Given how big my library is and the fact that I rarely buy full-price, its hard to pick a single item.

If I had to pick one worst, it would probably be Company of Heroes 3. I was really hopeful for the game, and got it bundled with my CPU when building a new PC, but its just not very good. The campaign, the main part I was interested in, is slow and samey and uninteresting. The multiplayer is even worse, being riddled with microtransactions, lootboxes, and other such stuff in ways that significantly impact gameplay, in a supposedly competitive PvP game. Even if we assume the game was equivalent to $20, I only put in four hours, and didn’t enjoy any of it.

In terms of best, the most technically correct would probably be Counter Strike GO/2. I’ve spent about $100 on it, between initial price, battle passes, and skins on the market, but selling those skins has earned me about $140 in revenue, so at 2000 hours, thats negative 2 cents an hour.

Excluding revenue made, its going to be Minecraft by a country mile. I’ve easily put in 10,000 hours since when I started playing mid-beta, so pessimisticly, it’d be around a quarter cent per hour. Honourable, more reasonable mentions would go to Gmod, where it works out to about 1 cent per hour when including time in the editor, and Dota and War Thunder, which are free, but I’ve spent thousands of hours in each and so bought about 2 cents per hour of microtransactions.

Just accidentlly hit post, and the immediate delete took too long to federate.

From my understanding, Valve would need to be hundreds of times more wealthy to be able to even consider manufacturing their own DRAM.

Edit: notably, this article seems to suggest that after significant government investmemt and with an already well-established knowledge and IP base, a fab costs around $15 billion dollars and optimisticly, a decade of construction. Given that Valve is starting from scratch, the price will be much higher. Chinese companies, backed by the Chinese government and using significant amounts of corporate espionage, have been trying to achive this for about 20 years, and are only just starting to catch up, nonetheless one (relatively) small software company.

It just isn’t cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick

But that lack of cohesion is exactly what makes it ugly, esspecially when split between a number of seperate assets. That said, I’m not convinced that that doesn’t have a huge impact on sales/perception, esspecially compared to an indirect factor like the resource waste and political influences of AI companies. Think of how little impact things like EA and Tencent’s immorality and anti-consumer behavior have on sales. Is AI really that much worse in perception than a company like that, or is it just down to the fact that the games look worse? Thats what I want measured.

Don’t Stop Girlypop is such a vibe wym ugly

I’d imagine people care more about a cohesive visual direction than they care about “pretty”. A lot of AI art already captures what an average jane would probably consider pretty, in a shallow sense. It just isn’t cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick

I would be willing to bet that the people who were previously doing human made slop like you described are now the ones making the AI slop. They were already doing minimal effort; it makes sense they’d do even less when presented the option.

You’re overestimating both how good AI is and how little effort a lot of these developers want to put in.

Generally, AI tools struggle with any type of specialized work and the same extends to game development. From my own testing, AI tends to butcher all but the simplest game coding tasks as a result of the larger and often very disjointed programming involved, and in terms of asset creation, it can create a lot of more generalized assets, but if you need a repeating texture or a texture for a 3d model, things immediately fall apart. That not to say it can’t be done, but its a suprising amount of work for what is supposed to be an automation tool, and when compared to the old solution, is it really much better than just buying a premade game, and maybe swapping one or two things?

That said, my question is more that AI is ugly, soulless, and samey, but human art (and “”“art”“”) can be too. Do equivalent human works receive similarly lower reviews, or do the additional consequences of AI use actually factor in to people’s perceptions, and if so, how much? For example, is a asset flip designed to rip people off going to be reviewed just as badly as a particularly soulless AI game, or AI going to be worse? Similarly, if you have a game with good programming and design, but AI assets, would it preform the same as something ugly in a human way like Cruelty Squad, or would it perform worse? Basically, how much of the negativity is because AI use has a bunch of negative effects, and how much of it is because the results of AI use are bad?

It’d be pretty hard to test in a meaningful way, but I’d be curious how big the impact of AI art is on a game’s initial perception compared to human-made slop such as asset flips or a lot of the mobile market and compared to human-made ugly games like Cruelty Squad or Don’t Stop Girlypop.

Basically, define how much the humanity is important, versus “prettyness”, versus dislike of AI for indirect reasons.

and is stronger than ever

Arguing semantics here, but this is a bit of a stretch. Iran has suffered very significant damage. A more accurate assessment would be that it withstood the US’s onslaught without having their military or their government broken, and have exposed the US military as being too inept to properly wage war.

The takeaway is similar in the context of the war, but its the US that has fallen rather than Iran having risen, which has much more significant global implications.

Direct link to the study: https://www.psycnet.org/doi/10.1037/ppm0000672

Unfortunately, its paywalled, but I’d be curious about the methodology and population.

Unfortunately, given the current economy, its not suprising. With how much prices have risen, the old pricing competed with and often beat out even used desktops.

For transparency, I’m a second hand source, close to multiple people who lived across the region.

Generally, the region is both extremely distrustful of government and outsiders, as well as being extremely prone to superstition and magic thinking. Obviously, there is the spectre of colonialism, but more recently than this, governments in the region are generally corrupt, violent and unstable on a scale westerners would find unbelievable. For example, (if I remeber right) Nigeria recently issued new bills but then much of the money “”“disappeared”“” before reaching banks and other organizations. The president claimed snakes ate the money. More relevant to this, with the inconsistent enforcement of laws, doctors are often unreliable or outright dangerous, such as giving sugar pills instead of medication. I have no idea of the authenticity of this (which is part of the problem), but from my own circle, there were stories of patients of the last ebola outbreak taken for quarentine, and then left unattended to or without food and water. Given all this, its not suprising that they wouldn’t trust outsiders taking people away.

At the same time, there is an abundance of superstition and magical thinking. I’m not sure how much of this is cultural versus reglious versus trauma and oppression versus lack of education, but belief in conspiracies, witchcraft, demons/spirits, and other such stuff is widespread to the point where it make the American south look tame. This is fed into further by the same sorts of social media rumors and misinformation that have become popular globally, but with far more gulibility and far less ability to disprove them (due to lack of education, and lack of local resources).

Taken together, you have basically the perfect cultural environment for this sort of anti-science movement.

And we all know how easy it is to buy an ARM board, install Linux and add all the ethernet ports one desires.

We do?

I have for some, and had the same issues, but its solved now. Apparently secureboot messes with the GPU drivers or something. I turned that off and its working fine now.

This seems to have fixed it! Thank you!

Unfortunately its not just Portal thats the issue. Its everything.

It is connected to the graphics card. Like I said, it ran fine on Windows so its not a hardware issue.

Story based motivators mean almost nothing to me, esspecially when told through non-gameplay means. Having an “intro” cutscene is almost akin to a text crawl/card in a movie - technically it works, and it can be an efficient way to give extra context, but its also likely to disrupt pacing or disorient - basically makes me want to watch less, rather than more. In the same way, I can’t think of any games where story played a significant part in motivation to continue. If I want to keep playing, its because the game is good, not because it told me I should.

Edit: Maybe to help clairify, good plot can be a motivator, but the character’s motivation is not my motivation. Whats important is that the plot is good, not that the protagonist’s goal is just.

Well, that would explain why I’m getting zero responses on my newly migrated account.