Maybe checkout gladiabots[1]? I have no affiliation with them, but I did play around with it for a few weeks a couple of years ago.
It's not really traditional programming, but I think it is quite fun coming up with strategies.
Many good suggestions in here already, so I'm just gonna add Space Engineers.
It's a voxel-based spaceship building game, where you can quite literally design your spaceship from scratch. If that's not enough for you, you can interact with your creation by writing c#-scripts that are stored in physically accessible programmable blocks.
There's also a large modding community you can get into.
This would pretty much kill the current industry (*as we know it).
F2P/mobile games are monetized through Wales, but they're only willing to spend if there's enough incentive (e.g. prestige). That's not given if there's no F2P player base, because the base game would be too expensive.
IMHO the best way to go about is to vote with your wallet. There are plenty of worthwhile games where you don't have to be a whale to be successful.
Well good.. Let's kill it. Who cares if the business model works. It shouldn't work.
The idea of such regulation is to stimulate the business to move back to normal models.
In the Netherlands this is already working, Diablo immortal is not available there. It's a small market but once the whole EU does it they won't have a choice but to come up with something more reasonable. Win-win.
It was thought that people would use less restaurants and bars if smoking was forbidden.
It's more likely that when incentives change, the whole customer base changes.
The current system of preying whales to pay for games has negative externalities for gamer's who don't have addiction. Playing is cheaper, but people play less games because addictive spending mechanics is affecting where the game development money goes.
Regulation would create incentives to make games that are expensive because they are so good.
Regulation would create an incentive to region lock out the areas that regulate it. Now you have people from the regulating country use VPNs to play the game in another region instead.
Diablo Immortal is not available in Belgium and the Netherlands.
It's not about the VPN, it's the payment method and App store setup that determines if you can install the game. Regulation does not have to be watertight. It just needs to work well enough to drastically reduce harm.
But you are though. Lots of games region lock US and EU out of their game.
Lost Ark is in the top 3 of all games played on Steam and has been since it released this February. The game was 3 years old when it launched in NA/EU though - it had been out for 3 years in South Korea, 2 years in Russia and Japan. This is a game that ended up being very popular, but if nobody had bought the NA/EU publishing rights then the only way to play it would've been to play on the Russian, Japanese or Korean servers.
It's pretty normal for online games that come from Asia to not cater to the western market. I don't see why they wouldn't do this even more if we get additional regulations on games. And even when they do cater to the western market the priority is going to be North America, not Europe. Europe's almost always second class in these. (And when these games are brought over they're often Americanized/localized.)
PS Lost Ark is banned in Netherlands and Belgium too.
"Escape from Tarkov" and "It takes two" are just some of the more noteworthy ones. There's tons more on steam.
It's just the mobile market that's screwed entirely. Which I find odd, because I'm convinced there are opportunities for games that work especially well on small screens with touchscreen (like Nintendo demonstrated half a decade before mainstream smartphones)
Precisely, Nintendo tried a sane sales model with Super Mario Run back in 2016. You would have access to some levels, then pay and unlock the rest. No more in-app purchases, IIRC.
The reaction was a lot of angry comments about the game being locked and that it should be free-to-play, etc.
Their next games (like Mario Kart Tour) went back to the exploitative loot box model.
Mario Run was also just not a very good game (this is obviously an opinion, but still…). I wonder how it would go if Nintendo tried releasing an actual good game for $10 or some other amount, not an infinite runner with a Mario skin.
Yes it does work. Elden Ring is another example of a hugely successful product which is solely focused on being an excellent piece of entertainment.
It’s just more optimal for
Profitability to create addictive garbage like this. Blizzard has chosen to be greedy and predatory rather than trying to create art of entertainment.
You are comparing a full AAA game for PC and console made for hardcore gamers versus a mobile game with loot boxes designed to attract and exploit kids or people that addicted to this kinda crap and disguise it like a game, pretty much like slot machine do.
I don't think we should somehow limit the use of AI for creative purposes. What the internet showed on the last 10 years is that there's an abundance of content. This won't change with AI, it'll just be even more content.
What we need IMHO is a way or a method to naturally let novel and intriguing approaches float to the top.
Obviously there are methods currently (algorithms, votes, impressions, etc.), so I don't see how we couldn't develop a new approach to tackle an increasing amount of AI-content
Why would you want to go out of your way to send bogus data to the manufacturer?
I'm all for being able to choose whether or not to disclose that data, but then we'll also have to accept different choices than ours. There's no point in sabotaging others.
If someone's buying the data they will care sooner or later. After all, if they wanted bogus data, they can generate it themselves instead of buying it.
I went through a serious attempt to remove all of my resumes on the web. Paid a firm, whole nine yards.
Several data brokers still have very, very old copies.. and they still sell them.. and recruiters still buy them.. and still contact me.. and still get met with an email politely telling them off.
But that years old shitty linkedin dataset still gets sold to thousands of people for thousands of dollars a year and nobody bats an eye. The recruiters are too stupid to spot the bad data and the brokers too lazy to care.
Usage patterns? Fridge being opened means someone is home. That data point is meaningless in isolation, but can be valuable if you want to use it to confirm/deny other data points - let's say another data broker is trying to get an accurate ad targeting profile but only has breadcrumbs here and there such as IP addresses, user-agents that by themselves don't mean much, but they can use other data points (such as fridge activity data) to link your otherwise-anonymous IP-based profile if they see that the only times this IP lights up is when the fridge was also used recently.
Whether that's currently done is up for debate - maybe there are other lower-hanging fruits that are easier to do, but if you've exhausted all your other options and still want even more accurate profiles, I don't see why you wouldn't do it.
Unless there's cameras everywhere in the fridge (plus advanced object recognition that knows that that bundled up pack of goat cheese inside a ziplock bag is in fact goat cheese) or people are scanning items as they take them out I don't see how that would work and both things seem kinda unlikely so it's weird they'd start with the easiest part which is hook up the thing to the internet.
We're already being sabotaged, by manufacturers - what else would you call this sometimes hidden, non-disablable connectivity/"telemetry", and the disappearance of dumb options? The only question is if we let them get away with it scot-free.
The "notes" I'm taking are mostly slack reminders on important messages when I know I have to come back to it soon.
Also, because I'm very much still a junior, I started breaking down my tasks and writing checklists using Joplin. Especially for larger tasks, it helps me keep track of what needs to be done, resulting in (hopefully) less mistakes.
At this point I'm fairly convinced anti-vegans chiming in after 5 minutes of conversation claiming vegans can't keep it to themselves for 5 minutes is more common than vegans actually being unable to not mention it.
> When we say that privacy rights can absolutely not be touched, we are, among other things, also saying, whatever criminals get best at abusing those increasingly powerful rights (given the relatively growing space covered by encryption and stuff that happens through or over the internet) get to be more criminal and that's just the price we will have to pay for our collective freedom.
Who is "we"?
As I see it, the criticism isn't directed at the goal. I think nobody is opposed to protecting children. Sure, HN crowd is obviously a very privacy-focused crowd, though I'm convinced that civil discussion is possible if the trade-offs for such a proposal would be a little more nuanced.
In this instance though, there is no nuance. There is no trade off. It's just security.
Also, implementing a law that kills privacy for pretty much anyone to protect children, while ignoring the elephant in the room [0] seems disingenuous at best.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/871930/GLADIABOTS__AI_Com...