall shouldn’t count as an independent game

I’m more disgusted with giving “Best Indie” and “Best Debut Indie” to the same title. Why even have two categories at this point? It isn’t even the studio’s debut title.

Similarly, three “Best Performance” nominees to the same title. You know what you’re doing and it’s not evaluation or recognition, it’s just promotion.

But then these awards gave Pretty Derby the Best Mobile Game and FFT: Ivalice Chronicles (a thirty year old remaster!) Best Strategy, so whatchagonna do?

Game awards have always been glorified ads.

Whether you go to the Silksong, KCD2, Death Stranding, Dispatch, Arc Raiders, or any other games subreddit that was nominated for any award about half the comments saying E33 is trash, overhyped, and their game deserved to win instead.

Nine awards is a lot. And this is after they swept Golden Joystick. It’s a fine game. It’s just not the only game.

“We’ve picked one game and we’re giving every award to that game because it’s the best game at everything and have you played the game yet? You should it’s so good it’s just the best at everything.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_Interactive

Kepler Interactive was founded in September 2021 at the initiative of former Ubisoft employee and French entrepreneur Alexis Garavayan, who had previously co-founded the video game investment fund Kowloon Nights. Self-described as a “super developer” publishing group, Kepler was born out of an alliance between seven independent studios to “pool their resources and knowledge”:

Hedge Fund ass publisher. Come on, guys. The Gaming Awards have always just been sponsored content and you’re getting hoodwinked because you don’t recognize the sponsor this time around.

“His erect member throbbed, red chaff lines glowing with the heat of his passion, in the dim light of the monitors glow. ‘Why yes, I would like to learn more about Horny MILFs in my area’ he growled, before clicking the large pop-up banner and snuggling his succulent ass cheeks into the gaming chair”

I used IAU for the few instances I banked gold as a hedge. But I’ve never held longer than a year and it’s never outperformed by overall portfolio returns.

It’s just not a good long term investment.