Harvey Birdman: Mr. Boo Boo, would you consider yourself a revolutionary?
Boo Boo: Well, no. But I believe corporations rob us of our dignity and independence, and that these systems must be ripped down, or levelled by any force necessary… But that’s just one little bear’s opinion.
Harvey Birdman: A cute, fuzzy little bear. (smiles at jury) The defense rests
Sacrifice. I am so sad it didn’t have a bigger impact than it did. What an amazing game.
It would take “you get fucking shot” long for them to figure out it was Air Bud?
The current government is trying to add things fairly quickly, the absentee owner law is in effect, and they did just add another 20% ‘flipper’ tax. As mentioned though, people still own way too many houses. My current landlord owns 7.
Just wanted to quickly point out - there’s likely nothing for 1.35 million in Vancouver. There are in greater Vancouver though.
And yes, 100% out of control.
The cheapest home I could find in my hometown of Vancouver, BC is:
1 bedroom, 1 bath, 696 sq/feet 398,000
I just go by reviews, usually from people I know. The only real difference between AA/A and Indie titles now really is marketing budget and size of team. Not much else is different. You also run into issues about what counts as indie now: it used to mean without a publisher, but it seems to have morphed into ‘a smaller company.’
But yeah, just look up reviews. Games like FTL, Hades, and so on tend to become known by word of mouth.
If the games stayed I’d check it out, but having a game for a few months isn’t something I find value in, which tends to be what people I’ve spoken with about it. Especially since you don’t choose the games.
Also, seriously the PC app is absolutely awful. The games work worse on it than on steam. It crashes, has terrible performance, and break installs constantly.
You also can’t mod a lot of these games, which particularly on PC is a pretty large missing piece.
That’s also not to mention the cost has doubled in two years.
You’re allowed to enjoy it, but I think it’s also clear why it isn’t taking off.
The reason people I know tend to give for not using GamePass is you’re essentially paying for demos (which still exist on PC pretty often. I just bought Roboquest because of the demo.)
EDIT: Also, $12/month is a huge amount of money for me to spend on something like that. Just shy of 150/year for games that aren’t good enough to own, but are good enough to play, doesn’t strike me as valuable.
One thing I read (a lot, oddly) is that GamePass is ‘really popular’/the most popular ‘subscription’ service, but I have never met anyone who uses it.
I checked the numbers of people using GamePass, and it seems the numbers have gone:
2021 - 23 million
2022 - 25 million
2023 - there was a brief post on linkedin saying 30 million, but it was removed.
If even the most popular service is struggling to pass 30 million users, how exactly is Ubisoft going to compete? There’s what, 120 million people with Xbox subscriptions, and they can barely get 1/4 of them to use GamePass?
It’s interesting to watch ‘AAA’ studios absolutely faceplanting every year now, hopefully we can make a full indie-sweep soon.
Also, following treaties signed under duress and in situations of radically unequally power dynamics isn’t too reasonable either.
I’m not sure the alternative to following treaties signed under duress is to not even follow said treaties. We can give them all sorts of land that we barely use, nobody is actually suggesting we give them back downtown Vancouver. The issue is we just shrug and go ‘yeah well people live in places now’.
See, it gets complicated.
Apparently we just do fuck-all because it’s ‘too complicated’ from what I’m reading here; seems pretty cut and dry. Follow treaties people in the past signed? Nah, why bother. It’s in the past. I mean honestly, what rules should we even bother following from back then.
Ok, so I steal your dads car. Years later, he dies, and they find me with the car. Well your dad is dead, so it’s my car now right?
EDIT:
To all the replies, what’s the cutoff? It sure seems to conveniently be the one where we keep everything and everyone else is fucked.
Should we give Japanese American/Canadian families back the houses and land they lost when they were interred? Why or why not?
If a car doesn’t count, but raw land does, what’s to stop the government from taking your house? They have the might, laws governing seizing of land is old, so fuck it, why follow it? Is that ok because they have the might?
If the actions of those ‘hundreds of years ago’ no longer apply, do Americans lose their constitutional rights? What exactly makes something ‘too far in the past’ to have actions done with it? Canadians got the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, is that old enough to break, or too new? What is the line in time, exactly?
What are we gonna do now? Give it to people that weren’t alive back then?
Yes.
I’m going to print this out for my wall, thanks OP!
I don’t think I can choose between games like Alpha Centauri, Marathon, Chrono Trigger, Homeworld, Quake, Counter-Strike (I played the beta in '99, does that count?), not to mention King of Fighters '98, Half-Life, Star Craft… wow it really was the golden era of gaming wasn’t it?
But the world is a complicated thing and we’ve got >7 billion people to feed!
Yes, and capitalism works to deny those people as much food as possible, to give it to others who can pay more. If you buy groceries and literally throw them away, that’s better for the companies selling the food than you using it. We’ve known for 50 years that climate crisis was coming, but in order for capitalism to keep expanding, they kept pouring (literal) fuel onto the fire.
I think we should be very careful before deciding “yeah it’s time to tear down the existing systems and hope that there are better systems out there”. It’s easier to make things worse than to make things better.
Worse for whom? We’re literally looking at unlivable temperatures popping up all over the globe, not to mention the storms, land erosion, lack of water, and the fact that soon, we won’t even be able to grow food like we do now. You think we’ll have cattle farms in 50c heat?
We don’t need a new system, we have one: Socialism. Not communism, socialism. Governments should exist to enrich and help their people, not to enrich a tiny percentage of them at the expense of everyone else.
Capitalism is about exponential growth, on a planet with finite resources. Eventually, you get to where we are now: End Stage Capitalism. A tiny number of people have a bulk of the wealth of the world. The game is over, they won. They made the planet unlivable for humans in a few generations in order to do it, but they won. Congratulations (confetti)
It’s hogs, hogs, hogs