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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The popularity of joystick was strongly tied to arcade machine; they are associated with fighting games because fighting games were the latest great thing Arcades had at their time to die out: home consoles such as DreamCast and N64 couldn’t give you the thrilling experience of beat “on the street” a random kid (as per “one quarter per virtual beating”). We talk about Tekken being an arcade experience before the world transitioned toward the triangular bosom of Lara at home (for those who were kids at that time). Arcade was the "mythical gaming”, the one all the kids knew they couldn’t have at home. Joystick, as such, was the ultimate “mythical” gaming device… to bad it was shit. Yeah, you could get the hang of “the moves”, the “feeling to push with your whole forearm if needed” just… not for too long. Not for pick a dialogue option, not for command trops, not for “dogeroll then attack”…or basically anything which wasn’t whatever arcade game was designed around that dumb, red clown-nose, big lever.

    Nostalgia makes remember some things correctly: “yes, you had fun” but forget the fine details “the 35th side scrolling beat 'em up of this year… Cool!”

    Joystick (emphasis on “joy”), Joypad… then a “joy-less” but more tame name as “controller” with added “thumb stick” if you need details… now everything seems to turn in touch, and maybe haptic… or probabily “let’s just wait for the AI reach the end of it” kind of controller device




















  • I do agree that monthly voluntary surveys is not an exceptional way for the general audience to have a clear idea on things are going on, but my point is less about the general audience and the responsibility weight Valve itself sit onto.

    We can endlessly speculate on the secret/true data Valve is hiding from the general public, but in fact, only the actual public data affect their business: that’s where publisher and developers make the strategic choices on which platform (OS) and hardware (VR HMD, highend GPU…) to support. Any incorrect or nonfactual data would lead to less sales, and less happy developer/publisher/customers.

    Yes, of course Valve does have it’s own “secret recipient data” they don’t share… but I think the secret data is used more as sort of control on those who try to cheat the stats.

    Sometime simplified Chinese language goes on top, resulting English language as secondary for the whole platform… quite often Valve fix those stats, no doubt by cross referencing their secret sauce.

    That’s how most modern anticheat in videogames works: the data is keep secret, until one special day you get one big wave that flush all them at once (if you throw constantly daily updated data on which kind of cheater you caught… the cheater got a precious feedback they can play onto)


  • I’m getting pretty tired of seeing these posts every five minutes from the same couple of sites.

    Statistics have variance, especially when they’re recorded from voluntary surveys, please get over it.

    Currently Valve is the only billion dollar company who invest in Linux gaming industry.

    …incidentally is basically the only billion dollar PC company who invest in PC gaming and don’t have any kind of conflict of interest with Console (Microsoft’s Xbox? any major AAA game company who also publish/make exclusives to console? Epic Games’s Fortinite earning is 48% Playstation, 27% Xbox and remaining 18% for Nintendo Switch/Android/PC)

    So, yeah, the earning on the only billion dollar company who is 100% all in in the PC gaming industry matter: those stats matter for Valve, at the very least.





  • Well, you have to go with loss leader for a long time… then progressively bullying your own customers to arise the price until reach parity.

    …from then you finally earn by continuing bullying the remaining customers as some sort of whales (people keep paying for shitty service due to constant spending habit).

    I don’t see why this would work with the simple concept: pay & get value that come with indie.

    You need a big plan to screw your customers and, like Google Stadia, carelessly drop millions in the trashbin just to buy that only lucky ticked that made Netflix win (but you did lose)