I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.

Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.

Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.

It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.

Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.

Exactly what I’ve done. Set my settings to hide NSFW, blocked most of the “soft” communities like hot girls and moe anime girls and whatever else (blocking the lemmynsfw.com instance is a great place to start), and I use All frequently. That’s how I’ve found all the communities I’ve subscribed to, but frankly, my /all feed is small enough that I usually see all my subscribed communities anyway.

Sure, but I think this is similar to the problem of social media being addicting. This kind of thing makes users feel good, and therefore makes companies more money.

I don’t expect the major AI companies to self regulate here, and I don’t expect LLMs to ever find a magical line of being sycophantic enough to make lots of money while never encouraging a user about anything unethical, nor do I want to see their definition of “unethical” become the universal one.

Might be a good use case for Anubis, in addition to the URLParam passwords mentioned elsewhere. Enough protection to prevent trivial brute force scraping, while also being basically invisible to users.