Honestly I think the bigger reason is that most games are more suited to a miniseries or full TV show.

Also Use Boll “retired” in 2016, and while he has still done some film work since, he has stopped cranking out bad videogame movies.

Recent stuff like Minecraft, Uncharted, Gran Turismo were “meh” instead of “terrible”. TV shows like Arcane, Cyberpunk Edge Runners, Castlevania, Fallout, and The Last of Us have been pretty well received. Heck, the first season of the Witcher was really good. The Mario movie did well enough that they made a sequel, and are making a Zelda movie.

Not to mention other cross-media franchises. Marvel has been gigantic. D&D has had several videogames and movies over the years of varying quality. Warhammer is getting a TV show. Pokemon has been a gigantic mess of good, bad, and mediocre media of all kinds. Star Wars too.

I swear every time I start looking into a romhack that claims to just be a mostly vanilla QoL update they always add in a bunch of random stuff to “fix” the difficulty.

Like, yes I am aware the games are incredibly easy. They’re for children. I originally played most of them as children. Just let me get high and stomp all through FRLG with a perfect-IV Feraligatr and the Gen 4 physical-special split. If I wanted to do Nuzzlockes I would… Do Nuzzlockes. If I wanted a game with difficult gym leaders and level caps, I would go play one of the thousands of romhacks that have that.

The article was updated in 2023 with the most recent data.

Almost all of the sales of videogames are front-loaded. Most at launch (or at the launch of a re-release), and then it falls off hard over a couple of years. Morrowind came out in 2002. It’s incredible that Bethesda even released any sales data still by 2010. The units sold since then would be immaterial to the conversation.

Morrowind only sold ~4 million units. I think you’re overestimating how big the fan base is. The fan base is loyal, opinionated, and vocal, but small.

So you’d rather be spies on by the formerly largest panopticon ever created AND not be able to side load?

If you think Apple is some paragon of privacy you might want to do some research on that lol.

I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit

That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.

As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.

More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.

Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.

What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.

It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).

This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.

“Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.

In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.

That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.

Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.

It’s also worth pointing out that the sugar industry spent decades and billions of dollars convincing Americans that fats were much worse than they actually are, which led to its own terrible consequences. There are healthy amounts of fat that a lot of boomers are still terrified of.

These food guidelines have always been more about economics than health anyways. It changes with the political influence of the various agricultural industries in America.

They make some good points about how we view “classic” games too.

A lot of 16-bit games are remembered fondly because of things like “look at how many colors are on the screen at once! Look at how big the sprites are- they’re almost as big as the arcade version! Hear how there are 4 separate audio tracks that kind of almost sound like real instruments sometimes!”.

Mario 64 is a great example for me. I hear other people was nostalgic about how incredible it was to be able to move in 3D space at the time, and how they spent hours just wandering around levels and marveling at the technology. For me, I did that with Crash Bandicoot (which came out a few months earlier in the US). And shortly after Spyro blew them both out of the water with its incredibly smooth controls and, imo, better graphics and sound. When I’ve tried to go back and play Mario 64 I find it a clunky mess of a game, more of a tech demo than anything else.

On the one hand I can respect the pioneers. The original thinkers who push the frontiers of what art can be. On the other hand, those games that rely so heavily on being “revolutionary for their time” often don’t hold up well decades later when tons of games have done what they did better. I think it’s possible to appreciate those games for what they did without enjoying going back and playing them.

When I look back at what I’ve played the past couple years, games like Control and Horizon: Zero Dawn stick out. I don’t think either one of them had anything particularly innovative or new. I see any games coming out today where I say “wow that’s a Control-like” game. But what they did do was execute on a high level, with a lot of polish and very few flaws. I think that’s the biggest strength of AAA games: execution, not innovation.

And it still outsold the 360 in the end

I don’t remember that. Maybe you’re thinking of something like “if the Wii keeps selling at its current pace it will pustell the PS2”?

They said that about the Switch as well and it didn’t happen.

Sure, I might own the hardware

Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU’s so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It’s a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.

As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.

So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.

It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica

I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.

In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.

By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.

So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.

I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.

However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.

Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.

This is a tired old gimmick.

It can work situationally. Different games have different approaches to health and to UI. Mario had different sprites and mechanical implications for health. Spyro the Dragon had Sparks change color, and if you lost Sparks entirely it became a pain to collect things.

But most of the time, often in modern action/horror games, it’s just nonsense. A pretty transparent attempt to make the player “feel” in danger by making the character bloody or putting up an increasingly opaque vignette without actually communicating health well. It makes it all that much more easier to try to give the player the feeling of “surviving that attack on 1HP” without actually having to fudge numbers.

There has been a trend the past several years of thinking UI = bad, and that less UI = more good. I find it incredibly annoying. Just give me the UI. Give me the minimap. These are things that are so useful in real life that humans have been trying to make them for thousands of years. We made smartphones and GPS systems because maps are great. Google and Meta and Apple and tons of other companies have been trying to make AR glasses a thing for years. It honestly breaks my “immersion” to NOT have a minimal in games like Horizon Zero Dawn.

It CAN be interesting to do stuff like this if the game is designed around it, but usually it just feels like the devs are trying to re-invent stuff they don’t need to, or following trends for the sake of being trendy.

It might be that Krafton has a weaker relationship with Denuvo than Microsoft did.

From what I can tell, it looks like their only other games that have used it were the Callisto Protocol (which also had it removed eventually) and inZoi (which used it during beta but removed it before the full release).

I hope Krafton clarifies. I’m fine with offline anti-tampering measures.

Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.

The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.