bigsocrates

@allthedinos: Everything changes so I think it was inevitable that the Internet of 2024 would not be the Internet of 1994. What's sad is how much less functional it is in so many ways. It's hard to think of other products that have gotten so much worse over that time. Take video games. There are areas where they've gotten worse in the last 30 years but I'd say the games of 2024 are WAY better than the games of 1994 in general. And in some areas there's no contest. The Internet is better in terms of video, graphics, speed and reliability, and it did generally keep improving for awhile (the addition of Google and Wikipedia were huge net gains, as was Youtube and probably Netflix along with E-commerce) but sometime around 2010 or whenever you want to peg it things started to turn and it's been a downward slide ever since.

@imunbeatable80: Actually, an entity that tells people to eat rocks and put glue in their pizza sauce WOULD come up with some of those rankings, so that checks out. I'mma start calling you imabothaha80.

@spunkyhepanda: Statistically 1 and 2 are not the worst I've seen but I'm pretty sure 2 is trolling. I think the number of people who got it on 2 without knowing anything on 1 is miniscule, and most of the successful 2 guesses knew it on 1. I think 3 is not meant to be guessable based on the character but on other elements in the shot, and there it can be pretty helpful.

Then after a pretty brutal 1-2, and a difficult 3, 4 is pretty revealing and 5 is just a check as to whether you remember the title because by that point you know or you're never going to get it.

#GuessTheGame #748

🎮 🟥 🟥 🟥 🟩 ⬜ ⬜

#MasterGamer

https://GuessThe.Game/p/748

@ares42: This chart, which I've seen other versions of, shows that non-mobile gaming more or less peaked in 2019, with maybe some slight gains in the VR/AR segment over the last 5 years and also a small bump during covid.

It's well established that the PS5/Xbox Series are underperforming the last gen of consoles and pretty much nobody is buying consoles in emerging markets. There's some growth in PC in emerging markets but it's almost entirely in FTP games, not the traditional high budget stuff we're talking about.

I really haven't seen anyone who thinks the last 5 years have been good for traditional games growth outside of the covid bump but if you have data that suggests otherwise please share.

ETA and I forgot to link the chart!

Charted: Video Game Industry Revenues By Year & Platform (visualcapitalist.com)

@cornfed40: But why do Swerve and Ospreay at Forbidden Door (a PPV that's supposed to be about cross promotional matches) just to do a screwy finish to set up an entirely different feud? It's not the worst ending to this match possible but it seems dumb to use a match this big to set up a much smaller, unrelated, match.

Nobody knows why Ospreay is still with Callis.

The booking is just so scattershot. Hopefully the return of MJF will give the show a central, strong, feud as he has in the past. Possibly their goal is to switch the belt to Ospreay so he can feud with MJF? Seems premature but that at least would make sense. Of course MJF and Swerve would work too.

MJF taking the belt off Swerve with some heel shenanigans and then having Ospreay take the belt from MJF with Swerve helping him to get revenge would be a way to set up a potential three way feud that could get momentum but maybe too soon for that too.

Regardless the show needs some kind of central storyline that doesn't directly involve Tony Khan somehow being outexecutived by the EVPs.

@ares42: There is at least one huge difference, which is that these games are now big players on console when they used to be PC only. And PC was a smaller part of the market then.

And the market is NOT overall growing (outside of mobile.) That's a big part of the issue. The market is stagnant right now and was starting to stagnate before 2020 (though it did grow significantly in 2020 and for the next couple years for obvious reasons.) The PS5 is lagging behind the PS4 and the Xbox Series has cratered. PC has picked up some of the slack but not that much.

Yes you can see predecessors of the current situation with WOW and DOTA/LOL, but they were on a different scale and in a different context. Again, the amount of play time spent in these games right now is astronomical compared to in the past. There's data that says things have changed.

@undeadpool: Nobody is telling you what to do. I'm just saying that for me dealing with a bad faith human is different from dealing with a computer program. At least the bad faith human may listen even if they do not hear.

@nobody_nowhere: Unless we all just forget what good writing is. People seem prepared to accept slop, and if they're not the powers that be seem hellbent on trying to force them to.

@shindig: Oh sure, you boil your head ONCE and everyone thinks you've got bad judgment.

@brian_: I mention Balan Wonderworld all the time. I mean not in real life, but online. If I play Skull & Bones then I WILL talk about. Enough that you'll all be sick of it!

@cikame: Only one way to know for sure...

@spacemanspiff00 It's all I've ever wanted.

@manburger: ENABLER!

@zombiepie: Is encouraging self harm how you get your revenge for being @ed too many times?

Because they're made for fan service not to be great games that have to sell on their own merits as games, and because the team that made Powerstone was incredible.

I don't really think this is a difficult question.

Why are licensed kart racers not as good as Crash Team Racing?

Why were licensed platformers on the SNES not as good as Super Mario Bros. 3?

It takes a lot of work and expertise to make a great game and when you're selling based on a license all you have to be is good enough (and often not even that.) Sure you do sometimes get licensed games that are better than they have to be (Dragon Ball FighterZ, though it's not an arena fighting) but it's very rare and generally happens because a great team has gotten their hands on a license for some reason.

No great team has been assigned to make an anime arena fighter. Yet.

Basically what this post says. Skull & Bones is free for the next week and while it's a game that I don't really want to play it's ALSO a game that I really want to be able to talk about because it's weird and dumb. Not playing it was easy when it could have cost money, but a free week is pretty tempting for a sicko like me. Remember, I beat Balan Wonderworld. I am a bigtime gameperv.

I want to be able to put Skull & Bones on my game of the year list (towards the bottom almost certainly) but I'd be an idiot to play 25 hours of it in a week, even for free. That is a LOT of time to invest. And of course if I play but don't finish I may be tempted to buy it even if I don't really like it just to see it through.

I'm broken like that.

I just need someone to talk me down from following my worst gaming impulses out of curiosity and "hey, it's free."

Ospreay Vs Strickland is such a weird matchup right now. Sure it's likely to be good in the ring but from a storytelling and momentum perspective it doesn't make sense. If you beat Strickland you kill his momentum and could throw him back down to the midcard. If you beat Ospreay it's not as bad, but I don't know that you do anything for Strickland and you definitely could blunt Ospreay's momentum, which is one of the best things they have going.

There's got to be a better way to set this up. Even if you want to switch the title to Ospreay, which makes sense, you can have Strickland lose to a heel in a filthy finish and then have Ospreay take the title from him, then set up the Ospreay/Strickland match as Strickland tries to get his title back. But it makes more sense to just keep them away from each other for a bit and focus on giving Strickland a good feud or two and letting Ospreay keep building, then belt him in the UK if you think it's time.

I'm interested in where this goes but not so much from a "I really want to see this, it will be great" perspective (outside the match itself) but from a "well this is weird, let's see if they have a plan" perspective.