I’ve crossed that threshold in Dunning-Kruger where I see how much how I don’t know, and it’s simultaneously disheartening and stressful. But hell, what am I going to do now? Quit?

I’m trying to properly learn VLANs and set them up so that I’ve got “self-hosted services exposed to the internet” and “everything else”. So far, the only thing I need to isolate is a NAS with Jellyfin and Komga, but I plan to add more services via a mini PC later. The thing that has made this whole journey frustrating is that every time I try to learn something, even laser targeted, I don’t get the full answer from the first thing I find, and the next answer I find introduces more complexity. I think what I need is a managed switch from my local Micro Center like a Netgear GS108Tv3, to replace the switch currently in my office. Then, if I understand correctly, I think I need to put the NAS (and eventually mini PC) on their own subnet and use VLAN rules to allow traffic to that subnet but not from that subnet to the rest of my LAN. But it’s hard to determine if I’ve even got that right.

Also 600W is likely several times more power draw than the Steam Machine is aiming for, however much that might matter to someone.

It’s been the play for a long time that being second or third to market is still lucrative. It’s being any later than that that’s the problem.

It got way more complicated than it was just a few months ago.

I think it would be difficult to argue that those two don’t count.

If you haven’t played Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3, I’d say that you haven’t played two of the greatest games of all time. And I love me some Factorio.

The old adage is that nine women can’t make a baby in a month, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a time and place for large team sizes. Large games employ large teams because that’s the only way they get made. I’m definitely first in line to say that lots of large games could stand to be smaller instead, but there are plenty that I like just the way they are, and they’ll need large teams. That means they’ll be expensive to make.

Yeah, that’ll happen. You can’t make Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3 with that team size though.

This is also survivorship bias. Plenty of companies would love to support their game post launch and make this much money, but they go under trying to follow the same playbook; even the ones that were successful doing so before.

There’s a Linux Discord server I go to for tech support questions when I need to, and they won’t even give you the time of day if you’re not using an LTS release. That alone scared me away from other versions.

Not so much covered in this article, but the vast majority of the spending is in paying more developers, and executive pay, which is largely in stock, isn’t a large contributing factor. Your favorite game from 25 years ago was probably made by 30 people in 18 months, and now the equivalent level of production value today is made by somewhere between 300 and 1500 people over a longer stretch of time.

It’s broken down by scope of the project, into four main buckets, seemingly not by country.

You’re not playing 500 games per year. Realistically, you’re playing a dozen or so if you’re a real enthusiast. Focus on the ones you like, support them with your time and money, and the market makes more of them. There are so many good games coming out in a year that I can’t keep up with them; I’ve got a spreadsheet and something resembling an Agile planning methodology to get through them more efficiently, and I still don’t have a chance of playing everything that looks good. Hardly any of those have any microtransactions (I definitely don’t buy them in the ones that do), and none of them waste my time.

I mean, funny enough, I head to a pub to play board games every other week, including tonight. I was more referring to suburbia and sprawl destroying “third places”, as well as younger folks’ tendency to drink less. It’s possible that online gaming expanded our ability to choose our social circle more than simple geography used to dictate.

There’s a lot more to what destroyed hanging out in the pub than scheduling, but yes, the games themselves have a lot of value in the socializing part of the equation.

They are not “most games”. They might be most games you’re aware of, because those games spend the most money on marketing. The type of game you want is downright abundant, and even some of the games you’re ranting about have more substance than you give them credit for, though they may not be your cup of tea.

From last year, check out Split Fiction, The Alters, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (it has a season pass, but you can take it or leave it), Dispatch, or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. From this year, I can recommend Escape from Ever After first-hand, and I’ve got plenty on my radar that I hear good things about.

I promise I won’t keep trying to sell you on them after this, but the amount of the game that comes down to reactions will vary wildly from game to game, and I don’t know that I’ve found a feeling in games more satisfying than knowing you outsmarted a similarly skilled opponent in a fighting game. If you’ve got any curiosity about it whatsoever, I’d recommend you check out this video by Core-A Gaming that shows just how wildly different they can be from game to game, with the only caveat being that it starts to feel a bit like an advertisement for 2XKO at the end. And if your curiosity survives that video and you see one that you might be interested in, we can leverage the 80/20 rule and I can help you “git gud” in record time.

Oh, so, so many differences. This is my wheelhouse. I doubt you’d see too much in common between Invincible VS and Street Fighter 6.

I definitely value my eyes more than you do.

They improved their support ticket throughput by orders of magnitude by automating a lot of it already. There are lots of versions of automation, too, like collecting information about the user’s problem before you even get to a human.