insomniac_lemon
Are you challenging me?
For the most part, it’s not hard to find them if they’re doing the things I said and you pay attention while they do it. Look at how many titles a publisher has on Steam, see if they have a wikipedia page and if so if there’s monetary info involved. Recognizing a dev/publisher might also be part of it.
Also with self-publishing never being easier, some of my skepticism starts there. Another is games seeming somewhat shovelware-esque or like they’re trying to ride the wave of some other successful game/trend and that’s why targeting consoles early-on is likely important to them for the money.
I originally wasn’t, but off the top of my head some of the stronger examples:
Just because something is cute pixels that does not mean it’s indie. A good introduction to this is the existing discussion of Dave the Diver and its ties to Nexon. EDIT: Also, lootbox controversy with Nexon and Maplestory
One involving unpaid marketing and crowdfunding/early-access: tinyBuild. ~$473m IPO. Publisher of Hello Neighbor, which also has some controversy around it on quality (also mobile games with micro-transactions, because kid audience). While searching on this, I also saw someone angry about them doing testing on Steam and then a post-launch Epic exclusivity. EDIT: Also one of their games not having all content available on GOG.
The game Roots of Pacha had a license dispute (I do not know the cause, but the dev did end up getting the Steam rights) their original publisher had at least 6 different accounts on Imgur (and they also did the crowdfunding/EA thing too, and no it was not like 1 game per account either and some of those accounts are mysteriously gone now). Same publisher was in the news about controversy over boob physics, and I don’t doubt it was either suggested by the CEO for the headlines or just marketing clicks if controversy hadn’t have happened.
Even if people don’t care about stuff like this enough to stop buying the games, I hope they at least try to not enable or reward blatant self-promotion (particularly the more dipping and questionable practices involved) on the fediverse
And don’t confuse high budget indie studios with AAA game developers
On the other hand, there are a lot of publishers out there who really shouldn’t have things called indie when they’re involved.
The ones who have struck gold (perhaps multiple times) and are already worth multiple millions, publicly traded or even owned largely by investment firms. Some like this still footing everything on the players (crowdfunding and then early access) and on top of all of that going onto places like Imgur and Reddit and doing unpaid marketing there (doesn’t seem great for the actual devs, and then there are things like multiple accounts/sockpuppets/deleting+reposting etc).
And even without the unpaid marketing stuff, a publisher has a lot of ways to screw over developers and/or players usually with the goal of money in some form.
My napkin guess is that this is some sort of specific process/tactic, either it only allows 1 2 levels of reclassification at a time or that was all that could be agreed on (with multiple agencies, likely the DEA limiting the pace). So either avoiding the Senate or the tiniest of steps that pretty much anybody will allow/defend. Slow-and-steady could be the plan, assuming Biden wins again and actually follows up.
Well that and it probably really helps with the turning-a-blind-eye, like the difference between ignoring/acquitting a hit-and-run fender-bender versus ignoring/acquitting the act of treating a no-traffic intersection (in clear conditions) like a 4-way stop. Maybe it will be enough to reduce hostility and move the relevant overton window over time while avoiding pushback.
EDIT: Looking at it more, this seems to be the department of HHS pressuring the DEA on clear medical use. As others say, the lower restriction might help further medical study which could in-turn result in further reclassification.
Reminder on Stockholm syndrome:
According to accounts by Kristin Enmark (one of the hostages): the police were acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages’ safety.
She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire, and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire
but the prime minister [Palme] told her that she would have to content herself with dying at her post rather than Palme giving in to the captors’ demands.
Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police, whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.
Which could possibly be relevant here, particularly the civil war part.
Correct. The last line of my comment is most relevant to this chain.
More specifically I could say that while many optimizations might be general-use or discoverable, others may be specific to said old system (or maybe getting around limitations). That and this level of optimization would be diminishing returns for even the lowest of modern systems (but obviously nearly required for the target hardware).
Making a minimalist and well-optimized game for desktop PC is going to be significantly easier and with more of an audience than trying to target most other hardware. There are also fantasy consoles like TIC-80 or WASM-4 for more modern/open targets that likely have better documentation/communities (or the community for whatever language you are using instead).
“completely turned around” could be charitably interpreted as “swiftly and accurately corrected course”. 360, not so much.
You could also call it a shopping plaza, either in a line or 2 (or possibly 3) sides along its parking lot.
Also bundled with those giant signs that list every store in the plaza.
Aside from cost there’s also the issue of law, requiring people die of natural causes beforehand means most people will turn to soup before their brain can have any hope of being preserved.
I have cynicism for lots of things involved here, but if I had the option from some shady person who seems like they are capable and vaguely aligned with me I’d probably take the chance especially if we could make some sort of a post-revival agreement. What a brain (put into a small machine and ideally alongside symbiotic systems) can do for the people who are still alive. Probably with my brain in a jar living in VR until the details are worked out.
And if it doesn’t work out that way, well… That’s gooood soup!
I will just perish.
Certainly not unable, but lots of factors seem like they would add to difficulty particularly if emulators didn’t exist (because cartridge-based storage, aging/costly hardware). Then there’s the idea of having a target on your back (or any tools that make it more viable) due to extremely litigious/malicious entities and to me it just seems like a niche that isn’t worth the extra time.
I’m grateful for PC games under 100MiB. Closer to 10MiB is worthy of praise and below that may be half amazing. There is .kkrieger at only 95KiB for a 3D game (and that is another mealtime topic), but I think that is more interesting visually than it is for gameplay.
Or to be clear, I see the “STILL” more for creating games for old proprietary hardware than for optimization itself.