Broadly speaking it sounds a bit like Antitrust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)

But I haven’t seen it in quite a while so I’m not sure how well specifics line up.

Over the years, I’ve become one to keep my media use as legit as possible. No judgement on anyone who doesn’t, but for a variety of reasons I have chosen to.

For retro games, that means my process is:

• Evercade - I’m a huge fan of the Evercade ecosystem and if a game is available there I will play it there first.
• NSO - For games not available on Evercade, my next stop will be Switch Online.
• Collections - If a game isn’t available on NSO, I’ll see if it’s available via a collection. Think Castlevania Collections, Arcade Archives, Namco Museums, etc. For these I’ll typically check reviews before picking it up and make sure the games play well as that’s not always a guarantee.
• Unlicensed emulation - Only at that point will I fire up a game on my raspberry pi.

Though honestly I can’t really be bothered to tinker with shit as much anymore these days, so often (but not always) by the time I arrive at unlicensed emulation as the solution I’ll just decide to play something else instead.

Continuing to work my way through the Duke Nukem 1+2 Remasters on Evercade. So much love went into these its ridiculous.

I think regardless of that deal, they were already on the debt-go-round for long enough it would’ve caught up to them eventually. I can’t imagine this was gonna be “one last job then we go clean.” The market would continue to demand more and faster growth until they hit the wall one way or the other.

Seriously. I realize people have Feelings about DRM and always-online stuff, but this is an article about a game that was never especially popular or active entering maintenance mode after a couple of years.

They aren’t shutting it down, they aren’t making it unplayable (though of course either of those things could happen at any time etc etc) - they just are no longer producing content for a game almost no one is playing anymore anyway.

Oh, interesting. I also initially read it as a thinly-veiled threat but I think you’re right it was more of a “will i be assaulted”. Still a weird thing to say.

Not really into travelogues like this (and this was no exception), but I will say I love me an Amtrak trip.

In 2015, I rode from Portland, OR to Boston, MA. Took 5 days, through Sacramento, Chicago, and DC. I was traveling alone so every evening in the dining car I was seated across from a different Giant Train Nerd and got to learn about the engine on the current train, the type of track we were riding on, who owns or owned the land, really interesting stuff.

Both before and after that I’ve taken trains between Boston and NYC several times, and taken the Auto Train (which carries your car!) between DC and Florida.

Every trip makes me wish I had the leisure time and the country had the infrastructure such that I could avoid even more plane travel and take a train instead.

So I definitely get the urge to write a meandering travelogue about just such a trip. But as you can see, the same information fits just fine into a reasonably-sized internet comment.

I guess I don’t see what the incentive would be for this, or even what it realistically means in this case.

Do you mean like relicensing the backend and frontend with a closed source license? I don’t see what the incentive would be for that unless they wanted lemmyml to be the only instance in existence (which runs counter to it’s raison d’etre) and to make secret/proprietary/commercial extensions to it that are difficult to develop in the open.

Or I guess unless they wanted to start charging instance admins for the honor and pleasure of running their software, which at least right now would be the quickest way to ensure nobody runs their software.

I guess my reaction is partially because I never see articles like this for my other hobbies and while I don’t see articles like this about video games often, I do see comments around the internet about this fairly regularly.

I don’t hear people saying “playing board games helps me with strategizing” or “playing guitar has really improved my hand-eye coordination and playing in a band has helped my ability to cooperate with others.”

Maybe that’s because gamers tend to feel more defensive about the hobby as it has historically been disparaged. People are more likely to picture “CoD yelling person” when they hear you play video games than they are to picture “wonderwall at parties person” when they hear you play guitar.

But, on the other hand, D&D players and Marvel nerds seem to have largely moved on from “but it’s actually really cool and fun and not weird at all.” Maybe video game players should consider doing so as well.

I dunno, ‘game company commissions study to ask gamers to self-report about how gaming isn’t a waste of their time’?

I’m in my mid 30s and have played video games my whole life. I also participate in some gaming communities online and my real-life friends are about 50/50 with regards to gaming. And if asked, yeah, I would probably self report that video games have had a positive impact on my life.

But have they? I’m not qualified to say. I don’t have any actual data in front of me. I do know playing video games often makes me feel good, but I can say that about lots of unhealthy habits.

Was pumping 150 hours into Tears of the Kingdom better for me than the couple weeks of workouts I skipped? Is it good that I drank more beer during that time than I normally would have?

Would my life have been more or less improved if, instead of talking about video games online I had been practicing guitar and finding an open mic night to play at?

Would it have been better for my mental health and hand-eye coordination instead of playing Elden Ring to have gone to Home Depot, bought some wood, and built the shelves I’ve been putting off building in the basement to ease some of our storage issues?

If video games really were an unqualified good, would “my loser boyfriend stays up all night yelling into his headset about Overwatch/CoD/Fifa/Fortnite” be such a common stereotype?

I’m not suggesting video games are bad (or even that the sometimes-unhealthy way I engage with them is bad), but I am suggesting that “gamers say gaming is good for them, actually” does not provide useful data for analysis or discussion.

Okay. If the article is misleading or wrong, it shouldn’t be posted. If it is found to be incorrect after posting, is it better to fix the title and let the comments sort it out or to fully delete the post?

The title of this post is at best misleading and at worst simply wrong. From the source that OP linked in a couple other comments here (emphasis mine throughout):

Since the start of July, the app’s downloads have fallen by almost 30% compared to the preceding two months, according to data from app performance tracker Apptopia. … Twitter has gained usually 15 million to 30 million users a month since 2011, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It gained just 10 million users between August and September of this year. … Visits to the web version of X, which still operates as twitter.com, fell since the start of the year, with global web traffic down 10% in August and US traffic down 15%, compared to a year ago, according to an analysis by Similarweb. … So far in September, daily users are down to 249 million, a roughly 2% decrease… Monthly users are down by about the same percentage, now at 393 million users from 398 million in July.

That is emphatically not “loses over 30% of users in two months.” That is, though, “signs of slowing growth” and “signs of the most recent round of dramatic announcements wearing off and folks moving on with their lives” which is why Musk is doing his best to get back into the news cycle.

Maybe OP should go ahead and update the post with a more accurate title to avoid spreading misinformation.

As someone without an Xbox or a PC, Starfield has very much gotten me back into NMS. Loving the last couple of updates, especially as a PSVR2 player.

I hope I get to play Starfield some day, cause it looks like a lot of fun, but it’s not a hardware seller for me. Probably some day I’ll pick up a gaming laptop or steamdeck or something and check it out along with the other PC games I’ve been missing for the past few years.

Yeah, my plan is PS5, too. I was worried because been playing these games on PC almost literally my whole life, from BG1 and IWD through to PoEII and DOSII. But I don’t have a PC that can play any sorts of games right now, so it’s gonna have to be PS5.

Watching a few let’s plays and streams, it sounds like controller support is solid. So despite not being what I’m used to, I’m confident it’ll be a solid experience.

This instance that you are posting to is in fact run by a guy who has proven to thwart DDoS attack without resorting to CF using methods 1 and 3 (confirmed), perhaps more.

I’m glad to hear it. Did they share these solutions in an easy-to-consume manner for other instance admins who may not have the same expertise, resources, or time? As I said before, I’m not suggesting they must do the work to share these things in an easy-to-consume manner - I’m just saying if these solutions aren’t available in an easy to consume manner, then you shouldn’t be so surprised and upset that other people are reaching for the easy-to-use solutions instead.

Telling people “bring a PR or GTFO” is very much the non-constructive shitty attitude we need to avoid.

The sentence you quoted very specifically did not say “bring a PR or GTFO,” so I’ll ask that you try to not put words in my mouth. In fact, I went to great lengths to make it clear I wasn’t saying that because I happen to agree with you - it is an unconstructive attitude.

I very specifically did say “bring a PR or don’t get mad that other people aren’t immediately doing the work for you.” If you aren’t bringing a PR then you are bringing an idea. If you aren’t bringing solutions but are bringing a sensationalist and confrontational attitude, don’t be surprised when you have a confrontation rather than a conversation.

Maybe it would be more constructive to identify barriers to adopting privacy-respecting solutions rather than getting judgemental about using other solutions. What makes Cloudflare easier than tarpitting? How could the barrier to adopting tarpitting be lowered to make it a reasonable solution to adopt? Are there any Lemmy admins that can weigh in on the conversation and share their challenges?

Okay, you’ve doubled down on hating Cloudflare, which is fair.

Do you see why maybe instance admins are reaching for the Cloudflare button, though? They are often individuals or small teams with relatively little expertise, time, or financial resources. Plus a lot to lose financially if an attack blows out their bandwidth budget or gets them kicked off their hosting. And they’re under extreme pressure to keep their instances available and reliable because that’s what users expect from web services these days, whether it is realistic or not. Saying “the instance will be offline for two weeks while I work on this haproxy config a couple hours each evening after work that may or may not effectively mitigate this attack” isn’t really a reasonable expectation.

Throwing out “just move to tor,” “jusy build a firewall rule with the last-known IPs of your users,” “just do tarpitting,” and “just turn off images.” Are nice ideas (except for maybe the known IP thing which has a lot of problems in an age of mobile devices and VPNs), but none are yet solutions.

So presenting it as “I can’t believe people are doing [this incredibly easy thing that I have an ethical problem with] rather than [this series of complicated ideas that have not yet been proven to actually solve the issue] this is a disaster in every way” is not conducive to open conversation and instead makes people who did [incredibly easy thing you have a problem with] defensive and/or just straight up annoyed and dismissive.

Ideas are good and having ideas for instance admin tools for things like moderation, ddos mitigation, etc is good because we need to start somewhere. But you can’t jump right to “I had this great idea it’s an absolute travesty that nobody has already implemented it” and expect people to take you seriously.

Now that’s not to say that your post is bad unless it comes along with “Intro to Tor for Lemmy Admins” or “how to configure rate limiting with tarpitting in your reverse proxy” or “here’s a PR I made for Lemmy that implements an optional text-only emergency mode.” But if you aren’t coming with those things you should instead come from a place of collaboration, education, and curiosity.

Right? I’d never heard of either of these games before, but after playing the Goodboy demo and watching some YouTube videos of Witch n Wiz, I’m pretty excited for this cart.

Yeah, it’s not for everyone a lot of folks prefer emulation on steam decks, anbernics, retroids, pis, etc.

The things that drew me to Evercade are:

• Licensed emulation. Lots of folks don’t care about this, but I’m happy to pay for my media when I can. In cases of indie/homebrew releases, devs get paid which is great. In cases of retro releases, rightsholders get paid which is sometimes just someone with a piece of paper saying they own a particular IP. Which is maybe less important than paying the people who directly made a thing, but in the way our society is structured, imo it’s also important to pay people willing to keep something commercially available as long as they aren’t trying to gouge you.
• Curated library. I mean, part of this is just because not everyone will license to Blaze so they need to pick and choose. But back in college when my roommates and I built a mame machine, or later when I was emulating on a raspberry pi. I would mostly play the same handful of games over and over again. I love that I hadn’t heard of like 70% of the Evercade library and hadn’t played like 80% of games in the library until they came out on carts. So much discovery. I also love the fact that not all the games are all-time greats - average and below average games deserve a chance to be preserved, played, and loved as well.
• The community. I probably should have listed this first because I’m not sure if I would have gotten as into Evercade if it weren’t for the community. The folks in the discord are great. Lots of really chill and knowledgeable folks to chat games with, a few colorful characters to keep things interesting, and Blaze themselves are pretty active and transparent in the chat which is really great to see. There’s a weekly games challenge (often but not always high score related) that one of the moderators runs that has lots of us playing the same games at the same time which is always fun.

Anyway, definitely no judgement for you wanting to enjoy games the way you want - that you are enjoying them at all is the important part. Just wanted to share a little bit about how Evercade works for me for folks who may be curious.

It’s always interesting when someone is like “I wish I could go back to using smaller sites/forums or try some more open/ethical platforms, but I can’t because all of my family are on Facebook.”

Remember just 20 years ago when most of your family wasn’t anywhere on the internet and that was just fine? I recognize that I’m saying this as a semi-isolated weirdo on some relatively obscure corner of the Internet, but it’s okay to not be in constant passive contact with everyone you’ve ever met. Yeah it’s more work to keep in touch with the folks you actually care about if you can’t do so passively via Facebook, but that’s how it always was. Email exists, texts and phone calls exist, meeting up exists.

If there are people you care about you can still keep in touch with them without using the same social media platform as them. Just like in the 90s you didn’t need to read rec.models.railroad to keep in touch with your model train loving uncle.

I get that these connections (whatever one might say of their quality or tangibility if the interaction is just “look at picture, press like button”) are important to people and one of the positives of platforms like Facebook, but if you’re going to bemoan not being able to seek alternatives solely because the entire world isn’t switching with you, it’s important to realize that is a choice and not a requirement.

There were lots of games back then. And many of them were as bad or worse than the shittiest shovelware and template swaps we’ve got today.

Thing is, most people don’t remember the 200 Action Games 3 disc pack at the bottom of the bargain bin cause they sucked.

I’m not disputing that there is more “stuff” these days by raw numbers, with the barrier to creation and distribution of games and such dramatically lowered by ubiquitous and easy to use tooling. But I bet the ratios of good games to shitty games won’t have changed too terribly much over the years.