• 7 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I imagine it’s a replacement for a bachelor/bachelorette party.

    I had that and a wedding, but no gifts were expected at either. The reason we did that is because a traditional wedding tends to be very planned and formal with not enough time to just hang out. We wanted the traditional wedding pictures and ceremony, but we had family and friends coming in from around the world just for a few days so we had a few events to see people as much as possible. I think it was well received, but again, no gifts were expected. We didn’t post a registry and told people that we just wanted them to make it.







  • Some of my favorite games were early access and I’ve played them the entire time really reveling in new features as they come out. Unfortunately, I think Paralives is going to be too buggy on launch even for me. I’m used to buggy life sims in general and I’ve done alpha testing of games, but from what I’ve seen I might wait for a bit. On the plus side, the dev team seems really dedicated. I’m sure they’ll keep working on it, it might just be years before I personally decide to jump in. I also don’t think a price has been announced. If it’s ~$20 I might go for it regardless because I’m sure I’ll get $20 of enjoyment out of it even with the bugs. I think $40 is likely and it’s not a bad price, but I’ll definitely wait for a few more months of fixes at that price point.


  • I was responding less to the lefty comment and more to the idea that aligning workers with shareholders is a good thing (“reasonable” per your comment). If you don’t subscribe to left-wing ideas, and sit more in the lib territory (non derogatory in this instance) of the spectrum, I can understand why we would disagree on that.

    Generic leftist drivel below:

    The profit motive is inherently exploitative of the working class. In my opinion, any attempts to align the working class with the profit motive is just a way for the owning class to dismantle class solidarity. Not to get too into theory, but this is where the idea of and disagreements regarding the petite bourgeois often come in. There is a concept of a managerial class who does not necessarily own the means of production, but profits based off of exploitation of the people beneath them. A lot of people consider this its own class, or at the very least class traitors, but what it really is is just working class people who the owning class has convinced to promote the interest of the owning class. If the owning class can divert a large enough portion of the working class into that sector then there is not much hope for change. You often hear about blue collar and white collar workers, but discussions of people who explicitly do not have to work don’t come up as frequently. You’re seeing more people talk about billionaires nowadays though, and if enough white collar workers realize that they are much closer to blue-collar workers than the billionaires I think we would be in a much better place.



  • Oh! Happy early Pfingsten!

    Yea, I’m expecting actual sales patterns to differ a bit for this one because it’s a cozy game. A lot of cozy gamers might not use steam regularly enough to warrant wishlisting a game. On the other hand, it’s releasing in early access and I’m not sure if enough cozy gamers want to play this as an early access game. InZOI was another early access life sim that was less anticipated than Paralives and it sold about as well as Forza 6 (on PC) though it’s not as widely played. I think they are releasing on Monday because it’s going to be pretty buggy and don’t want people playing all weekend and running into a bunch of bugs. That plus they can address bug reports as they come up during the week instead of doing it over the weekend. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on how it sells and player stats though.







  • I think part of the issue with moving from physical media as a form of software distribution is that people ship buggy software all the time. In addition to making more money via subscription, the company can ship updates whenever it wants. This often means that 1.x may have bugs still present in 1.z, but 1.z has features not originally included in 1.x. At a certain point you’re maintaining several versions of your product to test bug fixes, since 1.x users still deserve the bugs fixes but technically shouldn’t have the 1.z features. Better companies would be able to handle that, but nowadays bug fixes get extremely low priority since they’re spending a lot of dev time trying to attract and retain users with shiny new features, so that means active development on older versions for longer. Obviously the subscription revenue is also generally appealing.