enkers

I’m so hyped for 2.0, all these changes look amazing!

Another one?! Jeeze, Boeing whistleblowers sure are unlucky.

Yeah, I was trying to reconcile that too, which is why I asked. Seem like it was other projects that were fully canceled, not the biggest of the big.

Oh, okay, so it was they who abandoned the content, not the users. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

I read the article, and still have no clue what “content abandonment losses” are. Did they basically predict FFVII part 2 to sell as well as part 1, and then it didn’t?

Seems weird to call your forecasting error a “loss” if that’s the case.

Y’all be strawmaning me here. There’s such a wealth of video games to choose from, I generally have no problem finding stuff I will thoroughly enjoy while staying well above my value threshold.

Additionally, how much a game costs to play per hr doesn’t necessarily have any relationship with how enjoyable it is.

The article is specifically boasting about play time metrics, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to look at how it compares to other games in similar or adjacent genres.

Nonono, that’s not politics, it’s business!

Weird flex, but OK. Doing a bit of napkin math, Factorio has something like 210 hrs. avg. playtime, and Civ 6 is at 290 hrs.

I personally like the 1 hr/US$ playtime metric as a good value product. At full price, Frostpunk gets 0.8 on average. It does regularly go on 80% off sale, though, so if you buy it then, it scores a 4.0 which is really quite decent.

Still, it’s by no means anywhere near contention to lead the pack.

As the petrocos literally set the world on fire, my one solace is that they still have to live in the world they’ve fucked over.

Ah, yes. Once again we get to count on one hand how many moderately fancy dinners it costs to buy a republican.

I did read it, and I did notice that the title was editorialized a bit here, and I think that’s immaterial to my main point. The article is basically “sun found to rise once again after 8 years”. As you mentioned yourself, it really doesn’t go anywhere with the idea.

Ya know what other game is basically the same game 8 years later? Pretty much all of them. Games almost never just up and fundamentally change their core design after release. Why would a dev do that, when they can just make a new game?

What a weird article title.

I think it’s quite a fascinating subject. In my opinion, the real problem is the stakes.

When you have RNG in a game, the only thing you have to potentially lose is the time you’ve spent in that game, so there’s a natural reasonable cap. Once you introduce outside currency, the stakes can grow way outside that bounds.

The reason gambling is so problematic is that the higher the stakes, the more adrenaline is released. This causes sensitivity to adrenaline decreases, and even bigger risks need to be taken to elicit the same reaction.

Gaming generally has a hard cap on how much you can lose, so there simply isn’t a way to increase the risk. The only thing that can happen is that you get bored of the game.

On a fundamental level, though, there’s no mechanical distinction between gambling and (some) RNG in games. In both cases you put your time on the line.

I suppose the other element is that expected value (ROI) is often >=1 in games and <1 in gambling. Usually in gaming it’s expected that if you continue to put in time you’ll eventually progress, whereas the opposite is almost universally true in gambling; the more time you put in, the more you stand to lose.

+1 on Chisel and Bits (not to be confused with just Chisel, which is also a great mod, just not for this)

I’ve seem some absolutely stunning detail work done in C&B. It’s definitely a labour intensive endeavor, though. If you’ve got a good eye for design, the sky is the limit.

It was, but I’ve been on this planet getting on towards half a century, and I’ve never seen an el nino year anything like this before.

Yeah, I think yours is proably the more correct take. Carrying capacity exists in nature because other animals can’t ship produce around by truck. That said, there’s still an economic carrying capacity, so to speak, where the forces of desirability and affordability meet, that will dictate the population size of an area. Climate pressure will decrease affordability of many regions driving more and more people to move or face poverty.

Basically my experience this winter. Normally we have several feet of snow on the ground for a full season. This year, it was a few inches, and lasted less than a month.

Not that I’d exactly call it gambling per se, but I have friends who definitely scratch their gambling itch with high risk RNG game mechanics that don’t cost IRL money.

Path of Exile, for example, is great at this. You can invest a whole lot of time/resources into a craft, and then the final step, it either bricks or becomes a best-in-slot item. The game is littered with this sort of mechanic, and you definitely get a rush when you coin flip with several hours of your life on the line.

So while I agree with you, I can also kinda see their point.