You think prices will fall now that there are giant new capable data centers everywhere? AAA Gaming will become synonymous with cloud gaming and the hardware to run games at home won‘t be produced anymore. They’ll build even more data centers instead. It‘s a much more useful business model to establish tech feudalism for the overly rich.

The problem is if nobody sells affordable hardware or hardware at all anymore, the only path they can go is cloud gaming. That means from here on onward ownership is dead.

Execs genuinely couldn‘t care less about what people want. They are the architects of this trend away from physical media.

I’m making the prediction that any hardware that isn‘t essentially just a screen that connects to the internet will become more and more expensive to the point no one can afford them. Major brands that we all know and use today will withdraw from manufacturing end consumer products.

I‘m guessing 10 years from now virtually everyone will be forced into cloud service subscriptions for gaming because the hardware to run these games won‘t be sold to us anymore. For a while Chinese companies might try fill the void the likes of Nvidia and AMD left but that will be short lived too.

You will go retro and learn to take care of your soon old timer hardware that will become ever more pricey to fix as spare parts get more rare and ridiculously expensive expensive or you will own nothing and be happy with that.

Yes this is all speculative but it‘s a vision of the future that becomes more and more obvious to me by the day.

Initially I thought this was about the 30% but they mentioned a new two tier system so I looked it up. It seems Apple‘s App store fees are more complicated than that. For example they charge $99 annually for developer accounts which doesn‘t sound much but that‘s basically the entry subscription to even participate. I didn‘t dig very deep but it gets more complicated from then on.

I loved the idea but it had too much of an impact on how a battle plays out. I hope it‘s kept but toned down considerably.

That‘s nice but I‘ll wait until reviews flock in to confirm this. There is a point when a studio is too big to pre-order. I‘ve seen this pattern before and know better than to ride the hype wave from one super success all the way to the next „more ambitious than ever“ title.

Why is one thing okay for you but not the other? A generated artwork is an artists not paid and theft. Generated dialogue is a writer not paid and also theft. All the popular models are fed on stolen content.

I don‘t like to admit it but you‘re likely right. And there are very cool use cases for machine learning if done right. And some of these concepts are already in successful games.

Of course there absolutely is slop that I‘m refusing to buy and companies do face backlash over it. No doubt about it, but that really doesn‘t mean every single use case for AI is bad or makes for a terrible product at all.

But it is interesting to see how much pushback you‘re facing for this comment while most people seem cool with it when Larian does it for some reason. Consumers are hypocrites sometimes.

Seizing the means of production means pretty much exactly this, yes.

„But that‘s as bad as it will ever be!“ I hear tech bros reciting their mantra but then it gets worse all the time somehow.

I‘m sick and tired of rich schmucks selling their lack of empathy as being neurodivergent. Nah man, you don‘t struggle with social cues. You simply don‘t care about others. That‘s a huge difference.

Good question! I‘m not that deep into the technical aspects but Chinese companies that work with foreign companies would have to work with the government and other Chinese companies that control internet access in China to circumvent the firewall legally. The process is likely limited and heavily monitored by authorities. Same would go for Chinese companies with storefronts in the global web. They would need to access our internet regularly but I assume their access is limited to some degree.

I imagine unless you‘re a big player it can be quite the hassle so many Chinese companies would rather work with domestic companies than with foreign ones. I think this is one major reason why many contracts with Chinese companies can only be done through middlemen. As an outsider, you can‘t get full access to their industry because you have no means of contacting all these little manufacturers yourself.

But again, I don‘t actually know for sure what these processes look like. Maybe someone with actual experience can shine a brighter light on this.

VPNs are banned in some countries. At least in practice. China comes to mind and please nobody tell me „I have a friend in China and they use one!“ That friend is either breaking the law, or a state agent or foreigner where that law doesn‘t apply. Hotels have that as part of their service for tourists because why the hell would anyone travel to a country with basically no internet? Of course they are exempt.

But Chinese citizens are absolutely not allowed to use VPNs to break through the great firewall. The overwhelming majority wouldn‘t even know how. But of course most of them know at least one person who can.

So in theory the law is useless but in practice it‘s very effective to control information. Whatever the case it‘s nothing a democracy should pursuit. Ever.

Some US states are in the process of banning VPNs too, though. I’m afraid the USA remains the uncontested champion of being a shitty western country and it‘s not even close.

I‘m in the same boat. OS2 had a very good balance for me. BG3 already took it a little too far for my liking BUT you could often choose not to, so it was okay. Playing BG3 and hearing the announcement about a new Divinity game got me giga hyped but I will temper my expectations after this cinematic trailer. I don‘t like the tone of it at all, unfortunately.

And LLM is simply such a bad example for Open Source in general. They couldn‘t have chosen a worse example to make their point. That‘s what’s frustrates me.

DeepSeek being an LLM is far from open source and especially not „truly“ open. The very article you linked basically says as much but wraps it in pretty words. Talking about ignorance.

It‘s open weights but definitely not

truly open source

Feel free to blame the technology as a whole but open source doesn‘t make exceptions for AI models.

I would normally make an exception for indie games when it comes to never pre-ordering games but not here. The development of this was so shaky (if not flat out shady) that I recommend to wait until it‘s actually there and user reviews are flocking in.

I think the bad reputation for asset flips is somewhat overblown. Like, of course some slop game is going to use assets but a lot of decent indie games do too. Using assets doesn‘t make a game bad. But yes a lot of games are just low effort bootlegs of whatever is popular right now.

But whats worse are games containing legit malware on Steam. Apparently that is becoming a growing problem.