Many many years ago, I read an article that said making a game world like the kind you see in grand theft auto would become so expensive that game companies would all start sharing the same maps for different projects, keeping costs low and splitting the profits.
Well, they were right about the costs becoming too high, but we’re wrong about companies sharing resources between one another.
They’d rather make nothing, then make something for just a little less profit.
I feel like some bean counter figured out somewhere that the big money is making a Skinner box instead of the older model of a basic game combined with DLC.
I don’t understand how it can get more expensive, let alone prohibitively expensive. Is it things like increasing costs of buying the engines to make the games from things like Unreal or something? I would have thought that building more helps develop the tools and skills to make it quicker and better next time.
The new god of war games cost more to make than the GDP of Greece I remember hearing. Making a videogame requires a lot of technical skilled labour and you’ve got to run in the red for years until you can release the finished product.
Content generation is the largest cost. This means specialized labor with specialized tools from vendors that nickel and dime (Autodesk mostly). On top of that, the two largest contractor firms (KeyWords and Technicolor) are at capacity, and running on the margins.
Engine licensing is a negligible cost at this point, even if the pricing becomes predatory. That said, in AAA spaces, Epic Games owns the space and this means they can control the fate of almost all. Building game engines is extremely difficult even though the commoditization of x86 and ARM removes a lot of technical challenges that are being piled on by Nvidia.
It cost Take Two somewhere close to a billion to make GTA 5 (development, marketing, and sync rights) and not only did they make it back in three days, they turned around and made many more over its lifespan. Everyone wants that level of success. The market can’t support it. Developers can’t support it. The products can’t support it. A crash is inevitable and it will probably take out a lot of capital for indies, further consolidate publishers, and maybe one of the console vendors with it.
Palworld and Helldivers 2 cost less than 5 million to make each and they’re the most talked about and played games of the year so far, maybe there’s a shift going on.
How about not producing it in the first place? As Russian I have no doubt Chinese spying agencies will obtain it anyway. Russian spying agency maybe will obtain it too.
they’ll just buy it from someone else who is not restricted; second, third, fourth hand. Or just wait for yet another inevitable data breach since there is no enforcement or accountability for that.
*Over the past few years, lawmakers have sought to address the data broker problem, proposing bills that would limit the collection of location and health data and regulate the government’s purchases of data from third parties. Our resource highlights two legislative proposals that would constrain the government’s ability to acquire large swaths of personal information without legal process.
The first, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, takes an important step toward closing the data broker loophole and updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The bill would bar law enforcement and intelligence agencies from purchasing certain communications-related information and location data.
But it could be stronger. The bill is still tied to outdated categories of communications service providers from the 1980s, and it would not cover similar information collected and sold by other companies, such as health and fitness apps. It also would not cover other categories of sensitive personal information like health, financial, or biometric information. Nor would it address the overcollection of data, or the trafficking of personal information to private entities or even foreign governments, practices that will likely intensify with the proliferation of AI models reliant on vast data sets.
The American Data Privacy and Protection Act takes a different approach. It is a comprehensive federal consumer privacy bill that promises to reduce the amount of personal information flowing into and out of the hands of data brokers. It would do this by restricting the collection of such information to only what is necessary to provide a service or achieve certain purposes specified in the bill and by placing additional limits on data transfers. This legislation is a promising template, but it, too, should be strengthened.
The bill has multiple exceptions that would allow government agencies to obtain a significant amount of personal data. These exceptions should be narrowed to prohibit transfers of data to law enforcement or intelligence agencies absent clear indications of a threat to public safety, a security incident, fraud, harassment, or illegal activity, or unless the government has followed the legal process required for compelled disclosure.
These bills, with the modifications we suggest, point the way forward. The data broker loophole is growing wider by the day, and it threatens to swallow the privacy protections provided in statutes and even in the Constitution. Congress must intervene to bring the law in line with the modern world and end the government’s all-too-common practice of buying its way around our privacy rights.*
unless the government has followed the legal process required for compelled disclosure.
I don’t see why we can’t just say that for everything. If the government wants the data, they can get a warrant. It’s not that hard - don’t we regularly complain warrants are too rubber stamped?
I agree that as a free product, the ads are less loathsome. But from a company that just posted a 265% increase in revenue, it’s not like they’re worried about keeping the lights on cnbc.com/…/nvidia-nvda-earnings-report-q4-2024.ht…
How about American companies and institutions that have a physical presence in this country? Pretty sure these nation states already have their data. Too late and not even remotely enough IMO.
Guess I’m buying a new copy of Elden Ring and Shadow of the Erdtree on PC. I’m not supporting these companies that are doing mass layoffs after profitable years. It should be illegal.
The difference is: Reddit doesn’t own the content, they can’t stop anyone else from selling it, or giving it for free; only the users could (the actual owners).
There are Reddit content dumps out there, which Reddit can’t stop anyone from using… so not sure what they are selling, but if it’s just that, then they’re scamming people.
If you are posting on walled-garden big tech site like Reddit, Instagram, Twitter / X, the site and therefore the company certainly owns your content and all the metadata attributed to it. You’re the product. This is why most of us are here on the Fediverse where things are different. Maybe if it’s your personal photo you took than you can make a copyright claim to some degree and download your data tediously but once it’s on their network it’s generally theirs to do as they please, whether that be sell to Google or any other advertiser or use on in-house advertising. Often without proper informed consent and not always legally. It’s definitely a scam, I agree. Hopefully this exposes it more and brings more people to places on the Fediverse where there’s no owner/seller/buyer of your data or anything else you contributed.
Ownership comes with both rights and responsibilities.
Platforms want as many of the rights as possible, without the responsibilities… which is why they have a contract (TOS) where they explicitly renounce to ownership, leaving it for the user, and only license the rights.
If platforms took full ownership, like in a “work for hire” agreement, they would be responsible for any illegal content a user could upload, since it wouldn’t be the user’s content anymore. Obviously they don’t want that.
A side effect of wanting as much content as possible without owning it, is that… well, they don’t own it. 😎
Fediverse where there’s no owner/seller/buyer of your data or anything else you contributed.
Incorrect. You get ownership of anything that’s yours, then upload stuff under whatever TOS your instance has… what’s that? it has no TOS? Then they’re in for a rough awakening some day. 🤷
Whether there are sellers/buyers… is something we’ll learn in time. For now, user generated content on the Fediverse gets shared with little regard or protection of anyone’s rights, so anyone can make a compilation, bundle it up, slap a price tag on it, and try to sell it.
Idk I kinda like the idea of a madman living in my graphics card. I want to be able to spin them up and have them tell me lies that sound plausible and hallucinate things.
How do you know that deleting anything on Reddit actually deletes anything? It might just hide the content but soft delete it in the database, which means you may not be able to see it anymore but they can still use it for whatever.
Have you ever checked back? I only ask because they restored loads of people’s deleted content. I had mine restored 3 different times. After my last purge I never checked back.
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