I've been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I've found to be actually good.

I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:

• Foreign (Non-American)
• Indie
• Small studio

Basically all of the good games that I've liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I'm sure if you think about it, the great games you've played have also been this way.

Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won't have fun, and it'll be expensive.

Go play EDF5 with some friends. It's jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.

Raft is great, too.

Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.

And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.

Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it's been solid.

But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.

It's like the loss of a union, except it's industry wide.

There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don't have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.

Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn't that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you're voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.

It's ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn't be supportable.

Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn't be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.

Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they'd: "be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all."

But remember:

• Foreign
• Indie
• Small Studio

These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.

STOP MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Enshittification.

IT'S ALMOST AS IF THERE IS A DEFINED SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS THAT'S SUCKING MONEY FROM THE ECONOMY

Less infighting, more eating of the rich. Pay the devs, not the landlords. The capitalism system is broken and breaking further. The cost of goods is defined by how much workers need to be paid to make it, and then multiplicatively inflated by how much greed that BILLIONAIRE CLASS wants.

Government is for the people, by the people, that's the ONLY reason it exists. People in, and that want to be the billionaire class have declared war on the rest of us, and it's the government's sole purpose to protect the well-being and will of the people.

The government MUST serve the people.

If it can't, the highest priority is it MUST be fixed immediately.

The longer we flail and wait, the more that obviously hostile class of people grow in power and make fixing this a more and more serious issue.

Like any good leader, if you are failing in your duties, you must self-correct, elect an adequate replacement, or you must be removed, by your own will or by force.

Because life-time is too precious to waste waiting for the conflict to come to a head and burst.

That hostile class is doing everything possible to prevent any of this. Calm down, diffuse, obfuscate, confuse, project, gaslight, lie, cheat, steal, destroy, and gain power to RULE above the-will-of-the-people: the government.

Apparently he was CEO in mid-2004 when EA bought Renderware and basically killed it.

COINCIDENCE???

There was an episode of vsauce or veritasium or cgpgrey several years ago that kind of talked about this a little bit. Basically, inside and outside of us, alongside covering all of our things and everything we touch and are around and other people, are all part of an extended network of poop particles and bacteria.

You get sick when new things get past your exterior & interior poop network of bacterial defenses. Same for anyone, anywhere. It's all just how much, how fast, and how far and how new, the new bacteria and viruses get. If it gets too far, too fast, we might die.

But, people are disgusting and COVERED IN POOP BACTERIA AND VIRUSES and so we're all fairly familiar with everything, and nothing is too different.

COVID-19, for example, was very different and spread in large amounts very quickly, I believe it's why it's called a "novel" virus. It was different enough that it just waltzed past all our defenses and killed millions of people. And then, it mutated enough, and quickly enough, that when it came back to us with the new form, our immune systems were like "damn this one virus came in here and caused a ton of damage, but for some reason we don't know exactly what it looks like. Are you that virus or it's relative?" And the mutation was like, "uhhh, no?" And the security guard/immune system was all, "okay, come on through." And it would get us sick again.

Biology is weird and epidemiology is incredibly difficult when half the population is fucking homeschooled and thinks horse dewormer helps this type of thing or that it's fake or something.

Ouch my sides. From laughter though, I don't want to increase my premiums.

Surprised: nobody

Victims: a lot

Surprised: still nobody

50k very active users that try to have integrity is a pretty big deal. Because with that will come development of the platform, meanwhile Reddit is going to struggle with a new chapter of shitty moderation and decreased quality. There are also a lot of people burnt out on the issue and so I expect real numbers from the immediate to be more visible over the next month or two.

Plus, which instances are you looking at for those numbers? Are all the lemmy instances and kbin included in those numbers?

Let's just assume that it's going to be about 1% of reddit's userbase. Does it matter which 1%? How will the platforms evolve? Because both are very different now than before, we're seeing realtime changes across a lot of tech and the internet. A lot of faith was lost by the public in many platforms by the people at all paying attention, and a lot of hope was garnished by the successful move to new platforms.

Stuff is definitely changing. I'm curious what big tech is gonna do to try to restore faith, or if they'll try to pretend nothing's happened and try to sweep it under the rug. A lot of people already try to downplay the events into just numbers, but in reality, there are a LOT of eyes watching and waiting to see what happens. People are tired of the same old capitalist bullshit and want something better, it isn't just ex/reddittors, it's Twitter users, Linux users, Amazon users, Netflix users, students with debt, homeowners, and a LOT of young people. People want better and the messed up economic future is making people pay attention more than ever.

It's all interwoven and something's gotta give.

There has to be a way for society to function healthily for all, and to disable corruption at the same time. There HAS to.. Like, if we can feel when something is bad, we can eventually articulate it, and if we can eventually articulate it, we should be able to design ways to make it better. The society programming will get more and more complex until we figure it out.

I think knowing what we want is key. And to want, you have to first know. We've simultaneously made so much progress in the past 100 years, but also so, so little. The human condition is slow-mode.

Because people really don't want to lose the time and investment they've put into building these huge communities.

It's like if the king just decides that your really healthy neighborhood and community, that you're a community leader in and are constantly defending against the shittiest companies and groups dumping garbage all over and ruining and harassing the residents (and whatever the equivalent to blocking posters of illegal things is), will suddenly charge you an extreme amount of money to do your volunteer job, and the clubhouse leaders/owners and other businesses an insane amount of money just to use the land (because the king wants that land to put up billboards instead) - because he wasn't making enough money on them before, but only because he wasn't charging them any money. And in reality, the king wants to sell the kingdom to China for several billion dollars and just wants to show how much money can be made from the billboards instead of the businesses and community centers.

Man. Fuck u/spez. Outcast that mofo rather than the platform. I wish somebody would just coup his ass, but everybody in his sort of position just always ruins it. Always. So it's the system, not solely him; it's the goal of... Internet Platforms. It's literally the same problem with government anywhere: if you have a monarchy, eventually, they'll do shitty stuff and eventually try to ruin it.

What's the solution?

Ahem....

FUCK SPEZ

GOOD.

Maybe there's at least one person fighting for good in there.

Or, the random person saying the mods got reinstated is a plant and just wants people to have faith and come back.