I guess we'll reach an equilibrium at some point. But loads of optimistic talented people having their dreams crushed seems a harsh way to get there.

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Quoting: soulsourceI'm still sad that the English translation "Longstockings" has such a cumbersome word-melody. As an Austrian I grew up with the German version, "Langstrumpf", which is pretty close to the Swedish original "Långstrump", both having a much smoother sound to them.
(also: in the Bavarian dialect, which is spoken in most of Austria, it'd be "Långstrumpf")

Could be worse. That's nothing compared to what happened to Kalle Blomkvist in English. Although at least I suppose Bill Bergson rolls off the tongue pretty easily.

I don't have much to contribute in terms of recommendations here--I kind of like point-and-clicks in theory, but in practice I seem to somehow manage to suck horribly at them. I just somehow manage to miss stuff I should be clicking on, or my mind works totally in the opposite direction from the puzzles, or something. I'm more a big-ish strategy kind of guy, like Stellaris or Civ, plus turn-based things like Shadowrun and stuff.

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Quoting: MrNilssonI haven't played a point-and-click adventure for ages. I'll give it a try. It's also the first Linux game I've ordered on GOG, since I started with Linux two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, huh? Well, I hope you have a good experience. Any Pippi Longstocking fan is welcome as far as I'm concerned!

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Purple Library GuyMore seriously it's been my experience that people often say things like "X isn't a religion" when what they mean is "I don't care about ethics and I don't want to have to defend that".

And when I hear people saying things like what you said I know what they mean is "I don't understand Intellectual Property or licensing and I would rather follow trends mindlessly instead of thinking objectively."

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThere are ethical and functional reasons to prefer open source when it's feasible

Ethical? No. Functional? Yes, but it depends. Most probably nvidia doesn't need to hide its code - it's doing it because their code might contain 3rd-party code with a different license. This is usually the case with most closed-source software.

Quoting: Purple Library Guyparticularly when it comes to infrastructure or other as it were "central" things which can create lock-in.

If you use nvidia you use nvidia - there is no real lock-in. Nvidia is not a necessity anyway.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe world would be a better place in significant respects if, in all the niches that have open source versions, those open source versions dominated over closed.

Only if piracy wouldn't exist.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyGames are a weird corner case in which open source is rarely feasible, and there are various reasons why it is difficult for that to change and why it doesn't matter nearly as much.

IP is not a corner case - it's the main case.

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo not worrying about the open sourceness of games is not really a reason you shouldn't be allowed to find open source important in general. And in general, open source is in fact important.

Open-source is important, but not critical. It could be the defacto standard if piracy wouldn't exist.

There is nothing here that gives me the impression that you understand either my points or perhaps even yours. I could give you a dissertation on ethics, the nature of open source and copyleft licenses, the ephemeral nature of games, the distinction between things like programs and recipes on one hand and things like art and stories on the other, and why piracy is not all that important, but you wouldn't read it with an eye to understanding what I'm getting at so there isn't much point.

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Sings of Sox.

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It occurs to me that one group who should be very wary of Stadia, not that they can do much about it, is game developers. Streaming music services sucked a ton of money out of the hands of musicians. Mind you, the payment model here is different, so maybe it's not a valid comparison.

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Quoting: DuncI can't put it any better than Shamus Young at the Escapist [External Link]:

Five years of Stadia will set you back $700, at bare minimum. (That’s the cost of the Founder’s Edition — which comes with three free months of premium access — and the monthly fee over the next 57 months.)

Who is this service for? It’s supposedly for people who want to play AAA games but don’t have access to AAA hardware. It’s for people who are into hardcore games but don’t mind an unavoidable baseline of input lag. It’s for people who can’t afford a $400 console but can afford to buy games at full price and pay an additional $120 every single year. It’s for people who have lots of devices who somehow don’t own any dedicated gaming hardware. (...)

Stadia is for casual gamers who are into hardcore titles and poor people with lots of disposable income. This is a service for nobody, and it makes no sense.

I like Shamus. And he's a smart guy; his arguments tend to be solid, and some of the thing other people here have said doubting this thing will work are persuasive. But arguments in the other direction have had merit too. Frankly, this is a new thing and a complicated situation. I think it's very hard to know just how successful Stadia is going to be at this point. There are quite a few reasons it might succeed and quite a few it might fail.
I don't think it's going to totally take over though. There are too many people who either can't use it effectively at all or have strong reasons for preferences against it. But that still leaves anything from "total failure" up to "market share similar to Playstation" and the more I see what people say, the less sure I am where it might end up in that range.

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Quoting: chancho_zombie

Quoting: KimyrielleI do understand streaming music and videos. I don't understand streaming games. In contrast to music and movies, people generally play only a very small selection of games at the same time, so having access to a huge library has not a lot of appeal in the case of games.
Also, hardcore gamers don't care about spending money for a good machine, while they DO care about any sort of FPS drops or ping lag, either of which is unavoidable when streaming. On the other hand, casual gamers don't need to stream either, because their office PC or standard gaming console can run their handful of no-so performance hungry games well enough, and doing so is considerably cheaper in the long run than paying a Stadia sub.

I don't get it, I just don't. It's a bigger hype than Star Citizen, but call me unconvinced that it will succeed.

You are right about your arguments, gamers tend to spend a lot of money building a pc, but it's also true that in undeveloped countries buying a pc is really expensive, so IMO this makes sense in countries like China or India, there this could have a huge market.

Except they also don't have the bandwidth for it there. I don't see this replacing those internet cafe things they use, the PC-bangs or what.

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Quoting: EgonautEveryone should be alarmed before buying games at Stadia, as the games are in Stadia only and google has a tendency to cancel projects very often [External Link]. The other reason why I'm not interested in using Stadia is the spying of Google. Usually you would think that they don't use your data, as you are paying, but everything Stadia is connected to their other services, which all spy on you.

I don't disagree with you on the spying, but c'mon. That ship has sailed. The corps know all they understand how to ask about me. So far, it hasn't actually led to me ever once buying something because I saw an ad for it online, so that knowledge hasn't maybe gotten them quite as much as they might have hoped, but they have it.

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Quoting: g000hQuite impressed by how small it is... approx 650 MB download and uses about 1 GB of hard drive space.

Every so often you see something that drives home the scale of change in computers over the years. I suddenly flashed on when I was a teen, playing text adventures stuffed into 16K.

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