SCmSTR

Thank you for this craving.

Valve is an independent company.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the past few years, and have noticed a trend in what games I’ve found to be actually good.

I noticed three very specific commonalities, and all of them have at least two:

• Foreign (Non-American)
• Indie
• Small studio

Basically all of the good games that I’ve liked in the past ten years have been at least two of these, and I’m sure if you think about it, the great games you’ve played have also been this way.

Stop buying big US studio games, their shareholders all require them to maximize their income with really anti-comsumer and predatory designs and practices. You won’t have fun, and it’ll be expensive.

Go play EDF5 with some friends. It’s jank but super fun. 6 is being translated and ported to PC soon.

Raft is great, too.

Talos Principle was fantastic, if not a little melancholy.

And weirdly, Minecraft Java is still good fun. Go check out some of the mod packs like All Of Fabric 6. Host a local server, port forward, play with friends. Literally world-class, free content made by grassroots, passionate developers who do it because they love it.

Valheim was great years ago, and while their development cycle is slow, it’s been solid.

But seriously. When somebody refers or suggests a game to you, the first thing you should look at are how they make money, because that is ABSOLUTELY where the industry is at, and has been for a decade now. We used to have centralized talking heads like Total Biscuit who would bring up topics and discussions trying to keep these studios and publishers in their place, but he got taken out too early and now the community is ultra fragmented with no central integrous authority to reference and publishers and studios are out of control with nobody to answer to except investors.

It’s like the loss of a union, except it’s industry wide.

There are gems out there, but you gotta get past the advertising and learn to smell the bullshit business practices. They don’t have to be standard, but remember that gaming has only turned into gambling and Gaming-as-a-Service (GaaS) because credit cards got involved post-purchase as a source of revenue.

Sure, good things come from it, but the trade-offs are entirely insidious and clearly motivating for standardized enshittification. We adults made our own graves by accepting and spending. Sure, even if the money isn’t that big of a deal and the content you get might be good, you’re voting with your wallet and training a soulless system.

It’s ABSOLUTELY a mirror world, just like the media - if you consume, there will be more. Stop buying shit games like Diablo 4. Blizzard can take the hit unfortunately, and if those business practices stopped making as much return as they did, they wouldn’t be supportable.

Sure, initial prices would go up, but at least the games wouldn’t be ruined with money shops, proprietary currencies, battle passes, and all the other ultra predatory shit that makes them money that ruin gaming.

Reward creators and studios that stick their necks out to make something purely fun, despite their CFO compromising and forcing their developers to implement these practices because otherwise they’d: “be leaving money on the table, and we are a business, after all.”

But remember:

• Foreign
• Indie
• Small Studio

These are demographics that are typically more resistant and empowered to make FUN games.

STOP MAKING SHITTY GAMES

Enshittification.

Shoes? Maybe Reeboks?

Edit: I am appalled by how many people know the term aglet.

It’s directly attacking twitter and eee fediverse.

Back in 2017 or whatever that North American solar eclipse was, I drove down to Bend Oregon to view it. After, there was bumper to bumper traffic almost the whole way north, back to Seattle, WA. There was literal bumper to bumper traffic from Bend, OR to Issaquah, WA. That was almost 350 miles and took basically an entire day. It was horrible having to pee on the side of the road in bumper to bumper traffic in the middle of nowhere. Protip? Don’t try to drink the Gatorade just to have a pee bottle.

Honestly, I’ve thought about that, too. Like what if electing trump was just a catalyst for good change? We see all the shitty stuff that we’re not immune to (no pun intended), and then steel our resolve to be better.

Frankly, I’d rather just be done with all the nonsense, but if the last several years have taught me anything, it’s that we are ALL dumb as fuck and need to work on ourselves, myself included. Humans just aren’t quite ready. We may be, someday… But right now, I think it’s best we learn to overcome what our problems are by looking deeply into a mirror and working on that.

I kinda wanted to be able to see that galactic civilization, but I’m now aware that we have never been ready for it, and need to stop pretending we don’t have issues and blind spots.

Yeah, huh. It’s weird how that happened. Disney, ruiner of many small companies and destroyer of the purpose of copyright law on a deeply greedy level, goes against a sociopath nazi white nationalist, probably kkk.

Ten years ago, I liked Disney stuff but hated what they’ve done to the freedom of law and ruining the opportunities of many.

But here we are, post-2016 trump era, the world is way, way worse, and my activist political aunt was right.

She said to me, back then at a family get together after dinner, that electing trump is an extremely scary thing and would be bad.

I asked her what’s the worst that could really happen.

She kinda stared back at me, as if to gauge what to say. Then said that he was the type of person that brings all the awful things out from under their rocks, and told me to keep my eyes open and pay attention, because if he got elected, the next 4 years will be the type of history that only happens once in a lifetime.

She was 100% serious, as if she could see the future. But she was just in her 60s, big gay, from DC, and confident and loud. I can still see the the look of dread and sorrow on her face as she said that to me, and I doubt I’ll ever forget it.

Power typically begets more power, and the only way to fix it is to forcefully bend it to your will over and over again. I can’t believe Disney is where our trust is for civil rights, but, I guess it can always be worse and Disney knows that and is using us for support. It’s not great.

Fuck spez.

It’s like boomer sociopaths grew old enough in their time, and were like “yeah, ruin everything, yeah yeah”. But then millennial sociopaths grew old enough and are now like, “hold my coke…” Can we reign this shit in for the future generations at least? Because it’s awful.

Nobody said it makes sense.

We’ll see in a few days what the people end up choosing. I’m not going back unless demands are met, but I do have a tiny glimmer of hope that the people will let it go as apps disappear, and a slightly larger glimmer of hope that it’ll just kinda shrivel over the following months and years.

But, in all likelihood, people are dumb, and spineless and ignorant, and will continue to make spez money and the durability of the site will endure. It’ll be worse, but not worse enough for the vast majority of normal people to not use it. I have hope, but it’s simply hope in the face of my ever growing misanthropy.

“Why even try?”

You don’t stand for much, do you?