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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)OT
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  • Clarifying "Android" here feels misleading. Sure, they're all Android devices, but they're not what people think of when they think of Android devices. And they're also unlikely to be the ones most people buy.

    You could also say "cheap Chinese TV boxes" and it'd still be accurate, and the devices people would think of would be more closely related to the actual devices in question.

    This has basically nothing to do with Android. You might as well say "plastic TV boxes" at that point.

  • Okay. You could say that if three people left and 8 million could have signed up. It'd be factually true. So?

    The comment I replied to was claiming the price hike is because they lost subs because of the password changes. That implies the loss was big enough to reduce their income to the point they needed more. It's not.

  • they lost subscribers to their no password sharing policy.

    In what world? They gained subscribers when they did that lol.

    Their content sucks, and people are starting to cut ties, but don't pretend it's because people were upset they couldn't share their accounts.

  • Labeling this as "cope" is just straight slander against vegetarianism. Most people who are vegetarian don't expect "it's going to change the world" so there's no "coping" to be had with the fact that it's not.

    Vegetarianism choices can be based in health, ethics, not wanting to support mega corps, dislike of the taste, environmental impact, among other things. "it's going to save us from climate change in light of everything else going on in the world" is a tiny clueless subset of just ONE of those rationales.

    Vegeterianism isn't "hopeless" or "cope" unless you're delusional enough to believe that everyone doing so would instantly solve our problems. Sure, some people think if everyone did it, it would make a difference, but very few think it'd fix all our problems.

  • Nothing I wrote claimed they don't exist, but they're much less common place than they used to be. My post was explaining why that is, as asked by the OP.

    Yes, tech has grown and there's more possibility, but there's just a far far smaller market if them than there l used to be.

  • you should refrain from commenting if you haven't used the product in a long time

    What makes you think I haven't used it? Sure, cloud saves were added recently ish. They still released and pushed for exclusivity without it, and also had their fair share of problems.

    Of all of those only the first one ever happened to me

    On the other hand, maybe you should refrain from commenting if you are only going to go off anecdotal evidence. There are plenty of people who have had serious problems with EGS. And their support is notoriously pathetic.

    A single Google search:

    https://www.pcgamer.com/a-bug-in-the-epic-games-store-launcher-raises-cpu-temps-on-some-pcs-partial-fix-is-available/

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/u8qhra/psa_epic_game_store_bugs_and_inconveniences/

    https://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/f7xfht/epic_cloud_saves_lost_me_my_save_game/

    https://steamcommunity.com/app/383150/discussions/0/6637787280779437776/

    https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?threads/save-lost-pc-epic-games.2338310/

  • Launching game on Epic: Launch Epic, click on shortcut on the left

    You forgot:

    • Epic needs to update
    • Yeah, we decided you don't own that game anymore, even though you've played it multiple times
    • Oops, epic corrupted your install
    • Okay we fixed it but we don't have cloud save, sorry you lost your progress
    • Oops, the EGS version breaks mods that work with every other version of the game
  • You don't have to love them but they're still the closest thing to any competition at all.

    That's arguably true. But as I said above, the only reason competition is good is if it actually is a reasonable alternative and the companies and products they're competing with have to make changes to keep customers, which in turn benefits customers of both platforms. Steam hasn't had to do a thing to deal with EGS. It's brought no benefits so it serves no purpose Because of this, GOG is better competition in many ways.

    On the other hand, as I said above, it has brought many disadvantages and actively harmed customers with unclear game ratings, lack of things like cloud save, fragmentation in their game libraries, and legitimately broken games and wastes of money.

    You can complain but they're most likely to improve if they're profitable, and it would definitely hurt end users if they shut down

    How would this hurt customers? There wouldn't be EGS exclusives. People would have consolidated purchases. Steam wouldn't change. GOG wouldn't change.

    The only argument you could make is the lost purchases on EGS, which wouldn't have existed if EGS hadn't started in the first place. That'd be a loss EGS created. So it only furthers the point. EGS pretty much only harms customers.

    I get the "buying exclusivity" complaint, but honestly it's fucking impossible to get a foothold, I would do the same thing if I were them.

    Okay, sure, the company is working in their own best interest. And? It still actively hurts the consumer. There is no value they are providing to the consumer. If there was an exchange in which the company provided some value in exchange for that detrimental action, it would be warranted.

    But EGS offers literally nothing but problems to the consumers.

  • I really don't understand how people still hang on to defending EGS. It's been shit since release, it's still missing basic features years later, and it's been found doing tons of shady shit.

    I'm all for more competition in these spaces, because, you know, competition pushes the companies to one up each other and build compelling features. But EGS is just blatantly missing shit and is explicitly user-hostile by buying exclusivity to their vastly inferior platform. Steam hasn't had to react at all because they're still so far ahead, and Epic is just fucking trolling users by forcing them onto their platform without working cloud saves or even non-buggy installs.

    The irony that they flag-wave "user choice" while doing this just totally baffles me.

  • So, I gather that what happened was iPhones and changes to coding languages (HTML5) which didn’t require an extra on the system (a plug in) to do it’s thing.

    ... Sort of. That's a bit of an oversimplification and iPhone-centric, but generally the right idea.

    I'd slightly shift this and say it's more that flash and Java had many known problems and were janky solutions to the limits of HTML of the day. They were continued to be supported by browsers because they were needed for certain tasks beyond games that were actually important. Games were just a secondary thing that were allowed to exist because the tech was there for other problems.

    At the time, more "serious" games were mostly local installs outside your browser, and browser games were more "casual" and for the less technically inclined general audience. The main exception here was Runescape, and a couple others like Wizard 101 etc.

    But then smartphones started becoming more popular, and they just could not run flash/Java effectively. They were inefficient from a performance standpoint, and smartphones were very behind in performance and it just didn't work well. In the early days, many Android phones would run bits of flash/Java, sometimes requiring custom browsers, but it just wasn't very performant.

    Then HTML5 came along, solved most of the gaps in existing HTML tech, and the need for flash and Java greatly decreased. Because of the performance problems and security vulnerabilities, the industry as a whole basically gave up on them. There was no need beyond supporting games, as the functional shortcomings were covered, and HTML5 did somewhat support the same game tech, but it would take massive rewrites to get back there and there was basically no tooling. Adobe had spent over a decade building different Flash tools and people were being dumped to lower level tech with zero years of tooling development. Then came WebGL and some other tech... But nothing really made a good grip on the market.

    Unity and some other projects allowed easier compilation to HTML5 and WebGL over the years, so this was definitely still possible but simultaneously the interest was plummeting so there wasn't much point.

    Much of the popularity of web based games back in their day was you could just tell someone a URL and they could go play it on their home computer. Their allure was their accessibility, not the tech. The desire for high tech games was won over by standalone desktop games. But those were harder to find, required going to a store, making a purchase, bringing a CD home, installing said game, having the hardware to run it, etc.

    But at the time of the death of Flash and Java, everyone carried a smartphone. They all had app stores and could just search the app store once, install the game, and have it easily accessible on their device, running at native performance. Console gaming had become commonplace. PC gaming was fairly common, with pre-built gaming PCs being a thing. Now Steam existed and you didn't have to go to a store or understand install processes. Every competing tech to web games was way more accessible. Smartphone tech better covered "gaming for the general populace".

    What would be the point of a web game at that point? Fewer people have desktops so your market is smaller. If you're aiming for people's smartphones, doing stuff natively to two platforms is higher performance and easier to deal with. Console gaming is more common. PC gaming is a stable market. OK top of that, there's way less money in web based gaming. Stores like steam and console game stores have the expectation of spending money and an easy way to do so. Smartphones have native IAP support to make it easy to spend money on microtransactions. Web has.... Enter your payment information into that websites payment processor they have to integrate, which feels less safe to the user and requires more work from the developer than the alternatives on console/pc/mobile.

    There's just no market for web based gaming anymore when people have so many more options available that are easy to access - what's the purpose of building a web based game at that point?

  • Claiming it's "door in the face" is a little crazy here. If this is where they wanted to be, the "bait" changes could have been much much less bad than they were, and they still could've walked back to this.

    Hell, they could have announced a 10% revenue split and it would've looked much better than what they pitched. And they could still walk back to 2.5% and looked like heroes. And it wouldn't have lost them nearly as much trust. Nor made them look as bad.

    If this was what they were trying to do, they'd have to have been even dumber to have made it this bad.

    I'm more willing to bet they're just fucking stupid. Or that a few people on the board had this as a fucking moronic idea, and the rest managed to take back control after it went totally sideways.

    But claiming that it's a door in the face requires them to be evil enough to do it, stupid enough to not realize they're overdoing it, crazy enough to think it'd work, etc. It seems way too contrived.

  • Yeah, that's kind of my point.

    On the other hand, as mentioned above, including that request is regulated by Google Play and it will trigger a manual review process. It's possible, yes. And Google is upfront about it.

    But it's still just removing app specific battery policies. It doesn't stop the device from sleeping itself etc. Disabling these battery optimizations drastically expands where, when, and how often you can run. But it's not as open ended as Android was 10 years ago. Many of the APIs and system behaviors have changed since then. This gets you like halfway back though. But still only halfway.

    On the other hand, iOS is super restrictive and a massive pain in the ass. It's not surprising the OP mentions Android supporting these cases better.

  • It's sad that this is even a consideration. We shouldn't have to keep corrupt pigs in office because of who's team their on.

    On the other hand, the "other team" tends to be full of corrupt pigs and it's arguably legitimately dangerous for the entire country.

  • A bunch of these are also utter bullshit. "Purchase history" sounds like they can go through and read your Amazon purchases or something - they can't. Diagnostic data sounds scary, but I'd rather use an app collecting diagnostic data because the alternative is a buggy mess. Them tracking what you do in their app is way more help than it is dangerous. Stuff like device ids and such are also likely only pulled for that reason or to confirm your purchases with them, etc.

  • They do that because that's the only way they can survive against AMD given how much behind Intel is in terms of CPU and GPU tech.

    This is just blatantly false and disengenious.

    Sure, Intels GPU tech is pathetic. But it's also not their business. Their only reasonable market use case is making a serviceable on board gpu for people who aren't going to buy a real GPU. AMD makes actual fucking graphics cards. Of course their GPU tech is ahead.

    But Intel CPU tech is not blatantly behind AMD. Sure, there have been points where AMD has leapt ahead. But the same could be said for Intel. Sure there are advantages to some techs on the AMD side, but the same could be said for Intel. They're in competition and neither is wholy ahead of the other.

    Yeah, you go on to pinpoint one specific use case that you have, which is very specific, and something less than 1% of 1% of 1% of their customers care about. Same could be said the other way.