Well, hurrah! Happy birthday!
You know, GoL has become the place where I go for Linux news, period. Anything important and relevant to the desktop tends to be relevant to gaming as well, so I see it here. And other Linux sites tend to be full of stuff about servers or whatever, that I don't give a damn about. So after I found GoL I gradually realized I really had no need for other Linux sites as a rule.

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I'm losing track. How does Boxtron relate to these projects?

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Quoting: denyasis

Quoting: 14It's like I'm at capacity for this kind of stuff: Steam native, Proton, Lutris, Battle.net, Origin, minigalaxy, itch.io...

Exactly, someone should make one launcher to unify them all!

(Yes, I'm joking... kinda)

You sly XKCD referencer, you.

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Quoting: LoftyI know that once netflix came along i almost entirely stopped watching movies as my local 'rent-a-DVD' market shut down overnight. I occasionally watch a Blueray or something on TV if i catch it on, Sometimes a streaming site might be playing a free movie. But il never be a netflix customer, and given the creeping price hikes im glad im not. This is what market capture does, it locks the customer into an ever worsening deal.

You know where you can still get DVDs? Libraries. And they lend for free, for longer than the stores ever did. If you can get access to a university library, I know mine has a surprisingly good selection . . . but even my local public library has quite a few, plus access to the stuff from a wide network of libraries including the great big city centre one.
Libraries are one of the last bastions of resistance to the agenda of information wanting to be hoarded.

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Quoting: CatKillerMost marmosets are chimeras.

I did a take, went and looked it up . . . man, marmosets are weird.

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It's funny, there was a time when I was sure this was cruising to oblivion.

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I suspect that what's going on here is partly that Humble isn't perceived the same way by its customers any more. In the early days of Humble Bundles, Humble was seen as this broke, ahem, "humble", little underdog practically doing a public service. So, if you went to buy a Humble Bundle, you'd naturally want to send some money their way, in the same way you'd naturally want to give some money to the charity.

But now they're pretty much just another business. They're bigger than they used to be, they're owned by a bigger business which is just another predatory company. So now, if I'm buying stuff from Humble, I'll feel like giving money to the charity, I'll feel like giving money to the hard working developer, but will I really feel like giving money to the money-grubbing middleman? Well, no. So, given the choice, I won't. It may well be a lot of their customers nowadays think that way and their revenue per sale is declining. In which case I can see their need to set a floor on their cut. And after all, it's not like Valve let people pick how much of a cut they get.

At the same time, I'm not going to go out of my way to shop Humble based on the notion that they're a good guy underdog, because they no longer are.

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Quoting: LoftyGames as a service probably will be the future but that doesn't make it a better future. Well, of course neither is movie or music streaming as technically the quality is worse than what came before it (at least for now). Sure you have endlessly more content but is it quality or just mountains of easily accessible mediocre quantity. In the end the lowest common denominator will win out when hardware prices become too prohibitive for people to purchase.
Im not against the concept of cloud streaming, just the predatory business models that are set to roll out once enough people have moved over to that technology.

When movies-on-demand first started up, I was actually kind of excited. I figured it would be like the ultimate video store--access to any movie you want, new ones, old ones, foreign ones, obscure ones . . . I mean, why not? One download costs what one download costs, and the other prices, like copyright fees, are arbitrary, so I figured they'd just scale them so all the movies could be hosted.

So instead we get Netflix. Which I've heard is not nearly as crappy in the US as it is in Canada. But in Canada it's like one of those totally middle-of-the-road video stores with nothing that isn't mainstream, totally enforcing blandness. Or Youtube, which will now rent you movies ... but half the time it doesn't work. Or there's other stuff on the internet, but it's kind of hiding. A couple of times lately I have been seriously getting nostalgic about, not even really good video stores ' cause I live in the burbs so we never had those, but fairly decent video stores, with a decent size selection beyond the blockbusters, things to stumble on . . . sometimes I feel like the video on demand era is just another version of ten thousand channels of TV, nothing on.

As to music, although I mostly still listen to my CDs and radio, I have to admit that for consumers it's been pretty good. It's sucked all the money out of the artists though.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: iiari

Quoting: JozuaI've never really seen the benefit of cloud gaming

I think the benefits are pretty compelling:
* Only one platform to target for programming, rather than 5 or 6 for a title. Less effort, larger audience...

Not a consumer-facing benefit, so a gamer wouldn't "see" that benefit.

Actually, I just realized this only materializes at all if one cloud gaming platform gains a complete gaming monopoly. The downsides of that would be so massive as to make your "one platform to target for programming" advantage pale to insignificance.

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: JozuaI've never really seen the benefit of cloud gaming

I think the benefits are pretty compelling:
* Only one platform to target for programming, rather than 5 or 6 for a title. Less effort, larger audience...

Not a consumer-facing benefit, so a gamer wouldn't "see" that benefit.

* DRM, obviously

You could mean a couple of things by that, but the most obvious to me is, again, not a benefit for users.

* For most genres other than FPS/arcade, lag/latency really won't be an issue

That isn't a benefit at all, it's just a claim that a problem isn't that big.

* Allows for high end, AAA gaming on even modest hardware. Fleets of Chromebooks haven't been purchased by families since, "Timmy doesn't want one since he can't game on it." That changes overnight with cloud gaming...
* Less hardware costs for families if you can, in a near future, game on cheap Chromebooks or Raspberry Pi's, or dedicated cloud streaming hardware. Gaming is an expensive hobby.

Those are both the same benefit. It's a genuine benefit, but the cost/benefit may or may not work out in the medium term. Someone has to pay for all those servers, plus profit.

* For some families, theoretically less software costs if any service can break through with a more Netflix style all-you-can-game subscription cost. There's a reason perpetually renewing streaming subscriptions have ultimately proven more lucrative for (some corners of industries) than per-purchase DVD's or CD's....

"For some families, theoretically" is not a compelling benefit. And more lucrative for the company is by definition more money from the customer in a situation like this, so you're kind of undermining your point.

* If ever realized, some potentially terrific social gaming and interactivity opportunities as part of cloud gaming that's hard to replicate with per-PC gaming...

If ever realized. Well, that's compelling, don't know why Jozua wouldn't have seen that advantage.

* Opening up new genres. Look at MSFS's modelling and streaming of the world for the flight sim...

That's another "if ever realized".

So basically, in that whole long list, there is one genuine advantage to a gamer: You can game on cheaper hardware. But even that isn't an advantage if you're just gaming on the hardware you were already gaming on. This doesn't mean there are no advantages, maybe there are some that weren't on your list, but the case you made wasn't compelling. And there are some disadvantages, although other than lag they tend to be long term.

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