Musk has his loyal fanbase who have been impressed by his achievements with Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX.
Honestly he seemed all right before 2020’s but after that he’s slowly become more and more radicalized.

Fortunately his behaviour is alienating a lot of his fanbase, unfortunately they’re getting replaced by more far right fans.

If Musk is ready to lie about his gaming achievements then can we really trust anything that comes out from his mouth.

I mean who cares if Musk is bad at POE2 but the fact that he goes to such lengths to lie about how good he is in a videogame tells a lot about his character and personality.

Personally I’ve only ever played POE solo and I think the game holds very well against many premium ARPG titles. When the game reaches its EOL as live service it would be very wastefull for GGG to just drop the game instead of turning it in to a paid standalone title that people can buy and play for as long as they want.

Solo Self-Found (SSF) is a thing in Path of exile and usually creating a standalone version like this requires some modifications to the game anyways for it to even run. For example developers behind Warhammer 40000: Inquisitor patched their game so that it can be played offline and even allows players to access old seasonal content (allows picking season when creating new character).

Maybe EU should just take a page from US playbook and ban these services due to national security concerns.

I mean Musk is clearly trying to influence European politics with fake news, half truths and downright lies. Not all that different from Kremlins troll factories.

This.

What eventually kills these platforms is “death by thousand cuts”. Enshitification, controversies, legal problems will alienate users bit by bit. Competing services will then make some people visit less and less until they stop coming at all.

These platforms are competing for peoples attention/time which is finite resource.

Hopefully GGG will make premium version of the original POE that allows offline play, LAN/P2P or even self hosting.

Would be nice for game preservation when the original runs out of steam.

Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.

Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they’re freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.

Here’s some food for thought:

• Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
• Many LLM’s can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
• A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
• Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever engaging with the source.

These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.

Maybe some dude in his mothers basement will use A.I to develop a good replacement for salesforce.

While some gamers are getting older the number of players does keep increasing with newer generations like alpha picking up controllers. Many millenials and older zoomers may have more disposable income but also much less time to play, backlogs of hundreds if not thousands of games and bunch of good old games they just keep coming back to.

However gaming doesnt exist in a bubble. Social media platforms, streaming services are also competing for our attention. The whole entertainment market is so saturated that only ways to increase profits is to enshittify or win marketshare from competition.

Well diversity has received a ton more spotlight and discussion for past 10 years with many developers and games being “canceled” for their views, opinions and many games have been heavily criticized for not being diverse enough or containing elements that are offensive for group a, b or c.

Now the pendulum is swinging back with those canceled or holding more conservative or religious opinions banding together to crusade against whatever they consider woke.

Result is a minefield where your game can be attacked if its not woke enough or too woke resulting in bunch of bad press.

Probably most hours I’ve spend where with Conquer Online back in the days before mysteryboxes where introduced. After that probably puzzle and dragons.

Luckily after those games I learned to question my time spent in these games. (Basically just one day after grinding tower of gods for umpteenth time to spend my 1k stamina/energy, I asked myself wtf am I doing with my life, was I having fun?)

After that my most played games have been Grim dawn, Sacred2, Monster hunter world, No Man sky, Incredible adventures of van helsing then various 2d fighters like Blazblue, undernight inbirth and Granblue fantasy versus that I play on locals.

The title is a bit missleading considering that the actual article mentions a lot other problems that plagued the development.

Project 8 faced both progress and challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic made team stability difficult, but some quality improvements were achieved. However, critical issues persisted, causing delays and budget increases. The latest review revealed unresolved problems needing more time and money, along with revised sales forecasts, raising doubts about the project’s profitability.
– TLDR by Microsoft copilot

While there’s still demand for “narrative-driven story-rich games” one should keep realistic expectations. For this genre I feel smaller scope and indie developers work much better.

In Finnish language there are no gender specific pronouns only gender neutral one hän/hänen.

They/them still sounds weird to use even if I know it can be used to refer single person. When talking or writing fast I’ll still often accidentally default to using he/him even for females which I then have to correct.

Paranoia should hit even harder if you decide to surround yourself with smart killer robots.

“If It’s Smart, It’s Vulnerable”
— Mikko Hyppönen

Structural violence is s great term that should get more use in cases like this.

I hope we’ll get some data on how much more money and effort is spend on this compared to cases where the target is just some regular nobody.

expect more of them to move to gated communities, entrenched beyond even higher walls, protected by people with even bigger guns.

Protecting oneself from gunmen by surrounding oneself with gunmen with bigger guns sounds great until you think about it a bit more.

Thats when paranoia hits.

It’s easy to expect perfection from your opponents while crying about whataboutism when someone points out their side has done the same.

Honestly it’s probably better this way as Fediverse is likely ill prepared to host all these people. There’s likely still a lot work to be done to make instances more efficient, scaleable, sustainable and easier to moderate.

No need to get rude, the point is that:

If you want group of people to be supportive for your cause then there are better ways than:

• Try to blame them for things these people have nothing to do with, like actions of people more than century a go.
• Convey them as villains in bullshit “us vs them” narrative.
• Tell them to check their privilege while they may be just as well be living in poverty or otherwise be struggling.
• Attacking them for not being woke enough.
• etc

I personally hate the modern day identity politics and it’s polarising narrative and this goes for both the left and the right or “woke” and “anti-woke” sides. This leads to radicalization of some and alienation of more moderate individuals from both sides of the spectrum. I also think that exclusion, scapegoating and vilification can lead to people and their supporters accepting their newly given role as a villain and start campaigning against what they where initially for.