It’s 2024 can we stop pretending headlines like these are some kind of potential indicator of good rather than just putting pins in a map for the sake of records where billion dollar companies ravage mile wide swathes through forests of smaller functional companies and destroy everything good about them?
Yes I know in this particular case Epic is already a dysfunctional massive trashfire but this will just accelerate the enshittification into more of a drag race.
Their games are notoriously bad. They simply rely on their fantastic reputation irl and can’t give a fuck about making good games - they sell enough games, even of the worst, just because they’re Lego.
Epic should count their blessings considering what the game started as and the billions they raked in during the meantime. I bet their active player count is well down from its peak though. Probably the kids grew up and/or got fed up of all the monetisation.
As for Disney they’ve tried many times to get into gaming and failed. I wonder if their corporate culture which is a subtle blend of naked greed, political correctness, risk aversion and schizophrenia over licensing IP just scuppers them every time. I’ve played a couple of decent games but most of their content is either shovelware or naked cash grabs. Even when they make a critically acclaimed or successful games, there is a sense that if they don’t get ALL THE MONEY, then they’ll shitcan it right then and there. Look at Disney Infinity or Club Penguin as examples of games that were killed for very unclear reasons.
Interesting play here. I’m not sure if investors understand that games don’t last forever, and a game out of nowhere can take the top relevancy spot overnight. Pal world is a good recent example of this.
I’m not claiming fortnite is going away anytime soon, but might not be worth a $1.5B investment.
Either way, I’m not mad if the gaming industry gets more jobs.
I have this conspiracy theory where Disney and Tencent concocted 20 year plan to merge through a common stake in Epic. Just don’t ask about any details because there are none.
It makes total sense. Both companies existing in a pseudo-merger makes a lot of advantage sense. Disney gets to keep its image clean of the anti-consumer practices of epic these past few years, while epic sharks its way around Steam and corners small devs, bullying them into exclusivity. (Were they bought out, “Disney subsidiary” might be a dirty word)
Epic gets to make games-as-services with ever more integration, with fortnite, league, and car soccer. This begins also the availability of Disney exclusive GAAS, but also with tie ins to epic titles.
In return Disney gets, for no effort, access to the market American companies can not tread - China. Tencent comes with Chinese party seal of approval built in. Marketing into the country nets Disney the market saturation and brand recognition they’ve been wanting in a new audience, and all they’d have to do is have epic make a game and sell it with their IP. Disney doesn’t have to ask the cccp for marketing permission because it’s a Chinese company product trying to make Chinese people sales.
The whole thing is so…dystopia that it just fits so well with the Disney that Walt built, and expanded as a cutthroat businessman.
This would fit in with some of the weird shit Disney has pulled in recent years with editing films for Chinese releases, and how they toed the line about the “camps” around the release of the Mulan live-action remake. They’ve been trying to break into the Chinese market hard for years now.
Fug. Wish I could say this theory makes me sick, but it just makes me feel empty.
Taking a stake is different than buying it out. To me this is Disney trying to get better deals for their characters/properties to be in FN, while also raking profits on both ends.
This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not buying any keyboard or laptop that has this key. There’s enough Linux-first vendors these days that it’s easy to avoid (Framework, System76, Tuxedo, etc). It’s time to be done with Lenovo and Dell.
It depends on how and what you’re measuring. A lot of Linux first, like system 76 and purism, do so e serious work on the firmware and boot systems of their systems. Which for some is a huge value add compared.
Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.
Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.
I think it's those stupid hard coded buttons on my remote that I accidentally press every so often then have to repeatedly try and back/exit out of the stupid thing it launched that I cannot remove/uninstall from my tv.
If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.
If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅
I want a voice controlled assistant that runs locally and is fully FOSS and I can just run on my bog standard linux PC, hardware minimum requirements nonwithstanding
All I want is a real life iteration of J.A.R.V.I.S. and several billion dollars so I can blurt out cool ideas and have them rendered and built in a couple hours.
Current LLMs are manifestly different from Cortana (🤢) because they are actually somewhat intelligent. Microsoft’s copilot can do web search and perform basic tasks on the computer, and because of their exclusive contract with OpenAI they’re gonna have access to more advanced versions of GPT which will be able to do more high level control and automation on the desktop. It will 100% be useful for users to have this available, and I expect even Linux desktops will eventually add local LLM support (once consumer compute and the tech matures). It is not just glorified auto complete, it is actually fairly correlated with outputs of real human language cognition.
The main issue for me is that they get all the data you input and mine it for better models without your explicit consent. This isn’t an area where open source can catch up without significant capital in favor of it, so we have to hope Meta, Mistral and government funded projects give us what we need to have a competitor.
Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.
I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.
It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.
Not a single soul wants this. They just want to use every foul trick to get you to use copilot (by accident even) just like they do with bing and their other garbage.
I just really hope they select games that have a good story or even better have a great story that and attach it to some IP that has very little storyline. People come for the IP but stay for the story. Unfortunately they’ll probably just pick the game with the largest fan base, attach some well known actors to it and then cram a bunch of nostalgic references into it and call it a day. Especially since the success of sonic means a lot of money will be sunk into it and a lot of suits will try to push dumb shit through.
Seriously though: the dumbest answer that might work is Daytona USA. A live-action anime that’s relentlessly cheerful and energetic. Like the Speed Racer movie, but with less melodrama, less surrealism, and not two hours long. Establish a rivalry with no villains, some stakes low enough that the protagonist might lose, and the sort of heightened realism you get in musicals. If the pit crew do a choreographed spin before changing the tires, you think nothing of it, because it happened in time with the soundtrack.
Genuinely not a bad idea, if you lean into the nearly transhumanist power fantasy of a guy taking on an alien armada with a jetpack and a rifle. It’s an excuse for ridiculous set-pieces where a proper aircraft or vehicle would not work. You can’t sustain that continuously for two whole acts - but fortunately, every time the guy stops, he is just a guy. The difference between standing around talking and zooming away at face-melting speeds is whether he feels like it.
The major downside is that Tony Stark’s already been there.
I was thinking something more like a sci-fi, existential horror film where Harrier is the only force preventing the utter ruination of the universe by an endless horde of Lovecraftian monsters, and his loneliness and indestructibility drives him to extremes, but the Iron Man-esque angle could work, too.
Ooh. So the jetpack-and-rifle angle emerge as he figures out he’s got an Unbreakable situation. Some tinkerer builds increasingly glass-cannon hot-rod fighter jets that are never as maneuverable as he wants. All his miraculous close scrapes in crash landings are really a result of whatever force trapped him in this surreal choke-point holding back the forces of chaos. Once he figures out he’s cursed with immortality, he doesn’t care if his guns leak deadly radiation or glow white-hot, so long as they spray plasma downrange. All of it is just a means to deliver him in-person to whatever elder god is trying to swallow Earth. So he can twist its dicks off.
Which is quite a thing to imagine, from squid-faced-Khorne’s perspective. You’ve found a thriving civilization that’s barely scooting around its solar system. They couldn’t even block your portal on their homeworld. Seems like easy pickings, maybe a few million scorpion-horse-locust minions killed by their measly bullets, then you get centuries of driving people mad and cracking open juicy mineral-rich planets. Your divine adversary blessed one guy. Token resistance. An admission of futility. But… your dudes keep failing. Plenty get past him, but none manage to stop him. You send the big fuckers straight for him, really nip that in the bud, and hours later he’s right back up in another flimsy contraption. They can smack him to the ground and he just runs closer. You are a four-dimensional entity older than this universe. You have despoiled countless galaxies guarded by valiant forces. You were not previously aware that you could sweat.
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