MudMan

dark

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

I’m not sure about the digital-only stuff, but the OP is specifically talking about yt-dlp as an alternative to ripping the BRs, and I have to agree that ripping the disks will be easier and yields better results.

Hardware availability is the trickiest part, especially for UHD, but if you have a drive that will deal with the disks you have I certainly wouldn’t bother with the stream rip.

But hey, as a fallback, it’s good to have the option.

For straight revenue, yeah, that’d be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn’t in the mix.

And either way it’s being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven’t even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

I… yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That’s your line.

Alright.

Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It’s “bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite”, instead of “Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else’s VFX pipeline”.

I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the “Disney Fornite whaaaa?!” angle is what people will take away from this across the board.

“Unknown” goes from 3 to 6% in the same time period, so I think technically it’s the year of the Unknown desktop. Sounds catchier, if you ask me.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn’t.

There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.

Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).

I’d be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies’ look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so… make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.

Nah, I’m mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.

Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized “hidden gem” lists of game collectors in thirty years, it’s that.

Well, then you’re my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it’s a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they’re both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).

And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.

Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn’t sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what’s realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.

Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn’t played it personally.

It’s all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use ~ and | as commonplace characters.

FWIW, I don’t even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I’m using constantly, it’s all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it’s not what I expect.

Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I’d make that trade.

Man, these guys really can’t catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.

I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren’t that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?

I don’t know what the business plan was meant to be, and it’s kinda killing me that I don’t fully grasp it.

The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the “I can’t believe it’s not Deus Ex” franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.

I came here to joke that judging by what toy stores look like, they probably just sell merch. I was extremely not ready for that to be the canonical explanation and now I feel more respect for the writers. More empathy, too, because… you know they know.

The stuff my dad made. My mom worked past our lunchtime, my dad did not.

https://media.tenor.com/WUwtwTKCvicAAAAC/reexamine-personal-biases.gif