Cyberspark

And social media wasn't a thing, nor YouTube, nor forms for sharing it really known. Reading the manual on the way home, getting excited to play it was part of the experience.

Super Mario 64 was, by memory, one of the first to have tutorial-like directions and informational instructions in game with more in the first few levels. Even then reading the manual still helped. I was genuinely shocked when Skyrim just omitted a manual entirely compared to the thick booklet Oblivion came with.

Funny I had exactly the opposite reaction. It was far too short in a tiny area, I spent far more time battling the controls than solving puzzles, not that the puzzles were hard. I hated the experience unfortunately. There was so many times I thought, why can't I do X, I'm a cat, but the game was locked into it's traditional platforming. I did have a good bit of fun making people do their phones and run away with them, best bit of the game.

Minor point, there's energy, maintenance and hosting costs of on-going digital services as well as costs for continued development and improvement. For most digital goods though you're right

Only in the US and "definitely not related to tariffs trust me" 🤔

Some switch 2 games don't have physical versions, and I thought I heard they were just download codes anyway, can you even trade those secondhand?

The problem is hallucinations are part of the solution to conversations with LLMs, but they're destructive in a game environment. An NPC tells you something false and the player will assume they just couldn't find the secret or that the game is bugged rather than an AI that just made some shit up.

No amount of training removes hallucinating because that's part of the generation process. All it does is take your question and reverse engineer what an answer to that looks like based on what words it knows and it's data set. It doesn't have any "knowledge", not to mention that the training data would have to be different for each npc to represent different knowledge sets, backgrounds, upbringing, ideology, experience and culture. And then there's the issue of having to provide it broad background knowledge of the setting without it adding new stuff or revealing hidden lore.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we see this attempted, but I expect it to go horribly wrong.

It's also obviously not even the same paw flesh-wise

There's a middle ground. Maybe they shouldn't be trying to release a new CoD every 6 months, but they also don't need to take 11 years with it.

The issue we're seeing isn't really sure to production budget, it's due to a broad squash on the middle class globally by governments going conservative and wealth pooling in the rich. And this is amplied specifically the response of companies to less people buying less games of increasing the cost of the games.

The reality is the people driving all the decisions just aren't in touch with the reasons behind market shifts.

You're against server based Anti-Cheat too?

Perhaps a little dramatic, but have you heard the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"

"things have changed" the makers of GDPR admitted it didn't really accomplish what they wanted

The EU does great things, but this is an area plagued with issues. Like timed licences expiring, meaning even the devs/publishers can't continue distributing the game, copyright and IP ownership being unclear who owns it after companies dissolve, leadership leaves or collaborations end. Not to mention the law still hasn't really caught up over what it means to distribute a game. Does hosting a download for the client side of a game count as distribution? What happens if a company is obligated to stop distribution, but obligated to provide the community a way to keep playing? What if a member of leadership keeps providing a way to download the client-side, it might not contain copyright content, but maybe the server side does, which is actually distribution, is either?

We live in a world where 'I want to remaster and I'm willing to buy the licenses and IP" can end with nothing happening because it's too complicated.

So forgive me if "We want to continue playing games we bought =(" feels like too vague a direction for something this complicated and I can see far more concepts of terrible consequences for bad implementations than just having to click a popup box on every single website I visit and needing a VPN to visit the sites that try to block EU traffic because they don't want to have to adhere to GDPR.

True, but it only got so popular because they had convinced both groups, hard and soft. I have no idea how they managed to convince people that Northern Ireland wouldn't be an issue.

But back to the real point. Yeah, I thought GDPR would be good, but in practice it's not changed the cookie/tracking landscape at all. Most places you'd have to send a letter to to get them to removed your data, and most would probably not be able to comply. Meanwhile we now have options that are subscribe (meaning they have legitimate reason to track and monitor you) or accept their ads and tracking cookies.

I think you have too much faith in them.