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Yes, but they get there “backwards”.
It’s not like they believe healthcare is inherently demotivating, it’s that they’re already Red Team members, and “Healthcare and welfare breed moochers” is a Red Team belief, and since they’re good Red Team members, they synthesize it into their belief system–despite the fact functionally no one rips off the healthcare system because, frankly, you have to have some kind of pathology to visit a doctor enough for fraud to be an issue.
I mean “Oh noes, they’re ripping off the healthcare systems by… (checks notes) …getting antibiotics for their earache!!” is not a thing. Ever.
Everyone, even in countries with socialized medicine, avoids interactions with the healthcare system until they need to. I mean, do you you really want to recreationally get your throat swabbed? I’m sure there’s four people on this planet of nine billion who get off on that, but that’s it.
Now, rich people, they come to this believe authentically. They hate public healthcare because a) they have to pay for it, and b) it’s one less piece of leverage they have to keep people shackled to work. But make no mistake, they also suffer from the delusion, above.
What I am really unsure about is if there’s even a market for Halo anymore.
I’d like to think that a plot-heavy, dialogue-heavy game has a place in the modern era, at least after God of War and Ragnarök, but I don’t know if that’s what the kids want, and I really don’t think the industry wants it because it’s expensive and the ROI is low compared to PvP extraction shooters, which are cheaper to make an easier to monetize.
I want to play a story through, and I want to care about the story and the characters and the dialogue. I cut my FPS teeth playing Marathon (Bungie’s predecessaor to Halo) and never got into the shallow-plotted shooters that id Software was pushing at the time, but I think the market has largely passed me by.
This focus on the engine and the focus on company structure does not give me hope.
I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.
Probably two things:
- Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn’t necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
- The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec’ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.
All those fancy “CoPilot ready” Qualcomm machines? They’re following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you’re looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they’re used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm’s history with support.
I’d love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn’t a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.
There’s a few things going on, here
- A lot of leaders are using layoffs as a flex on workers that got raises post-2020. There’s a lot of “they need to know their place” language in boardrooms, and not just in this industry.
- I’m assuming this gets them out of paying company-performance-based bonuses, as well as PTO and leave for people who were looking forward to a post-crunch break.
- AI. Executives, especially in creative fields, are salivating over the kinds of headcount reductions AI can provide.
- There are some relatively forward-thinking leaders who are looking at the economic landscape and figuring they need to conserve cash. Not say that’s the case here, but it’s a reason that some companies that aren’t run by utter assholes are citing.
As someone who’s been a Bungie fan since Pathways into Darkness (yeah, I’m that old) this makes me sad in a way that only the sale to Microsoft had managed.
Yes.
They got significantly worse after they were acquired in 2016, and they’re effectively another dropshipper, albeit with a better search function.
There’s one notice, and it’s in the System Settings app. And it’s a little red dot beside the iCloud section. That’s not really the same league as what Microsoft is doing, or Even Google’s nag to use Chrome across all their Web properties.
You’re right about the first-party apps that you can’t remove, but it’s also not the same as, eg, Edge where those apps are used constantly and your preferences are reset on every update.
On my Mac I set my browser to Firefox in 2018. It’s never reverted to Safari, not once, where Windows really wants me to use Edge and goes so far as to not just reset it periodically, but also direct start menu searches and in-app web links to an ms-edge: url instead of using the http handler.
Apple has problems, but this isn’t one of them.
I realized I composed that entirely incorrectly; here’s what I should have said:
I hope they use full-motion video for characters, rather than rendered CGI models. This didn’t look great in Myst, and it was really nice when an enterprising modder added FMV back to Myst. I get why (FMV doesn’t always work with VR) but I hope they give us the option on day one with Riven.
The PC OEMs really, really, REALLY want to get back to the 90s and 2000s, when the six-month obsolescence cycle reigned supreme and you couldn’t sit on the same Ivy Bridge machine for a decade.
That’s a large part of the push behind NPUs and AI: it’s the only way to get the cycle going again, because otherwise the PC OEMs are going to be looking at a market similar to automotive OEMs, mature, and where replacement happens at the customer’s discretion instead of the market’s.
Qualcomm lets them do this because ARM isn’t anywhere near as open and standardized as x86, and Qualcomm can–and will–sunset platforms whenever it suits them, resulting in millions of machines getting boat-anchored.
(side note: Apple doesn’t indulge in this despite selling ARM machines because Apple plays the long game, and would rather chase revenue from conquest sales than cannibalize their existing customers; it’s remarkably long-term thinking from an erstwhile hardware company)
I think I bought Shadow of the Beast for almost that much in 1988 or 89. Of course, it came with a t-shirt and cool Roger Dean poster, which added some to the cost.
Point being, games certainly were this expensive for a long time, and I’d agree with them being that expensive again, but for the money going to vulture capitalists who’ll soak me via DLC on top of that. And I won’t get a Roger Dean poster, even.
The model should be Apple: yes, they’re expensive, but they’re also no-questions-asked. As long as your AppleCare is still valid:
- Laptop stopped working? Just send it in for repair or come into the store, you get a new one.
- Apple pencil won’t charge? We’ll send you a new one, send the us the old one back in a prepaid shipping container.
- Screen cracked on your iPhone? Here’s the schedule of repair costs, we’ll send you a new one.
- Dog chewed your airpod? Nominal fee for replacement and we’ll send you a new one first.
The problem is that Apple has the up-front margin to support this kind of thing. Asus et al don’t.
Ah, got it. I was confused because Aleph has been a thing for a very long time. I didn’t click that it was “…on Steam” that’s the important part.
I loved Marathon back in the day; played the hell out of it on an LC475, and it was a key reason why a) I stuck with Macs in my post-Amiga era, b) made me a fan of Bungie in general, c) broke my heart when Halo became an XBox exclusive, and c) resulted in my buying an XBox anyway because Halo is/was basically Marathon 4.
This and Marathon were why I almost didn’t make it into University.