prohibition
noun
pro· hi· bi· tion ˌprō-ə-ˈbi-shən also ˌprō-hə-
Synonyms of prohibition
1
: the act of prohibiting by authority
2
: an order to restrain or stop
Disneyworld has lines longer than the park can manage for decades, do you expect it to just be a matter of time until park management finally figures out how to queue people efficiently enough, or do you think the solution will be once again raising costs for the customer.
Games with micro transactions are one of the most profitable things that you can do today and fortnight being fortnight. There are tiny mobile companies being sold for billions and making massive profits with predatory mtx transactions. Gatcha games are doing extremely well, and fortnight is no exception.
Valve is making a killing over CS gambling and MTX as well, so not a good example. Steam is obviously making more but even CS itself would have made Valve a very successful and profitable company. Pretty much all of these build on predatory practices though.
If we are talking about games without MTX, yes that’s a very rough business.
They're also paying out hundreds of millions to map "creators", the majority of which are pumping out low effort game modes like Steal The Brainrot. I can't help but feel this isn't helping their situation at all. Then again, Steal The Brainrot often surpasses the actual Fortnite game modes in player count, so maybe it is worth it. It doesn't seem like a sign of good health for Fortnite overall, though.
Ok, but Fortnite is a massively popular success, even as its popularity slips. Fortnite's run so far could have sustained Epic for years, even without other revenue they get from things like Unreal Engine. Games as a whole may be a risky venture, but we're talking about Epic here; the mystery is not how to succeed in games, but how a company that had an earth-shattering run of success in games is now in such a position.
It absolutely is a profitable industry, maybe not as profitable as todays greedy shareholders would like it to be. Just look at the CD Projekt that releases 1 game per 10 years and still makes a fortune through Netflix colabs and selling merch.
I agree with your sentiment, but I also don't know if CD Projekt is a great example because its not their original IP. I am sure the games saw a boast in sales from awareness given by the TV show. But I am assuming Andrzej Sapkowski is probably the one who gets most of the money from licensing from Netflix. Although I will say, I don't 100% know all the details for the Netflix deals. And due to lawsuits and what not, exactly what Andrzej has the ability to sell rights to isn't very easy to find out with quick searches.
Edit: Ah, maybe CD Projekt does own the rights completely? They may have bought the right completely from Andrzej? So Andrzej may not have been the primary party selling the rights? Or maybe not? Andrzej may have retained film/tv rights and not sold those to CD Projekt.
The person I was replying to is asserting that the winners of the metaphorical lottery are not in profitable employment, so you aren't making the point you think you're making.
Well, you goto be good nowadays, you compete against the whole worlds dreamy eyed teeangers wanting to make "their"game. A wellfunded, pig-trough-slop-mill ala hollywood can not compete against that when it comes to fun, art and experiences. They fled into gambling, but gamers actively ostracize lootboxers nowadays.
Gamers love, love, love lootboxes. Can't get enough of them. There are many lootbox games with 10-100s of millions of players. The Reddit/HN vocal minority who hate lootboxes (myself included) probably represent <5%, if that.
They made products that were effectively only targeted at the gaming audience, and when they pivoted, they were rewarded substantially, as the wider market recognizes how small the niche they used to be in was compared to where they are now.
You have literally no fucking clue what you're talking about. The games industry is ~200 billion dollars per year. Film is 30, music is 60. Not only are games the largest entertainment sector, nothing else is even close.
A hardware company pivoting to the AI bubble has literally nothing to do with the profitability of software.
This is the worst take I've seen in a while on HN. Nvidia doesn't make games, and for its case, they can either sell the same die as a gaming GPU for $2,000, or as a server GPU for >$30,000, the math is simple and obvious, which is why the stock jumps.
Epic doesn't have anything else besides the gaming market. And the gaming market is huge, it's more than music and movies combined, so please just stop spilling bullshit.
Right now even Valve realizes that Steam will literally run out of steam. This is why they have been trying to become more like Nintendo and selling their own hardware (with varying success) .
Developers chase the user base. If and when the users choose Linux developers will target Linux.
Proton as a project let's valve hedge on the heir apparent OS without upfront developer cost. If the Linux player base grows, developers will follow and valve is poised to remain dominant.
Because of Oracle v Google, supporting applications running in the Win32 userspace isn't necessarily leaving yourself open to threats of Microsoft meddling.
There's tons and tons of older software that people still want to run that might never be ported to Linux. And that's fine, because there's no problem with building compatibility layers to make it work. Microsoft can't do anything about that.
I believe they have proved that very few games are actually Windows games. The few remaining are mostly those which require Windows kernel drivers to run or connect to online services.
Hmm, citation needed on that one imo. Consensus is that their hardware strategy is in service of selling more games. Hardware revenues for Steam Deck are proportionally tiny; Frame and Machine aren’t going to meaningfully change that.
If AI being a million billion zillion times more productive at doing bullshit jobs nets in very little economic gain, then that lays bare the net economic value of all our bullshit jobs.
But given that the stock market hasn't panicked, this must mean at least one of these premises is false:
1. Economic activity is relatively flat.
2. AI makes us a million billion zillion times more productive than we used to be.
> lays bare the net economic value of all our bullshit jobs.
This was already obvious, the more important question is what are we (collectively, society & our governments) going to do about it?
We (should have) already known most of our jobs were bullshit jobs, especially white collar jobs. The difference is now we might have something coming that will eliminate the bullshit jobs.
But society will always need bullshit jobs or the whole system collapses. Not everyone can go dig ditches, so what do we do?
The problem here is that people have been provided strong incentive to believe in a falsehood. It is unlikely a purely technological solution is available for this.
I'll treat this as a genuine question. No, to "steelman" is to engage with the strongest possible version of your interlocuter'so argument, rather than the weakest. An especially effective steelman case will (genuinely!) strengthen or clarify the opposite point of view before laying out the case against it. It's a way of granting respect to those with whom you disagree, and (I find) a discipline that helps me avoid empty rhetoric.
But, yeah: if you find that the steelman version of the opposing argument won't be borne out in reality that's a promising line of attack. You'll argument will be more likely to be effective, however, than if you attack the strongest rather than the weakest ("strawman") version of the case.
I don't understand, declaring on your own terms what you think the argument actually is isn't respectful, it's deeply disrespectful. Take the claim at face value, details can and will be clarified through conversation.
> declaring on your own terms what you think the argument actually is isn't respectful
Which is usually a strawman tactic, and I agree both disrespectful and useless.
But... We will always respond to our own understanding of someone else's argument! That's inevitable, short of mind-reading. A habit of steel-manning the opposite case is a useful discipline for demonstrating respect - and, ideally, minimizing the necessity for clarification.
In practice, this means to make (to the best of your ability and understanding) an honest and accurate restatement of their case, and (if you see an opportunity - you won't always) a genuine suggestion that it would be stronger if it considered [x, y, z], before you attempt to refute it. You may not get it quite right, but you will have given your interlocuter a straightforward opportunity (as you say, conversationally) to clarify.
I think this is, given as I say that we're not able to inhabit anyone else's mind directly, the closest that we can rhetorically come to taking another's claim "at face value".
You think explicitly highlighting that you're in the market segment that's happy to pay for online services will mean you will never see paid ads for online services again?
If gamblers want to gamble, is not seeing the 30 second video ad the only thing stopping them?
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