For whatever reason, a game company can make your “physical copy” require a digital download to function. If a company decides they don’t want you to play a game (or version) anymore, it being on a cart or disc is not insurance against it.

And if this practice continues for Switch 2 games, or was in practice for the Wii U, or etc etc…

It’s a bad practice, even if right now there are ways around it for one game. It’s a bad practice even if it’s only for the current console on the current firmware. It turned a physical copy someone bought into a keycard. I’m of the opinion that all physical console games have been keycards since the day they started having day 1 patches, but at least that argument has the reasonable counterpoint of “you can still play the buggy incomplete v1.0 that’s on the cart/disc, that makes it better than Switch 2 Game Key Cards, which are better than account-locked Digital Games”.

This is direct and complete proof that your physical copy means nothing. The company can still restrict your access whenever they want to. The Switch 1 still gets firmware updates, after all, and firmware updates can’t be rolled back. The physical copy guarantees fuck all in the face of every preservation concern that’s a criticism of digital downloads. DRM-free digital and piracy are the only trustworthy methods of preservation.

This is still yet another point against those people insisting that physical copies mean anything. Right now, it’s “just update the game and you can play it”. But that’s exactly as limiting as a digital copy - you still need an internet connection, an account in good standing, the company’s CDN to be online, and everything else to play the game that’s “on” your glorified $60 DRM key.

As more Switch 2s get firmware updated, this change means every “physical copy” of Mario Wonder has become a “Game-Key Card” retroactively. The only difference is that the download is slightly smaller for a GKC.

I’d love to see an extension that, instead of removing the client ID tracking information, instead randomizes it - and does so on inputting a link too. Removing tracking parameters needs 100% certainty, a single link clicked while signed into Google or whatever on another browser can be enough to establish a connection between you and the friend who sent the link. If I show up as clicking one link from Bob and 9 links from null, I’m still connected to Bob. But if my 10 links are from Bob, Jane, Alice, Fheism, Bggur, Daxi8, Michelle, Sssssssssss, Mgke7d, and BRomgi, good luck targeting any ads with all that noise. Especially if the systematically replaced clientIDs are recycled within the addon’s database and end up creating ghost profiles on the advertisers’ end.

I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game

Do you not consider Expedition 33 a well-made game?

I have less issue with smaller devs doing it

The comment I replied to says “we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots.”

Indie games on shoestring budgets are also the games that can least afford to pay employees to learn the “better” tool set on the job. Hiring devs that are experienced in Unreal or Unity means your onboarding is just about teaching them your studio’s stuff, and the demands of your game. Budget is a zero sum game - if something like Expedition 33 (UE5) did it “right” instead of doing it “easy”, they might not have been able to afford or produce the phenomenal mocap/VA/soundtrack/environments in the game.

Godot continues to mature, and some relatively big names in the indie space are publicly dumping Unity for it (like Mega Crit with Slay the Spire 2). But “pushing” smaller devs to ignore the onboarding problem isn’t the way. It’s the smaller devs that benefit most from engines with “good enough” defaults - bigger studios can afford to pay someone to “do the lighting”.

Picking an engine (including the option of rolling your own shit) has to be a decision made very early in the game development cycle, like “before you hire anybody” early, and it’s a really hard one to change your mind on later. For a lot of studios, the right decision isn’t the “best, most capable, free-est” one. Hell, for Balatro the dev chose LOVE, which is usually used for VNs, because he didn’t need all the other features he’d get out of something like Unity or Godot.

Plugging *arrs into public torrent trackers is always a losing proposition. Consider either paying for usenet or getting into some entry level private trackers (lurk on Reddit’s /r/opensignups)

Since nobody else posted it in the comments yet: 600 euros for the base version, 900 for whatever the X version is.

OP, remember this isn’t Reddit, we can put the actual number in the title of the post.

I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin’s Android TV client still can’t handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.

Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.

Wait, did the dev finally come back and fix sync for lemmy?

Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.

This kind of extension is used when your device’s output sucks and “cranking it to 140%” is the only way to make it audible (usually mangling the quality). Possibly used by hard-of-hearing users too. Or maybe they’re stuck on monitor speakers and “just pay $15 for cheapo cans” isn’t an option, and the monitor’s OSD controls are clunky and awful (they always are).

I’ve used “volume booster” features in apps before when listening to badly mixed podcasts/audiobooks, because turning up the system volume on a phone makes other apps too loud. I could see a desktop situation that mirrors this for someone, a setting in FF is faster/easier than the windows volume mixer.

The firefox list is pretty much entirely overly specific youtube tweaks (that you should be using uBlock or a more fully featured Youtube extension for), “games in sidebar”, and custom cursors. Bonzi buddy and toolbars, anyone?

Seriously, an NES emulator? As a browser addon? That needs permission to access “your data on all websites”?

TBH if you didn’t want hostile people that know the planet better than you manipulating sandworm aggro to kill you, why did you install a Dune survival MMO

That’s like, the main form of factional interaction in Dune

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?

In the US and most of the rest of the world, that’s what they’re doing. In the UK/EU, they’re being forced to require age verification.

Do note that while “protect the children from seeing a titty on the internet” is an unwinnable and pointless battle, the outside UK/EU method doesn’t do anything to prevent it. I’m against age verification as a process, I want my accounts to be fully pseudonymous whenever possible, but without it there’s nothing preventing a horny 15 year old from entering January 1 1990 into the age field or clicking “yes I’m 18” the way everyone’s been doing since the Internet moved beyond Usenet. The EU/UK law is acknowledging the ankle-high barrier that “dude just trust me” age-gating applies, and is attempting to introduce some form of actual verification/accountability for sites that display porn. Doing this is, of course, awful for the freedom of information and privacy that can exist in online spaces, but “we gotta protect the children!!!”.

As far as Nexus goes, this statement is as close as possible to saying “we are going to be complying with this law as we are forced to, but are committed to doing the absolute bare minimum required of us. UK/EU users will have to use a VPN into any other region to bypass whatever age verification system we’re forced to implement.”

Whatever they end up doing for age verification in the EU/UK can probably be bypassed by a proxy/VPN, at least.

I didn’t buy and don’t have the console. But either way, refunds wouldn’t “hurt” Nintendo the way they would on a platform like Steam - you can’t refund Nintendo digital products, and even if Walmart accepted a return on a Switch 2 with the digital account-based (non-transferable per TOS) Mario Kart redeemed, Nintendo already made their sale by getting the thing on a Wal-Mart shelf in the first place.

It’s just silly to see a comment about “keeping” giving Nintendo $80 for mario kart when the people affected by stuff like this… Already gave Nintendo $80/$500 for Mario Kart. The “support” has already been delivered.

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing “gshsjajfkfksiwn” in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we’re really micromanaging every art shortcut as “potential pay to hire more artists” now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.