sp3ctr4l

Can't wait to see Rey discover the remains of an ancient battlebus.

This isn't perfectly representative of the entire WA political situatiin, but here's WA State House of Representatives by Party:

Here's another way of looking at it, the Partisan Voting Index, by County:

WA is only a very blue state because the mass of people live between Bellingham and Olympia.

Get 50 miles away from the Salish Sea and basically, everyone is a Republican.

Spokane is a very weird oddball of... basically being a swing city/county, within WA the state.

It is also surrounded by MAGA loving inbreds, and is extremely close to Idaho, which is basically just Gilead at this point.

Indeed, there is still an ongoing Republican plan to try and break off the eastern counties of Oregon and Washington, and merge them into 'Greater Idaho'.

https://greateridaho.org/

They used to be more public about Phase 2, incorperating eastern WA as well.

... And now that Trump is dictator, the chances of this happening are... a whole hell of a lot more plausible than if he'd lost.

Wait, did Palpatine canonically escape the Fortnite dimension?

Like... that's the 'somehow he returned?'

I watched the OT as a kid... and then watched the Prequels as a few years older kid...

And I thought the prequels were inferior to the OT, and even to many OT/EU based video games that were released before or in the same timeframe as the prequels.

And then the Sequel trilogy was an utter trainwreck, along with pretty much most of the Disney+ shows.

Rogue One was decent?

Mando S1 and S2 were good (very obviously a serial spaghetti western type show, but executed well untill S3) Andor is great, everything else bad or so uninteresting I haven't even bothered.

If you're referring to me, what makes me comment as I did?

Post popped up on my feed, I felt like commenting.

I use a mobile app, and I'm on an instance that's federated with basically everyone, so I see all kinds of different things

Uh then theres the whole, I personally find Paradox games to not actually be challenging once you grok the systems thing...

Oh and I also have a degree in Econ, and am interested in the entire market strategy of Paradox as a company, as well as being am avid strategy gamer and thus interested in the products themselves.

Like.... people are worried about GTA6 being $120 on launch.

... Paradox games, and FlightSims have been pushing hugely expensive game+DLC sets for a while now, and you could argue that the fact that gamers don't revolt against that, when they're a solid, dedicated fandom... well that's ammo in Rockstar's board room meetings when they argue that they too have a similarly locked in fanbase, who will ultimately accept a new pricing paradigm.

Agreed!

Also worth pointing out:

Epic Games is American, and also privately owned, like Valve.

GOG is a subsidiary of CD Projekt, which became a publically traded company in 2009... but it is based in Poland, the EU, which has much more regulations in place that help to temper the pure insanity lust for maximum profits now! that American public companies have.

Game Theory presumes that you are dealing in near peer type dynamics where competition is possible while the people who own corpos and rule us don't see us as equal and we really ain't anyway economicly or otherwsie.

No, it does not.

What you are describing is a constrained, specific usage or application of game theory, but the general theory is much more flexible and allows construction of and evaluation of much more varied and complex scenarios.

Game theory actually excels at analyzing situations where different actors have totally different preference sets, representing the power disparity you mention.

...

There are even whole subsets of game theory designed around accounting for information disparity between actors, where one actor knows their own preference set as well as that of the other actor... but the other actor only knows their own... and many other more complex scenarios...

... and there are subsets of games that sequentially repeat and form branching decision trees, and other models that use even more complex math for more complex scenarios.

Also somewhat ironically, a whole lot of early computers were designed specifically to evaluate massive datasets being pumped into iterative game theory models... computers and games go hand in hand, in many ways.

...

The thing that presumes you are dealing with near peer dynamics is the MicroEcon 101 level 'perfect competition' paradigm, which you will hopefully understand is certainly not 100% applicable to all situations before you finish your first year of a 4 year, proper Econ degree.

... I am not making a blanket statement that 'all privately held companies are better in all respects than publically held companies.'

I am pointing out that in the context of video game companies, being beholden to outside investors is ... seemingly in essentially all cases at this point... a recipe for all of your game development to lean toward the safe/formulaic/stale core game concepts, with increasing levels of production value, and also a massive disparity of power and wealth within the internal hierarchy, which leads to incompetent management.

High need for maximum investor profit = low appetite for truly innovative risks, which can't guarantee they'll even work at all.

Its basically a pretty clear rule of thumb at this point that when some privately held tech company goes public... 95% of the time that means they are either in dire financial straits and can't find anymore VC funding, and/or they are about to enshittify and massively hypermonetize now that they think they have a functional lock on some market demographic or segment.

...

Perhaps a useful analogy would be the difference between a government with most of its debt held by domestic investors vs foreign investors.

If your own debt is mostly contained within your own country, you have more freedom to do both more radical monetary and fiscal policy.

If your own debt is mostly held by foreigners... well, your whole economy can collapse if you do something they don't like, because they can just firesale your bonds.

This same dynamic plays out at the megacorp scale.

I mean, if you enjoy the games, that's great!

Personally, I find them to be... as I said, boring, after you fully climb that wall of groking all the systems... not worth the price imo.

Also... its a bit if having your cake and eating it too, to originally say that consistent dlc releases are a good funding model, and then also say 'well they are optional'.

Like, yes, you are strictly correct... but the whole idea of the business model doesn't work if you don't have a large number of people regularly buying the dlc...

It would be nice to see a more thorough breakdown of Paradox's user and revenue numbers to see how dependant their cashflow is on 'buy all dlc' types, who would be called whales if it was a gacha game.

Note how Valve is not a publically owned company.

They are privately owned, and are thus free from the 'next quarter profit' incentive structure.

... Which has enabled them to experiment, and actually drive forward gaming in general.

They basically invented achievements in games.

They also basicslly invented MTX.

They also basically have the best engine in gaming.

They also realized that turning steam, which was once just their game launcher/updater... into a gigantic digital marketplace for all games... was a very good idea.

They also basically invented handheld pc gaming consoles.

They also invented proton and are now rapidly approaching the ability to make the average person go... wait, why do I even use windows at all on my personal home PC?

... And they also pretty much make the best VR headset for AAA VR games, even if it turns out that VR is basically just too expensive generally.

The point here is: look at the incentive structure both within and surrounding an entity, and you csn determine how that entity is likely to act.

... Ironically... this is literally called 'game theory' and has many applications to economics, polisci, sociology, etc.

Thats true, I did not explicitly exclude those, but I think you can tell that ... I am trying to mean a game that... someone would actually pay for, a game that has at least some level of popularity, general cultural impact.

Some game jam games do kind of achieve this, some are later expanded into more fully fleshed out games that later release...

But generally speaking, a game jam is more or less a speedrun tech demo of you or your team's ability to whip up something fairly basic... and most of these do not usually go on to have any real impact or popular awareness or even a niche following that expands outside of other game devs.

Its like a training routine / job interview process for a game dev.

I am not trying to insinuate no zoomers are technically capable of making a game, of course many obviously are.

I am trying to match the context and language of the OP, referring to a much more generalized: 'what has been the effect of zoomer game devs on the kinds of games produced by game industry broadly?'

The Hoi4 'Ultimate Pack' is currently about 50% off on steam... and costs about $90.

Were it not on sale, it would be almost $170.

... Paradox reported a 57% profit margin in Q4 2024.

The whole year of 2024, they reported a profit margin of about 34%.

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/investors/financial-reports/year-end-report-january-december-2024

They could knock a quarter (25%) off of all their game/dlc base prices and still be quite profitable.

... And Hoi4 AI ... just recently, finally, 10 years later, got an actual overhaul to its actual strategic/tactical warfighting AI, that makes it almost as competent as an average player.

I dunno about you, but for me, every paradox game is ... you climb a vertical wall of understanding how all those complex systems interface with each other, and then after you get over the top of that wall, there is basically no challenege whatsoever beyond the pure tedium of micromanaging everything... because the AI fundamentally cannot strategize better than a human that actually understands the game it is playing.

It is true that general inflation over time and the tariffs increase the material costs of actual gaming hardware...

But uh, higher game prices?

The ballooning cost of game development?

Those things are almost entirely a result of the ossification of major publishers and studios into smaller and smaller numbers of bigger and bigger ultimate owners, who are all responsible to their investors... who are only interested in next quarter profit, which makes sensible long term strategy basically impossible.

And also the ... just generally absurdly incompetent internal management and strategic decision making within major game studios/publishers.

Just go look into basically any major AAA (or god forbid AAAA) game in the last 5 or 10 years, and you'll find that management is basically bipolar/schizophrenic, constantly making and then unmaking decisions, constantly laughably out of touch when it comes to estimating the market for or appeal of their games.

Also also, it doesn't help that the GPU market is basically a monopoly, and the new graphical paradigm (and development paradigm) is basically the equivalent of the entire US car market shifting to oversized luxury trucks and SUVs that most people can't actually afford... instead of offering a wider range of 'cars' for a wider range of 'drivers'...

Nor does it help that various IPs basically have a death grip on their fanbases, who will not stop giving them money no matter how many bugs are in their games, how many broken features they release with, no matter how much they cost.

...

The gaming scene is going to (and to a large extent arguably already has) bifrucate along the same wealth disparity lines that society is more broadly:

Huge numbers of people playing cheaper, older games, or indie releases...

And a smaller and smaller number of people playing absurdly overproduced, but very gameplay formulaic, 'safe', boring kinds of games... which cost more and more.

...

The 'games journalism' industry has largely been incapable of or unwilling to take the on the actual core problem: Capitalism.

Unrestrained, unregulated, unnacountable capitalism leads to monopolies/oligopolies that stop truly competing, and start extracting rent, and internally, culturally, they become more and more incompetent, inefficient, wasteful, and basically delusionally entitled.

...

To go back to the car metaphor:

Nissan is basically on the verge of collapsing.

Nissan was in talks to merge with Honda... but those talks fell through.

Why?

Because Nissan execs felt disrespected by the proposal that Nissan ... still maintain its brand, but ultimately be a subdivision of Honda.

... Because that would mean a bunch of Nissan management and C Suite would now be redundant, and thus either let go, or functionally demoted.

Nissan wanted a more equal partnership merger... despite themselves being objectively less competent at managing both its finances and general operations.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/inside-collapse-nissan-hondas-60-billion-mega-deal-2025-02-12/

So now Nissan is pretty much guaranteed to just collapse, unless METI just strongarms them into accepting some kind of deal, which will now almost certianly be on worse terms than the original Honda merger deal.

This same kind of dynamic of delusionally entitled yet also objectively incompetent management/c suite is also whats driving nearly all the bullshit in the video game industry generally.