Prove_your_argument

They’re also upping the sub price for some home user office plans. Apparently it’s milk the customer time at microsoft.

I went from a 1080ti to a 6800xt, and then a 9070xt. I basically just skip a generation, but the amount of posts from guys out there this year saying “Finally retired my 4090 with my shiny new 5090!” is honestly depressing.

I mentioned the ancillary costs because TCO is relevant. If you’re sweating bullets over $10-$30 a month, but you always buy the highest end gear as it releases and are paying $200-$300+ a month on just being able to play stuff… why the hyperfocus on software costs? Couldn’t more money be saved by doing something differently?

I know guys who buy all the skins on LoL as they release. I know people with thousands of spend in shit like fortnite. I also know people spending hundreds a month on gacha. Financial literacy is terrible.

Anyway, I look at game sub costs as super cheap, especially compared to 1990s $5 rentals for 5 days. There’s a 30 day all you can eat rental option, whether it’s worth it to you really depends on you. I don’t pay for it shrug

It’s just like all the other garbage ‘leadership’ decisions based on how it’s always been done, rather than focusing on actual outcomes.

Sadly it’s way easier for underperforming management to say “ass in chair m-f 9-5” as a productivity improvement than to try and quantify reduced turnover as how it relates to output or wasted man hours from training up new people.

Relies on proper leadership that isn’t following current MBA principals.

It’s too easy to go for a cash grab. Broadcom is a great example.

I don’t like the subscription model at all but I spend way more than $360 in a typical year for games.

I probably only buy at most 2 “full price” games in a year, but I usually pick up at least a game a month, and sometimes even more for cheaper indie stuff. My steam library is old enough to drink in the US and i’m just shy of 1000 things, and I haven’t bought anything in a bundle since around reaching ~400.

Most games I pick up I end up spending less than 10 hours on them. Some amount more is 20-40 hours before I drop it and probably never look at it again. A handful of titles I get 100-500 hours, i’d say maybe .5 a year fall into this like Shadow Empire or Age of Wonders 4.

For the indecisive gamer $30/mo is way cheaper than buying a single new release… and since this shit is monthly you just cancel a sub when you’re done. I don’t really do it much, but I have many friends that do.

Have you ever looked at your gaming spend holistically and seen how much it costs a month between electricity, hardware purchases, software purchases? It’s probably way more than $30/mo. I’m not saying it justifies the cost, but odds are with regular GPU refreshes every three years, you’re paying something like $20-55/mo for that one part anyway nowadays.

4x10 is so stupid though. A huge portion of roles could get everything they need to do done in 3x8 or 4x8.

Capitalism doesn’t really see building a well treated highly compensated team of exceptional high skill workers as consistently generating more money for them.

For this to work you need a few people at the helm who actually give a shit about long term results. Capital wants bigger numbers with each earnings report which doesn’t always happen with gaming.

I for one have no comprehension as to how blizzard has maintained it’s following, but it’s a great example for how even the best companies can turn to shit by shareholder/board member directions. The money got too big with WoW.

Stuff like that puts me off. By default it’s basically illegal, so we have no idea when the developers will need to retain legal counsel that explicitly tells them to delete everything and cease discussing it.

Support and maintenance are a nightmare, and based on the other folks here talking about it, it’s certainly something to have to tinker with heavily.

If i’m going to have to tinker, i’m going to go with FOSS stuff if I can. I’d rather learn something that will be useful for a while.

no actual path to profitablity

You don’t think reddit can make money from advertising?

For another thought experiment, try living in Wilmington and commuting to Vertex. There’s a rail station right there. It gets nightmarish especially if we have snowpocalypse again.

Everyone I know who lives in Boston who is not exceptionally wealthy or in a very high paying role (350k+/yr) is very young and living with roommates. The second you have a couple of kids the math gets real tough to justify anything. Most of the working professionals I knew 10 years ago who were just about to turn 40 were buying homes out in Salem, Beverly or some other distant commuter rail destination to raise their kids. Even the guy who owned a 2BR condo downtown did this as his kid got to kindergarten age ended up in Stoughton.

I’ve also lived and commuted from Cleveland Circle and i’d take a cambridge pharma job over that vertex commute any day of the week.

I don’t live in Boston. I own a home in a nearby city. I can get to the subway line, but the connections required blow.

Let’s just pretend I live at oak grove and I work at vertex pharmaceuticals. They’re RIGHT over the bridge at seaport. What’s the sensible public transit option aka not a 18 minute walk from orange line to vertex?

It’s definitely a wealth grab. They’re moving all the skilled jobs to the red states and as those jobs bring more and more people with critical thinking skills the state will become less and less red. Eventually those states won’t align with the current politics but it won’t matter, the ones in power will be long gone.

The damage will already be done and the wealthy pockets will be more flush than ever when the pendulum swings back a tiny bit and we get social security 2.0, which is then attacked or neglected for the following 80 years.

It’s the circle of shit.

Hey man, when I was a kid it was $5 to rent a single game for a week.

It absolutely sucked when the game was terrible, but what are you gonna do?

AFMF is terrible though compared to a properly implemented frame gen solution. There’s only so much you can do with driver based implementations.

I promise an executive at microsoft is getting a massive bonus this year once they see the earnings increase for this segment that far surpasses the earnings of their xbox hardware was generated.

It’s still a decent deal. A buck a day to play unlimited games is hardly unaffordable in the US or Europe, and even most of latin america.

They won’t stop with this increase though. Look at the price of cable TV bundles and how so many eagerly signed up for $200-300+/mo. I work with older people who still pay this.

The ads/manipulation does a thing that helps you attain profit or power. You want to manipulate what people see and pay for… so you pay reddit to allow you to mass deploy bots bypassing moderator levers. They have the community, you have the objective, you pay for the help of doing this and they probably have their own bot farms included.

They can even internally flag these entries as bots and use their AI partnerships to analyze what works on users and what doesn’t to trigger a specific response, and to avoid using techniques that get called out as bots.

They have their public ‘sponsored’ content, but I promise for big spenders they have a program that has no sponsorship callout. They probably brand it with nice fancy marketing terminology that makes it sound like you’re an angel doing god’s work by driving conversions or some stupid shit.

This is just the zeitgeist of 21st century capitalism.

✓ Subscriptions. Make them pay you forever.
✓ Low initial price to saturate market share and stifle competition while you operate at a loss.
✓ Drive all realistic competitors out of the market (stadia et al.)
✓ Slow user growth? Jack up prices!

I’m not surprised they got out of the hardware business. Software license protection publishing fees are way more lucrative than hardware sales. The hardware is just there to lock people into the software.

Are there any great alternatives that are easy to use off the shelf (with our own drives) that can compete here?

I’m basically to the point where my next NAS will end up just being a linux desktop running truenas which sounds like a lot of tinkering for something that should have a simple solution. I don’t want to have to buy some big expensive enterprise array for a prosumer use case.

Look on the bright side, in a couple of years they will come crawling back to us, desperate for new things to be built so their profit machines keep profiting.

Current ML techniques literally cannot replace developers for anything but the most rudimentary of tasks.

I wish we had true apprenticeships out there for development and other tech roles.

Please consider getting involved with politics. We need more leaders with ideas like this.