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TwinIon

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Everything posted by TwinIon

  1. The business model for consoles is significantly different than it is for general computing platforms. There are very different market forces at work that do more to justify 30% take for a Switch game than a PC game. I feel like between the Epic v Apple case and all the discussion around the DMA in the EU that this has been litigated to death, but if you can't differentiate those models, that's on you. I also never said that Valve should give up on their revenue, and I don't think that anyone has been suggesting that. However, it seems rather obvious that they are able to maintain that cut because they run an effective monopoly. Monopolies are not necessarily built from unfair conditions, so this not an indictment, just an observation that Valve now controls what is broadly considered to be a monopoly share of the PC gaming distribution market (70%+). It would take either a huge market shift or regulation to change that in the short run, but monopolies are considered bad for consumers for a reason, and to dismiss those effects here is silly.
  2. This was the first thing I've watched on Prime that actually had regular ads spaced out in it. Not a fun change Amazon. Show continues to be good though.
  3. Yeah, I agree with that. If you're bringing in more revenue, you have the leverage to make a better deal.
  4. Apple based their 30% cut on the horrific carrier controlled app distribution of the early 00s and Valve based theirs off of the cost of physical distribution. At the time, neither was really a bad deal. Now that digital distribution has become the norm it's basically unjustifiable for that high of a cut to become standard and the only reason that fees have remained that high is monopoly control. If you're selling a product outside of one of those monopolies, fees go down very quickly. Etsy runs a store, and their fee is 6.5%+payment processing, so call it 10%. On Squarespace once you're paying them more than $23/month the transaction fees go to zero and you're only paying the 3% payment processing fee. If you're only paying for their cheapest plan, then their fee is 10% (which includes payment processing). Those are imperfect comparisons and I'm well aware that Steam offers a bit more value than just a website, but it's not 27% more value. Sweeney and Epic aren't saints and I'm not necessarily defending them, but these fees are way higher than they should be and I think it's bad for consumers that they've persisted for so long.
  5. This game is perfect for the steam deck, though it seems like it would be great on the iPad as well. My best and most fun runs so far have relied on the "+1 mult for every Tarrot card played" joker. In both runs I had that effect duplicated, and then I built up different ways to play as many as possible. Having a guaranteed 200x mult is pretty good, plus playing all those cards meant basically every card in my deck was enhanced. It's also just more fun to play as many cards as possible. I just unlocked the challenges. Some of them look like a pretty good head start and some of them look pretty hard. Overall the game is really great. It's simple and clever and seems like it'll have plenty of replay value.
  6. Sure sounds like it. From the articles linked by the one in the OP:
  7. Yeah, I'm almost compelled to agree with @Mercury33 about Man of Steel, but the Pa Kent stuff was such a cataclysmic miscalculation.
  8. I'm looking at a BO total of $1.3B that suggests that plot is not necessary for a Mario movie and the sequel was inevitable.
  9. Not a lot of surprises and a pretty meh show overall, not that I expected much from Jimmy. I enjoyed the Mulaney bit, Cena coming out naked was a good laugh, but it's hard to deny that "I'm Just Ken" was the highlight of the show. I expected Lily Gladstone to win, but I think Emma Stone was a more deserving. Very happy for Nolan to win Picture and Director. He's great for cinema and Oppenheimer is as deserving a winner as any. I personally would have given the trophy to Spider-Verse, but the first one did win and I think there's a good chance at them winning with the next entry (though I didn't realize it was a different directing team). I just can't feel bad about Miyazaki winning, even if Boy and the Heron isn't my favorite of his. I have never really grasped the metric that Visual Effects is judged on. I loved Godzilla Minus One, and the effects they were able to achieve with that budget are astounding. I can't feel bad about them winning an award, but they were not the most impressive of the year. Also, it's BS that the Academy did a little clip show about stunt guys and how they risk their lives and how essential their work is in the same show where they bring up that the first new category in 20 years is "achievement in casting." I think casting is extremely important, and it might be a round about way for blockbusters to get some credit for their amazing casts. I can just imagine the casting director getting an Oscar for Iron Man while the performance goes unrecognized. Still, stunt guys should have been at the top of the list if they're adding categories. Not only that, but they should retroactively give out awards. Back up a dump truck of overdue statues for Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan and Tom Cruise, and all the guys whose names we don't know.
  10. And they're unbanned thanks to the EU. I'm open to the idea that Apple should ban Epic for deliberately breaking the rules, but Apple's decision made it seem like it was largely based on Epic's comments on Apple, which is not good at all.
  11. Even if you're not a fan of Dragonball, it's hard not to recognize the incredible impact his work had.
  12. After my desktop PC, my 11" M1 iPad Pro is my most used and loved computer, beating out my folding phone and laptop. I'd love to upgrade it to OLED, but I'll probably wait another generation unless they do something more with the platform. I desperately want to be able to use it as my primary photo editing device when I'm traveling, but file handling is still a real pain and Lightroom CC doesn't really sync well with Classic.
  13. I haven't been playing much thanks to FF7, but man the subreddit for this game has gotten crazy over the last week. People are pissed about the nerfs and the devs are getting angry at players and it just seems like a mess. My instinct is that this is just a smaller dev not accustomed to the pressures of a larger audience. It's probably still only a small fraction of the player base that is toxic, but when you increase the raw number of players by a couple orders of magnitude, it's a lot more to deal with.
  14. I was rooting for Bearman to get into Q3 and he was so close! Still a good showing for someone's first time in an F1 car with (most of) one practice session.
  15. One place where FF16 exceeds Rebirth, for better or worse, is in focus. I thought 16 was good overall, and great at moments, and for whatever its faults, it was consistent in both gameplay and story. Rebirth is a lot of things. I feel like it’s kind of messy in that way; always getting you to play some weird mini-game where the quality and novelty vary wildly. That’s not to say that consistency is the most important metric. I think the Rebirth combat system is so much better, even if it’s a bit much at first. Still, sometimes I find myself playing as a frog, or in a board game and I wonder if that makes the game better.
  16. Honestly, even if there is someone behind him pulling strings in a high stakes remake of Weekend at Bernies, I’d still rather vote for the puppeteers than the other guy.
  17. He’s doing fine. “You can’t only love your country when you win” is a good line. His pacing is a bit all over the place and he’s stumbling here and there, but it’s not a bad speech thus far.
  18. Continues to look pretty good. As far as the all episode drop is concerned, I feel like either your show is big enough or marketed sufficiently to be a cultural touchstone, or you're probably getting better viewership numbers by just dropping the whole season. I don't think it necessarily is an indication of quality as it might be their estimation that the show will become some kind of mass market hit.
  19. Personally, I would be happy if there is a sufficient backlash against generative ML to the point that they need to rebrand it. I feel like calling everything AI is a disservice.
  20. Yeah, if I was a Tesla stock holder, it would piss me off that the CEO was making decisions that enriched himself but hurt my investment. Seems like the kind of thing the SEC would investigate, but I have no clue what the laws surrounding all that are.
  21. Yeah, the Fort Condor time limits are BS. First I got lucky, winning the first two with less than 1 second. With the next two I failed by seconds multiple times in a row.
  22. I finished it and thought it wasn't bad. A bit rushed and never quite living up to the standards of the original, but never offensively bad. There was plenty I didn't think would work well in live action that went off just fine. The acting is inconsistent, but errs on genuine, if nothing else. I'll watch the next seasons, but I won't be desperately awaiting them.
  23. Lol. So Elon isn't so much against OpenAI going for profit as he against them going for profit without him in control of everything. It also feels like a window into what Elon thought of OpenAI's business prospects. He was looking at what they had and thinking that they needed an existing profitable business as a crutch, but it turns out they didn't. They were able to monetize their product quite quickly. They're still burning through cash, but at this point it's clear they'll be able to get whatever cash they need for the foreseeable future. I'll also point out that Elon has since decided to again open his own AI company separate from Tesla, so whatever reasons he had for insisting that OpenAI be part of Tesla obviously don't apply if you're a company under his control.
  24. I wasn't really complaining about the tonal shifts, just acclimating myself to them. I totally agree that the traversal is classic 3D JARPG, but just because a genre has historically been bad at a thing doesn't give it a pass. If you're controlling a 3D character in a detailed open world like this, I don't think it really matters much if you're playing an RPG or Shooter or a puzzle game, I think your character should feel good to control and look like they're navigating that environment more than gliding on top of it. I'm not asking for a jump button or grappling hook or for Naughty Dog level quality everywhere. It's not really even all much of a problem because it's fast, but it seems cheap in the context of the rest of the game. I think it's a fair mild criticism to say that these characters in a AAAA game look silly sliding around and it's odd that they have a force field around them that sends everything with physics flying and that the animations are poor and slow and that the forced stealth controls are awful. I also completely agree about the context thing, and I'm kinda torn on what I think about that. I played the original in 97, I've replayed the couple discs a couple of times, seen the movie, played through Remake when it came out, but never really fell in love the the world in the way that so many did. I also haven't played all the other games like Crisis Core. I've watched a recap video or two, but I know I'm missing a million little things and kind of wish it was more accessible.
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