Might've been financed on credit - but even still, it takes a lot more than $12k for a down payment.
Assuming the median price for a home is $500k, you'd need $100k for a traditional 20% down payment. Sure, $12k is 12% of the way there... but it's nowhere near what is needed for an actual down payment.
This is a third bottleneck, earlier than the 2 we already knew about.
Specifically, this affects the entire human population.
The other 2 bottlenecks were specifically the humans which moved out of Africa - with one being as humans crossed into the Middle East and a second as humans crossed the Bering Strait.
This third one was earlier, and covers all humans, even the ones which never left Africa. These are separate from the more localized "founder events" that we see all over the world.
That's all game development.
Baldur's Gate took 6 years to make. Starfield has been in development since 2015 - that's 8 years. As gamers demand more, games have grown in scope. The ones that stayed behind have gotten punished.
If a AAA game doesn't have at least 8 hours of story and realistic graphics in the modern era, it gets panned by reviewers. People's expectations have been raised - and are continuing to be raised - and in turn, that inflates how long it takes to make a game. People will say "Why should I spend $60 on this game when I can spend $60 on this game that gives me more stuff?" (See: Immortals of Aveum, which itself has been in development for 4-5 years.)
The games that don't take that long are the stale yearly franchises - the FIFAs and CODs of the world. Even COD alternates between studios, with each installment taking 1-3 years. Some franchises (like Pokemon) have multiple teams within a studio that operate independently of one another; Arceus was made by the Let's Go team, while Scarlet/Violet was made by the Sword/Shield team.
If studios stop betting on long-term projects, you're going to wind up with stale yearly iterations - or half-baked games rushed out the door to meet a deadline. If it's true that you say AAA (and even AA!) dev isn't sustainable, then that's effectively calling for stale franchises pushing out cheap content for quick cash grabs (see also: Hollywood movies over the last decade).
It's also not just games this is happening to. Disney recently canned a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea show that was ready to go. There's the Scooby-Doo stuff that Max recently pulled before release as well. That stuff isn't my industry; I don't know how long it takes to make those things... but I know it costs about as much to make as a AAA game does.
There's probably a reckoning to be had for both industries, but I don't think the correction should be that drastic - and I think it will be bad for people who consume that content.
Yep, it's been a trend all year. My studio got canned back at the end of January. Publisher called us into a studio-wide meeting scheduled during lunch with 1 hour of notice, only to say "The game you spent 6 years on is canceled and all 150 of you are fired. The media will know in 30 minutes, don't say anything until then if you want to keep a severance package." (I have since landed on my feet elsewhere.)
These studios are owned by big publishers and generally work for years at a loss. With the costs to borrow increasing, we're seeing cuts on long-term investments that might not make their money back (like movies and games).
Volition was owned by Embracer, which is now struggling with funding. So anything that isn't a sure bet is effectively canned - and in turn you see these studios shut down left and right, plus big layoffs from studios that are still open.
It's written in PHP, which a lot of devs dislike.
It is drowning in pull requests: 83 open as of right now. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls
Ernest (the lead dev) wasn't really expecting it to blow up yet. Kbin was created in January of this year, and the first "major" instance was launched in May. It blew up basically instantly due to Reddit imploding, and Ernest has been playing catch-up.
But it still has rough edges - no API means no mobile apps. Lots of bugs and such from being a new project. It's improving every week (including an API in code review), but Lemmy is more polished and has an relatively mature API.
You can see a list of instances here: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin
As far as I know, there isn't specifically a privacy-focused instance like what Lemmy has. But I also didn't browse that list of instances too closely.
Yep, you're 100% right. People who have the same job can be paid dramatically differently, and the "reasoning" is that one guy is better at things than the other.
I got a 9% raise this year because I outperformed everyone else on my team, but I know that my 9% raise came at the expense of someone who only got a 2% raise. A union contract would give everyone like a 4-5% raise, which people dislike because they always think they're going to be the ones on top of the totem pole.
Me? I want predictability. Game dev is extremely unpredictable.
This is sort of the mission statement of Kbin. Kbin supports Lemmy, Mastodon, FireFish, and Pixelfed already. It's planned to support PeerTube (this used to work but broke) and Mobilizon.
That's the main reason why I have a Kbin account. :)
I am very pro-union. I was a Teamster for years (Local 495).
I now work in the game industry. A good chunk of the gamedevs I know are pro-union, but there's enough of those opposed where there's effectively a question mark.
Generally, the holdouts tend to think:
Union leadership is corrupt/greedy, and they don't want to give union leaders money for "nothing" (as they see it)
Being in a union means everyone would need to be bound to strict regulations - keeping exact track of time worked, having exact lunch breaks, documenting everything. As-is in the game industry, the "standard" at most places is hands-off, take lunch whenever, stay at lunch however long you want, clock in/out whenever, nobody questions you as long as your work is getting done. People like this and don't want to risk losing it
Being in a union threatens close relationships with management. I can say that when I was a Teamster, management was outright adversarial and conversations with them weren't fun. In the game industry, management is quite literally my friends and people I chill out with. There's a very, very blurry line between "friends" and "bosses" - some bosses are horrible, to be sure, but the general vibe is casual
There's a lot of benefits in the office like free snacks, free swag, a place to chill out and play games at work, etc. People are afraid that this would count as "compensation" and thus being unionized would mean that you'd have to pay for snacks or swag or whatever - or that it could be taken away as retaliation from management
Retaliation is a thing. It's illegal. US government doesn't care. Corpos get a slap on the wrist because of plausible deniability. EA has been downsizing recently and they "coincidentally" cut the contract with a QA team that just unionized. Hmm.
Again, I myself am very pro-union. However, to some extent I can see the logic in each of these bullet points - I disliked the guy running my Teamster local way back when because I felt he was too soft and captured by management. I can understand needing to clock in/out (fairest way to ensure nobody is being overworked), ruining relationships (can't have accusations of bias from being friendly), and losing benefits (although this can be put into a contract). And nobody can deny illegal retaliation is a real thing.
So I can understand where the holdouts at least are coming from. It would take a shitty workplace for unionization to happen, shitty enough that all those bullet points above aren't enough to keep the union holdouts in line. I hear Blizzard is really bad from people who have worked there, and my money is still on them being the first "big" dev to unionize - assuming Microsoft doesn't come in and clean up.
There's still a lot of people who will always stick to Reddit as well (as evidenced by a good amount of hostility in the comment section of the Reddit discussion on /r/rust).
Counter-counterpoint: I've been using it since 2019. I think you're exaggerating.
It aggressively tries to center itself, always. If you're in a lane and it merges with a second lane, the car will swerve sharply to the right as it attempts to go back to the middle of the lane.
It doesn't allow space for cars to merge until the cars are already merging. It doesn't work with traffic; it does its own thing and is discourteous to other drivers. It doesn't read turn signals; it only reacts to drivers getting over.
If a motorcycle is lane-splitting, it doesn't move out of the way for the motorcycle. In fact, it assumes anything between lanes isn't an issue. If something is partially blocking a lane but the system doesn't recognize it as fully "your lane", the default is to ignore it. The number of times I've had to disengage to dodge a wide load or a camper straddling two lanes is crazy.
With the removal of radar, phantom braking has become far, far worse. Any kind of weather condition causes issues. Even if you drive at sunset, the sun can dazzle the cameras and they don't detect things that they should be able to - or worse, they detect problems which aren't there.
It doesn't understand road hazards. It will happily hit a pothole at 70 MPH. It will ignore road flares and traffic cones. When the lanes aren't clearly marked (because the paint has worn away or because of construction), it can have dramatic behavior.
It waits so long to brake, and when it brakes it brakes hard. It accelerates just as suddenly, leading to a very jerky ride that makes my passengers carsick.
The only time I trust FSD is when it's stop-and-go traffic. Beyond that I have to pay so much attention to the thing that I might as well just drive myself. The "worst thing it can do" isn't just detour; it's "smash into the thing that it thought wasn't an issue".
Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.
The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.
Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.
So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.
Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.
Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.
I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.
The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It's also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)
I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I'm thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they've simply not been the best stewards of the project - it's succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.
That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).
Maybe switch to Firefox then?