TulliusCicero

Come on man, can you please just stop, take the L and let the subthread die.

I'd rather you do this than him. Chill out, please. The pelican pic is fine.

Yeah, or you can just get a cheap retro handheld with similar stylings that will charge via -- you guessed it -- USB-C.

I'm guessing it's because people expect USB-C ports to at least handle 18w.

Yup, gamepads are super cheap now too. You can get actually good quality gamepads for $30. Were you getting good gamepads in the 90's for $15? Definitely not.

The inflation adjusted price of (decent) peripherals seems to keep going down. You can get monitors and mice and keyboards of reasonable quality these days for almost nothing.

It's also amazing how many f2p games are out there that are actually not too exploitative. I've put in hundreds of hours into Deadlock for zero money, and I couldn't give them any money even if I wanted to (because it's closed beta, but still, the game is already very solid).

The gaming audience increased, but budgets also massively went up. You weren't spending $100m+ on Super Mario World.

I'm somewhat skeptical that they actually require more attention per person. Does an 8-person group require more than 2x as much attention as a 4-person group?

Gaming is getting too expensive.

Gaming is so much cheaper than when I was growing up that I'm kind of blown away.

SNES games went for $60-70. That's like $130-150 in today's money. And they usually had less content than today's games, even if you never do microtransactions today!

In contrast, major AAA titles today are half the price, and you can find indie games packed with content for a paltry $20. Hell, with Steam sales, you can find them even cheaper than that! Some free to play games like Dota 2 make all of their core gameplay content free!

If you check when games like Quake were released, their minimum requirements were absolutely INSANE compared to today. We're talking about mid to high-end CPUs released within the last two or three years, none of this "oh yeah something lower-middle from 5 years ago is fine". Average prices for computers were much higher too (well, maybe the current RAM/SSD crisis has equalized that a bit, but other than that).

Controllers? 8bitdo and the like make highly competent gamepads for $30, which would've been $15 in the 90's. You couldn't even get terrible third-party shitpads for that little back then! It's disgustingly cheap.

If you want to game these days, you can spend a very reasonable amount of money on a mid-range gaming PC* and have it last at least a good 5-6 years. You can then buy games for a steal on Steam, and get surprisingly decent peripherals like gaming monitors and mechanical keyboards for almost no money. The idea that gaming is "too expensive now" is itself laughable.

* Well, other than the memory crisis fucking things up, but before AI companies ate all the RAM, things were very reasonable

It helped me.

Steam has problems but it also has a vast feature set. The family sharing and refund policy are both seriously great, for example. Personal calendar is also really, really cool (and bad for my wallet).

You can still get Steam keys, I usually buy them from Loaded (formerly CDKeys.com).

I think it's one of those things where people only care about a small percentage of the features, but which small percentage varies.

For example, I used the example of remote play together, which is very neat and a lot of people love it, but I personally don't use it.

On the other hand, I make extensive use of Steam's gifting feature, including its ability to handle multiple gifts to multiple people in a single transaction, and to schedule exactly when those gifts will land. And this is something that the other major stores don't seem to support at all, a big advantage for Steam for me, but I'm sure there's many people who don't care at all about gifting.

Being a Steam competitor involves making a store that's actually good. All the other major stores/platforms don't really seem to give a shit, to be frank. Steam has like 20x their feature set, and the gap appears to be still growing.

If anything, it should be easier to make cool new features when you own the hardware side of the platform experience too, but no, it's Steam that has stuff like remote play together, not PSN or Xbox.

People sending unwanted DMs is an obvious reason. At the very least, users should be able to report DMs and then that should allow for moderation.

It's very common in some spaces to get people who send unwanted (spam/harassment/etc) DMs to tons of people. Just expecting everyone to block those people makes for a horrible user experience, because it means new users might be suddenly met by a bunch of unwanted DMs from aggressive randos that remain unbanned. You really need to be able to ban these people (and that means being able to verify that they did what they're accused of).

To be fair, if we waited until there "no more pressing issues", then we'd never get any "quality of life" regulations passed like this.

God I wish we had Aldi in the PacNW. I know, TJ's is technically owned by Aldi Nord, but it's really not the same.

The nice thing about Costco's stuff is that it's typically pretty high quality too.

Honestly I wouldn't say Costco is terribly convenient, other than the limited selection.

I think it's less that America is declining and more that China is rising. And really, most of the world is getting richer.

Hand written is unnecessary, just ban/confiscate phones and restrict internet access if the test needs a computer.

Ah, so pointing out the truth is "so defensive". Amazing!

Yes, there are members of the extreme right even in WA state. There's more of them in red states, but there's certainly some in blue states as well.

Americans IRL only rarely have Confederate flags these days. If you want to discuss the extreme right, say so.

That's not what a window AC unit is.

And yes, it's true they're kinda ugly, but it's better than baking in the heat.

Americans on the Internet will often heartily agree with foreigners about all kinds of things that are shit in America and need to be changed: public transit, walkability, health care costs, university costs, money in politics, lack of basic geographic knowledge, etc.

Of course there are some more conservative folks who may be more resistant to those critiques, but the average American will just nod along. If you mention on this website that healthcare in the US can be insanely expensive, you'll mostly see agreement from Americans.

Germans will say they're not very patriotic, but really the way German patriotism manifests is a resistance to outside criticism paired with a stubborn insistence that things ought not change.

A basic window AC unit costs a few hundred bucks.

Video games have been calling this kind of thing "AI" for multiple decades now.

You do realize e-bikes exist beyond Europe? In the US, e-bikes can go up to 20mph (32 kmh) or 28 mph (45 kmh) depending on classification.

And you can literally fall asleep at the wheel and get away with a $300 fine: https://komonews.com/news/local/sleeping-tesla-driver-speedi...

To be clear, the "e-bikes" in question aren't what you usually think of as e-bikes. Not only do they look different, they're faster and typically don't even require pedaling (and may not have pedals at all). Hence why I said they were kinda like mopeds.

True, it's not exactly the same situation, but it does ban them for the riders (the teens) who were previously on them.

You could make it more analogous by saying that we could enforce stricter regulations on big SUVs and trucks in terms of, say, driver licensing, and you'd still have a huge outcry if we tried that.