The best remakes of ChronoTrigger were killed by vindictive SquareEnix litigators a decade ago.

I’m not holding my breath on an FF7Remake treatment on these terms.

We took all the difficult and complex processes from humans and gave them to machines a long time ago.

We really haven’t. Automation just adds layers of complexity, often with extra rigidity, so everything becomes hyper specialized.

That said, we’ve capitalized the process such that the real estate and machinery necessary to do the work are fabulously expensive and in an extremely limited number of hands. So a lockout of the labor force can cripple wages, even in a very sophisticated field.

It helps if you recognize that factory labor is quite difficult and complex, while slapping your watermark on someone else’s art is incredibly easy.

Did anyone ever hook 4chan up to a new machine or is Greentext now trapped in amber from a few weeks ago?

https://mainleaf.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-market-a-video-game/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-0

As a rule of thumb, you’re looking at 25-50% of a AAA game’s budget going to advertising. So a $40 game becomes an $80 game in large part because the publisher is putting out $10Ms-$100Ms just to raise name recognition and build hype.

If it isn’t carved into a sheet of limestone using the Mayan character set, I don’t want to read about it.

Upset we didn’t get a “Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago…”

there are the likes of South of Midnight and Clair Obscur launching at $50.

Beautiful games, both. But again, they aren’t having the full court press of advertising like a new Call of Duty or Final Fantasy or Diablo would.

That’s the real cost savings. You don’t need to change $80+ for a game if you aren’t focused entirely on presale figures to justify your studio’s budget.

Incidentally, you also get to focus on a better game. Balatro didn’t need wall to wall subway ads in New York to end up on everyone’s phones.

Steam doesn’t advertise at the scale of Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. It won’t have a ripple effect because it won’t change the degree to which artificial hype drives people towards the “Buy” button.

$80 on release day. $60 a month later. $40 a year later. $20 a year after that.

What you’re paying for isn’t the game, its the hype. An enormous component of a modern AAA game’s budget is just advertising. That’s what your $80 is going towards. You’re paying to have people tell you to buy it.

Even assuming you don’t feel like pirating… Just be patient, play something that came out a few years ago, wait for the next Steam Sale, and own the game for pennies on the dollar.

I also hate Cathoclicism

Lithium is the new Gold.

Anything that gets a rise out of your parents is going to be repeated on a loop whether or not you understand the context.

I remember saying “Pimp” in front of a friend’s parent. She chewed me out over it, while my friend’s younger sister listened in. She then proceeded to say “Pimp! Pimp! Pimp!” all the way home.

I was not invited back to that house for a month, which I think is a bit unfair.

You’d incentive people to make tires that lasted longer and that would be horrible.

But also

House republicans have proposed putting a $200/year federal registration tax on EVs

I do love it when Republicans ride into office on a wave of people screaming “ARGH! I HATE TAXES!” and then spend the first four months in office finding an exciting new way to raise people’s taxes.

More than anything, I’m looking forward to all those Cybertruck owners getting the “Fell For It Again” award branded onto their foreheads.

It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.

I don’t particularly like this analogy, because /r/changemyview isn’t operating in a country where an occupying army was bombing weddings a few years earlier.

But this goes back to the problem at hand. People have their priors (my bots are so sick nasty that nobody can detect them / my liberal government was so woke and cool that nobody could possibly fail to love it) and then build their biases up around them like armor (any coordinated effort to expose my bots is cheating! / anyone who prefers the new government must be brainwashed!)

And the Bayesian Reasoning model fixates on the notion that there are only ever a discrete predefined series of choices and uniform biases that the participant must navigate within. No real room for nuance or relativism.

Manipulating users with AI bots to research what, exactly.

Researching what!!!

A/B Testing in Digital Marketing

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Lots of Americans are hateful

You’d be surprised. Incels love prostitution.

Jones sacrificed too much of his integrity

How much did he have to spare?