Zoom: "wE cAnT cOlAbOrAtE iF wErE nOt In PeRsOn. We NeEd EmPloYeEs To ReTuRn tO tHe OfFiCe."
They have stiff competition but this has to be one of the most incompetent boners I have ever seen pulled by a major corporation. Stating very clearly to the entire world that you have no confidence in your own product. If Eric Yuan (Zoom's CEO) wasn't the principle shareholder he probably would have been fired out of a cannon by now.
Despite previous promises that they would not, they did something similar to Unity and tried to retroactively change their Open Gaming License to force creators of Dungeons & Dragons derived products to give up ownership of their products unless they pay exorbitant sums.
They also sent the Pinkertons to intimate a guy who got shiped some unreleased Magic the Gathering cards by accident.
Well nothing in particular, I've been done with the rate of MTG product releases for a while now, hate the universe beyond as for me it damages the feel of the game significantly, and the overall price increase is just rude at this point.
Decentralize. Democratize. Demonetize. Time for a new internet, a new gaming industry, and a way of sharing thoughts and ideas where clout is the least important factor.
Don't forget strong policies to keep everything from enshittifying all over again! Check out Cory Doctorow's thoughts from DefCon: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?feature=shared
Literally every company is doing this. There was a time when, for example, Apple could reverse engineer the Word document format and make their own word processor that uses them. This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
Now companies use litigation and corporate buyouts to reduce their competition, then set up ways to extract rents on customers rather than providing a service. Business folks love this because it means a consistent stream of revenue that won't go away. And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
When I reach the point at which I am forced to buy a car like that, I'd just find out from where the feature gets controlled and hack in my own controller and a good 'ol switch.
Right now it's your right to do what you want to your car as long as it still passes vehicle inspection, but it appears that car makers want new laws that prevent you from modifying your own car.
If we just sit on our hands now, well likely move into a future where we will be forced to either pay subscription or take public transit, which requires subscriptions.
The Library of Congress added "software that runs land vehicles" to their copyright exceptions somewhat recently. That's why farmers are legally allowed to use cracked software from Ukrainian grain farmers to run/repair their tractors
Even allowed now I would never ever modify my car firmware due to huge liability in case of any incident. Literally any insurance company figuring out you tempered with car software would try to take all the money paid for damages back from you.
You can inject CAN bus commands if you can sniff what they're sending. No firmware modification necessary. Not saying it's a good idea to do so, but it is possible to do so.
At least public transit is an ongoing service. I'm far less opposed to subscriptions when I'm actually being provided with something for them.
Car manufacturers trying to charge subscriptions for features in the car you own feels like racketeering. They're not providing an ongoing service, they're asking me to keep paying them to not remove a feature.
This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
i don't think it was due to reverse engineering but bcz of releasing specification by IBM them self due to which other manufacturer where able to make identical clone and can run extracted BIOS from IBM PC without any modification!
They completely botched the WotLK server situation launch as well.
I waited for that shit for years, and me and many others couldn't play no matter how much money we were willing to spend to do so. I don't know if they ever fixed the servers, but back in December they were still a hot mess.
Also, to a lesser degree, SC2.
They certainly lost a loyal customer in me, at least.
Well this year was overwatch 2, which was pretty much the same game but wrapped in skeezy monetization, with the excuse that they needed to drop a sequel (and delete the original) for their new PVE content. Then a few months later, they announced they weren't even going to do the PVE content, but they were keeping the new monetization.
Seriously fuck them to death for this. And their “new maps” is just like the same fucking maps but at nighttime or daytime instead! OoO what a sequel! The company deserves to crash and burn.
Also I PAID for one of the call of duty games and after a year they one day just said I can’t play it anymore because they ended support for older versions of windows, of course they also refused to refund me. I didn’t buy “one year” of gameplay I bought the fucking game. Never making that mistake again.
Just relentlessly fucking greedy and shitty. It’s a shame people enable this bullshit by spending $30 on character skins and paying out the ass for lootboxes. We need to answer them with the loss of our business. I did my part and uninstalled all their IP and refuse to give them another dollar of my money ever again until/unless I see a 180 in their policies and practices.
I didn’t buy “one year” of gameplay I bought the fucking game.
That right there is the root of the overall problems we're seeing: licensing, and the increasing willingness of assholes with MBAs to use licensing as a weapon to increase profits.
When you pay your money, you're not getting anything but the right to use the thing for as long as the company decides to let you keep using it. They take your money AND they retain the right to revoke or change the license whenever and however they want.
The only way to win this kind of game is to a) not play it, and/or b) take to the high seas.
This year was also Diablo 4. And they have been driving that one further and further into the ground. The OW2 lore shit is another turd on the pile. Dragonflight is continuing a "more of the same but we told it'd be different" trend, but is honestly their smallest fuck up in a list of fuck ups.
Was HotS dying last year? OW1 was basically on life support for the past two years in order to support the OW2 fiasco so I feel like that should count as it's own entity... Once we're into last year, there's Diablo Immoral
That'd make sense, I just remember visiting my brother in-law around christmas last year and he was playing it and telling me about the controversy about it being the same game.
But yeah everything blurs together lately, don't know if it's because everything is so chaotic, or just because I'm getting old lol
Seriously? They've been one of the most shitty companies for years. They've been on the top of the most talked about and widely shown because of all their bad decisions. How does anyone who has even a remote idea and interest about this not know that?
Right but they could have done that without promising that 10 would be the last Windows version. Let's be honest, everyone is already locked into their ecosystem outside of enthusiasts and people with Apple Hardware. If you want a non-mac laptop/desktop, unless you go well out of your way, you're almost certain to end up with a Windows PC, they didn't need the "last version" gimmick to keep people on Windows.
Hell, a lot of non-techy people who are already used to using Windows would rather not use a computer than learn to use a new OS. It's easy to forget how tech illiterate the average person is
I’m probably one of the less technically literate people here and in my case, you’re absolutely right. I assume Linux involves typing commands somewhere and I, frankly, have to look up how to do a vlookup in excel every time it happens.
I would probably prefer to use my phone (an old ass iPhone) instead of a computer with a totally new os. I’m not a huge fan of macs, but it’s still basically the same on the user end. I suspect linux is more different.
Inb4: I straight up don’t have time to switch my os for at least a year, I just wanted to support the above comment. I am well aware that my assumptions are probably wrong, just wanted to share what the reputation of Linux is among non tech people (if they’ve ever even heard of it).
It doesn’t, it’s akin to command prompt/poweshell on Windows albeit less verbose or Terminal in Mac. It’s just something you can do but if you don’t use it on Windows then you aren’t going to need it on Linux
I would probably prefer to use my phone instead of a computer with a totally new os
Android/Chrome OS are Linux, I think this is the easiest way to show people how little “command typing” is needed
just wanted to share what the reputation of Linux is among non tech people
Tech people use that reputation as well, a bunch of people think it makes them smarter but Linux is better for non tech people than Windows because it has a natural defense against scammers/viruses.
I switched to it because Windows was too complicated and I couldn’t get anything to run well <- Linux has less overhead but that wasn’t my issue
it’s akin to command prompt/poweshell on Windows albeit less verbose or Terminal in Mac. It’s just something you can do but if you don’t use it on Windows then you are going to need it on Linux.
You just lost 99% of windows and Mac users right there.
I am well aware that my assumptions are probably wrong
No, no, this is entirely accurate. It's just that the Linux-a-boos would love to tell you otherwise. But it's all a bunch of circle jerking. The people who are willing to deal with that and have already dived need justification and will tell you it's simple.
Sure, some distros are a bit more hands off and "works out of the box". But you still have to find the box. And figure out how to open the box. And figure out how to get it out of the box. And then it just works. Until it doesn't.
It's not as hard as it used to be, but anyone telling you "any normie can just do it and never look back" is full of shit. It still has its hurdles and you'll still be occasionally troubleshooting your own PC. Most people don't want that. But the people who do are already running Linux.
My grandmother has been running under Linux for about 6 years now after constantly needing people to fix her Windows install. She can barely use Facebook.
As a lifelong windows user, 10 is my last windows, I've heard nothing but garbage from those I know running win11.
I will be switching, it's just a matter of distros, better support for gaming/vr/drivers etc.
I've been messing around with Ubuntu on an Orange Pi 5 and so far, apart from gnome (even with extensions) I'm really pleased and feel much more in control of my hardware.
The moment I heard of ads in the start menu on 11 I vowed it won't happen, and yet the bing bar showed up on my desktop last week after am update. Needless to say I've already been into the registry to fix that issue, but yes, that basically sums up how I feel, and I know most I know feel the same re: MS Windows at this point.
Yeah then MacOS 11 came out after 20 years. The idea was to have the same version number for the dumb dumbs. It's why the Xbox 2 was called Xbox 360 so it'd match PlayStation 3, but bigger.
Firefox did the same bullshit. Was on version 5 for ages, saw chrome do insane version numbers, „oh no they might think we are outdated“. Now firefox v110.
LOL why do you care what version number it is? They could switch to using letters, I wouldn't give a shit.
The part that's cool is rolling updates. It just doesn't make sense to have a release schedule like they did. The reason why software had that in the first place was for marketing: you're supposed to get excited for the new version 6.0 or whatever and run down to the computer store and buy it to replace your old, outdated version 5.0. That model doesn't make sense for software that's free, though. Incremental updates make more sense. Features get rolled out gradually instead of being all bundled together for a big, splashy upgrade.
Tldr: Epic waits until a game with hype annouces a launch date on Steam, then contacts the developer saying "We would love to have you on our platform" and offers an exclusivity deal.
Dev turns down exclusivity deal because backers were promised a Steam release.
Sudddenly Epic has no interest in making the game available on their store if they have to actually compete with another store. Despite saying previously they would "love to have it".
Having it on their store as well would provide a better service for their users but that's not what Epic is interested in.
This is silly. Epic Megagames out out some ridiculously great products. Jazz jackrabbit, omf, zzt, freaking UNREAL and unreal tournament. If y'all wanna hate on their recent decisions that's fine not everyone stays good, but to say that simply existing is a reason to hate on them is redacted.
Unfortunately and admittedly, we are the problem. These companies know that people pay for convenience and stick to what they know. If we were less likely to do so companies would have to raise their standards. Take Twitter for example, even with Musks over inflated numbers other sources indicate there's still hundreds of millions of Twitter users. They see all of the things Musk has done and it hasn't buried his business thus they are now taking pages out of his book.
I just think people shouldn't be chided for doing what is convenient when so much of our economy is attention based. Kind of like hating the players instead of the game.
Moderation there is worse than a joke. I gave them a motherlode of screenshots, discord links, timestamps to Nazi content being posted on a single server, and their employees would simply pretend I didn't give it to them and keep asking for discord links, as though they were unable to follow up on it otherwise.
The streaming industry has been slowly burning down for a while now. I see more and more people pirating than buying another subscription for another fucking streaming platform that has like one good show to watch.
Well, shares are company value, not product value. And companies are valued by their ability to create value. A terrible decision usually doesn't mean much, and share price fluctuation is mainly speculative in nature. A large company may survive a bad CEO, and create value down the road. Even a crashing company has value, as it may be split and sold with a profit, turning shares into cash.
All in all, as much as I hate, EA for example, they have a strong position and can easily eat up failed releases for years to come. Many of their releases are payed off with only pre-orders.
Companies can no longer continue to grow through innovating their products or services. Companies are no longer competing in that domain because they have already conquered it completely.
Companies can no longer grow through marketing and branding. Branding is everything and everywhere now, even normal people have personal brands, they have already conquered that domain and most people have grown to disdain marketing and branding so its less effective than ever.
Companies can no longer grow through data collection and advertising. All data is collected, ads are everywhere and they are always listening to everything we say and do. They have already conquered that domain.
Now all that's left is competition through exploitation. It's the only way companies can continue to grow. That is the stage of capitalism we are entering.
Also, for a long time back until this year, money used to be close to free. Now interest is way up and suddenly companies are forced with the prospect of needing more revenue.
Red Hat (Enrerprise Linux) & HashiCorp (Terraform) closed the source of their products in different ways, also fucking over their community of clients and contributors, though their reasoning seems slightly more sane than "no more free money, aaargh!"
Twitter, Reddit, and Unity have not been profitable. This was fine when money was cheap (near zero interest rates). The market was awash with capital trying to find something that could turn a profit. A business plan that was basically underpants gnomes (1. Gather underpants 2. ???? 3. Profit!) was acceptable. Twitter’s and Reddit’s 1. was “gather users”, Unity’s “gather projects”. Now money isn’t free anymore, and capital is demanding that these businesses fill in 2. with something. Twitter is doing whatever Musk thinks is good, Reddit is trying to monetize its API to make AIs pay and to serve real users ads through its first party app, and Unity is trying to monetize the projects it has gathered. All of them have been offering a product below cost, and users are understandably angry that the cost is going up. (And in many cases, finding that the product isn’t really worth anything.)
Blizzard is different. It operates in a creative field and has been very profitable. Games are art as much as they are products that are sold. As such, they’re fickle: you can’t assembly line manufacture games and make a hit after hit. Artists in music that turn out bangers decade after decade are rare, as are authors, directors, etc. Blizzard’s streak of awesome games was bound to end eventually. AAA games are also extremely expensive to make: if you make an AAA game, it must be a hit or you’ll lose money. Alternatively, you can use dark patterns to monetize it, then it doesn’t have to be as good to make loads of money. Banking on your creatives to keep beating the odds is risky; infesting a good enough game with scummy monetization is a safer bet.
You’re spot on. The changes we’re seeing are seen as “radical”, as users had previously utilized them on the cheap. Given the recent changes in the overall market, shareholders are making radical demands. So companies have to think of something to pivot.
When we look at video games, we’ve seen micro transactions creep up, a slow boil if you will, so consumers have adjusted to the increases in these “optional” purchases. Video games overall have been largely stagnant in terms of price per copy. Even accounting for inflation, we’ve really only seen a 20 dollar increase over the years for the raw “license” of a game. Then you add in premium packs and other “optional” nonsense and most have just accepted it.
I think where people get heartburn on these things is when you introduce such a whiplash of a change with such short notice. I think even if Unity changed the pricing to 2 cents an install starting 2024, then upped it to 5 cents in 2025 and kept it at an incremental increase, it would have been a better “slow boil.” By going outright with the 20 cents per install for the entry level, the market reacted just as radically as the proposed changes.
While I don’t personally agree with the changes, I can understand through your point why they’re trying it. Late stage capitalism and all that
I think where people get heartburn on these things is when you introduce such a whiplash of a change with such short notice. I think even if Unity changed the pricing to 2 cents an install starting 2024, then upped it to 5 cents in 2025 and kept it at an incremental increase, it would have been a better “slow boil.” By going outright with the 20 cents per install for the entry level, the market reacted just as radically as the proposed changes.
It's not short notice, it's negative notice. They're potentially charging people who haven't used Unity in years, and had agreed to a completely different set of terms when they did use it. If they'd just made their charges apply to new versions of the engine going forward then people might still have stopped using Unity since it no longer made sense from a business perspective, but there wouldn't have been the outrage over it that we see now.
The problem is that Unity is trying to change their agreement with their past customers unilaterally to get more money. In that situation, one penny is too much.
You’re absolutely right regarding Unity. And yeah, going back to pilfer your clients piggy banks is horrible optics.
The only times I can think of when a company is justified in retroactively requisitioning cash from a client/business partner is when that client/business partner is either
A) They (client/business partner) failed to honor their end of the agreement
B) They lit your building on fire (i.e. damages)
Barring those two, not really anything else I can think of that warrants a company saying “oh you also owe us more money now based on your past sales.”
When I was thinking of short notice, however, I was thinking Reddit.
I'm still laughing at reddit and the ads thing. They pushed me more into blocking all their ads and tracking even harder, and to patch their official app when I had no choice but to go to reddit. Everything they've done has backfired as far as I'm concerned.
Twitter wasn't very profitable, but it wasn't hemorrhaging cash either. If Musk had come in, left most things alone, and focused on killing the actual dead weight while getting a little extra cash from blue checks his simp army would have had ammunition for another decade.
It was in fact hemorrhaging money. They have been cash flow negative for quite some time now, with steadily decreasing assets. While they recently have been decreasing their short term debts, they have also been accumulating long term debt to such a degree, that in Q1 2022 their cash/debt ratio became negative.
All this long term debt must be becoming an increasing problem during the current economic climate.
No matter what you think of Musk, radical changes were absolutely necessary.
I am extremely skeptical of the claim that these companies have not been profitable. Fuck they said LOTR trilogy lost money and they were some of the biggest movies of all time. I don't think these companies are above cooking the books to make it look like they are losing money on paper.
It varies from company to company, but when infinite growth becomes unrealistic they get desperate for new revenue and start doing shitty nickel and dime tactics.
More specifically for Reddit thoughts are they realized that these new AI tools had already pilfered all of “their” content and they did not see a cent from it and responded wildly.
Not only Infinite growths, but infinite money. Since at least 2008, money was almost free for tech companies and somehow nobody cared, that they never made any profit - Twitter had like 2 profitable quarters in its entire history.
Now that interest rates went up, investors want to see results and if you can't burn through venture capital anymore, you have to get money somewhere else.
Reddit's decision about 3rd party apps and API changes actually made business sense. Not only was their content being pilfered on Reddit's expense, but a decent portion of their user base were using 3rd party apps that didn't collect as much data nor serve Reddit ads like the official app. At the expense of losing a decent portion of their community, moderators, and any goodwill their userbase had towards them, Reddit now has all their mobile users on a single, add ridden app that they own and can collect as much data as they want going forward as well as ensures that they get paid for AI API usage
Not really. I just patched my app, and the app of others, so it doesn't display anything nor track anything. Reddit caused themselves way more unnecessary harm and damage/ self inflicted wounds than they should have. That's all if i/we actually still need to go to reddit for anything. I've been purposely avoiding them and their search results and doing fine. The traffic I/we would've given them is significantly less.
I keep up to date with a lot of tech stuff through youtube so I genuinely don't know who can offer a service as big and reliable as google. I'm pretty sure they're offering at a loss or something right? I've tried Peertube and Oddysee but not all creators are on those platforms.
The year is 2023, every single major companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No.1 and shoot themselves in the foot in as many ways as they can think of.
That's what happens to monopolies and oligopolies. Pretty much unilaterally. That is the steady state of capitalism without very heavy government regulation
I’m still using Plex successfully. I bought the lifetime pass for $75 a few years back and they haven’t been able to track me down and kill me off, so my movies find me wherever I pause long enough to watch a few minutes
For sure, I swapped over when I was setting up my automated TV/movie obtainer after I ditched netflix last year, tried to watch something on my phone and it immediately starts complaining that I haven't bought the special version. Also GPU encoding was either nonexistent or paywalled too I don't remember. I'm not going to throw money at something before I've had a good enough period of it working how I'd like.
Preference aside, Plex has a single cheap lifetime pass that you don’t absolutely need, I don’t see how they can compare to any of this corporate squeeze you for every dime you got bullshit akin to blizzard and friends
i fear mozilla may be in the line here, finally giving-in to google on manifest 3's limitations, web 'drm', and targeted ads program, in exchange for keeping the lights on (google is their single biggest source of funding via payment for being default search).
See it looks like Mozilla needs Google, but it’s actually the opposite.
Google needs Mozilla more than Mozilla needs Google.
Google is in a huge antitrust suit over chrome and web searches. They’re in trouble.
They need to be able to show that there’s a valid competitor, and Mozilla is the only REAL competitor, all the rest are little more than skins on chrome.
Look up Microsoft in their antitrust suit.
They invested heavily in Apple, literally saving Apple from bankruptcy just so that they weren’t the only show in town because having eliminated all your competitors makes the antitrust suit a slam fucking dunk.
Have hope my young padawan, there is still some moves left to be played.
I see literally no incentive for them to limit their API to just the Google version of Manifest v3. If I recall correctly they already expanded their implementation to offer more.
If they ever implement WEI (the "web DRM") then it's because the Internet forces their hand. A web browser is only as useful as the websites it can browse. If our banks will demand WEI support Mozilla doesn't have much choice. We need to worry about the website providers changing the web, not Mozilla adjusting Firefox to these changes. In the latter case it's already too late and it's hard to blame Mozilla at this point.
I agree on WEI, and that's the scary part since crappy companies will demand it in the name of security and everyone gets fucked and the Internet becomes a little less free.
People wouldn’t use Firefox if it couldn’t run google and if it made bing default then you’d see a bunch of idiots making memes about how it’s so bad and they won’t use it because it’s default
Google has been worse than bing for a decade and chrome has been worse than Firefox for longer. But people still use them and think they are the best.
You even have people make jokes about edge only existing to download chrome
I'm honestly astonished that Google hasn't pulled the plug on Mozilla yet. After all, their missions completely and utterly oppose each other and Mozilla probably causes the biggest losses to Google.
If your prediction comes true, which isn't unlikely, Firefox forks that already exist would probably take its spot. Or privacy friendly Chromium based browsers. I know, the latter sounds like an oxymoron, but they exist and one of them I would be hated on for naming has actually been proven to have better out of the box privacy than Firefox.
This is such a fucking post. Activision-Blizzard is drowning in cash because people continue to buy their garbage. Diablo Immortal was a great move. OP is completely clueluess.
Interest rates went up and with it the era of free money. Now the investors come knocking for profits and lots of it. As they get squeezed, they squeeze the customer harder with worse products and services for more money.
Whats wrong with Brother? Bought one of their toner printers recently. Doesn't require any bullshit drivers, borderline malware software, or even genuine toner cartridges.
Shit was up and running within 60 seconds and prints/scans on Windows, Android, Mac, Linux, (and maybe iOS idk) without any additional software.
Rather than build the epic game store with features and bug fixes, they've decided to go for exclusively deals. This means they are paying publishers to publish their games only on the epic game store in an effort to force people to use their store instead of making an actually good store.
So now everyone is forced to use yet another launcher because epic can't compete fairly
I can't believe how slowly people are coming around to this. I've found it ironic since day one that their "freedom of choice" narrative is being back by exclusivity. It's the most ass backwards shit I've seen, and their launcher is A W F U L.
I feel people still aren't realizing this and epic is still stringing most people along.
Yeah the fall guys stuff is kinda crazy too. I couldn't believe they'd lost "freedom of choice" while also buying Rocket League and removing it from steam...
I think most are either just on there to get the free games, or they're on there for specific games that are exclusive, I don't think most would use it if they had a choice
They released one of the worst DLCs for the highest price ever in Total War: Warhammer 3. Instead of backing down when called out by the community, they doubled down. This has killed almost all good will, after a long series of whoopsies by them.
They haven't been patching their flagship title (Total War: Warhammer 3) because they're throwing all of their staff onto 'Hyenas', which is an upcoming battle royale likely to die on release. They only have one person part time on bug fixes in their flagship game.
Also, their soonest upcoming game is Total War: Pharoah, which when polled only 7% of people said they'd purchase because the setting of bronze age Egypt is boring in terms of unit variety to most. It is also just a complete reskin of Total War: Troy. The latter of which was a cheaper 'saga' title--you bet your ass they're charging full price for Pharoah, though.
Oh, it was pretty wild. Globally, their past DLCs have always been top 3 on steam at least day of release. This last one only rose to #17. It was insane to see so many people boycott it. I'm curious to see how Pharoah does.
I'm just sad because I want Total War: Warhammer to succeed because it's my favorite game series. On top of that, the developers, liasons, and artists are great. It's just a shame the suits and executives opted to destroy everything for the almighty dollar.
Mostly same old bullshit just add D4 being a cashgrab/flop on the pile if you were unaware of that part. As far as I know that's their most recent community oriented fuck up following overwatch 2 drama.
I didn't know D4 had flopped. I got D2R on a huge sale that came with D3 in a combo bundle that was cheaper than D2R alone at full price, and IMO it's fine as an ARPG but TERRIBLE as a Diablo game. Grim Dawn is a better D2 successor, even if it doesn't have procedural dungeon generation. Torchlight 2 is okay for that part, and having a pet to sell loot for ya is nice too. As for Overwatch I have a low opinion on multiplayer games (I play ARPGs solo) overall and competitive gameplay especially, so IDGAF about that game. Blizz is still a shit company now though, and a prime example of what happens when you sell a franchise to a big corporate overlord.
Brands inherently has no value. It's the people that make these decisions. and after the management changes , people expect the same amazing product again but new management wants is profit.
Except... its not. Basically nothing changed for InBev. That lip-service marketing thing only generated extraordinairlly loud conservative screeching from 1% of their customer base, that ultimately amounted to a small downward jump in their stock price that hasn't moved since.
Doesn't count when compared to the likes of Unity who have quite literally alienated every single user of their product.
They have seen a legitimate downturn in sales across all their brands, with Bud Light suffering the most, however that's been the case with pretty much all beer brands in general. People are just drinking less beer.
Yeah, thats overall market trends affecting sales, not a result of their choices or marketing "oops" (that wasn't even an oops, nobody other than inbred homophobic fag-haters gave a rats ass about that campaign)
What people don't understand is how absolutely fucking huge AB InBev is. Just scroll through their list of subsidiary brands for a second. They have over 400 individual brands under their control, they don't give a damn if you stop buying Bud Light. Guarantee almost every single conservative boycotter switched to another beer brand owned by InBev and didn't even realize it lmfao. They were never in any danger.
Guarantee almost every single conservative boycotter switched to another beer brand owned by InBev and didn’t even realize it lmfao.
My uncle was literally complaining about Bud Light being "Woke" while drinking a Space Dust at a family gathering when all this was still fresh lol. I chose to not say anything for comedy reasons lol
Im from the STL area, have a couple friends that work there. They've pretty much confirmed exactly that. In fact, there was a short spike in sales revenue because half the ones switched to more expensive InBev brands.
Probably not unexpectedly, BL saw virtually no downturn in sales in STL
Are people drinking less beer, or just more local/craft beers? Because my experience has been the latter. I honestly don't know anyone under the age of 40 who regularly drinks the "big name beers", not when they have other options at least.
Talking to said friends that work at InBev, it's less beer in general. Gotta remember that the core customer base of beer companies are people knocking back 12+ most nights of the week. Those people are (literally) dying out and (thankfully) are not really bring replaced.
Also have to remember that a fairly large portion of "local" craft breweries, at least in terms of sales volume, are owned by corporations like InBev
Also have to remember that a fairly large portion of “local” craft breweries, at least in terms of sales volume, are owned by corporations like InBev
This is a fair point, I was a bit dissapointed when I learned that my go-to beer that I thought was from an (admittedly large) craft brewery was just an InBev subsidiary (Space Dust)
Google Chrome and "Enhanced Ad Privacy".
That won't destroy their community.
edit: Because people who use chrome, doesn't care about privacy, freedom or anything like that.
Like when Google and Facebook remind you to take a "privacy checkup" which is bullshit and does nothing for your actual privacy from them.
It got me off Chrome, at long last.
Web environment integrity.
I should start marketing cyanide as a painkiller too, goddamn.
Zoom: "wE cAnT cOlAbOrAtE iF wErE nOt In PeRsOn. We NeEd EmPloYeEs To ReTuRn tO tHe OfFiCe."
They have stiff competition but this has to be one of the most incompetent boners I have ever seen pulled by a major corporation. Stating very clearly to the entire world that you have no confidence in your own product. If Eric Yuan (Zoom's CEO) wasn't the principle shareholder he probably would have been fired out of a cannon by now.
And what are zoom employees using from the office to sell their product? Why no other than a fine Zoom call, from our desk to yours!
Wizards of the Coast
Oh I'm so done with their shit.
What is it this time?
Despite previous promises that they would not, they did something similar to Unity and tried to retroactively change their Open Gaming License to force creators of Dungeons & Dragons derived products to give up ownership of their products unless they pay exorbitant sums.
They also sent the Pinkertons to intimate a guy who got shiped some unreleased Magic the Gathering cards by accident.
Well nothing in particular, I've been done with the rate of MTG product releases for a while now, hate the universe beyond as for me it damages the feel of the game significantly, and the overall price increase is just rude at this point.
Decentralize. Democratize. Demonetize. Time for a new internet, a new gaming industry, and a way of sharing thoughts and ideas where clout is the least important factor.
Some clients let you block all botted content
It's a Lemmy feature actually. You can go in your account settings and unchecked "view bot posts".
That control needs to be more granular than on/off.
Because the rest of humanity is still plugged in to the matrix and bots are the only way we can hear them and discuss where they're taking about
Don't forget strong policies to keep everything from enshittifying all over again! Check out Cory Doctorow's thoughts from DefCon: https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz_4?feature=shared
Time to return to the OG internet then?
Literally every company is doing this. There was a time when, for example, Apple could reverse engineer the Word document format and make their own word processor that uses them. This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
Now companies use litigation and corporate buyouts to reduce their competition, then set up ways to extract rents on customers rather than providing a service. Business folks love this because it means a consistent stream of revenue that won't go away. And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
For more details, read Chokepoint Capitalism.
When I reach the point at which I am forced to buy a car like that, I'd just find out from where the feature gets controlled and hack in my own controller and a good 'ol switch.
Right now it's your right to do what you want to your car as long as it still passes vehicle inspection, but it appears that car makers want new laws that prevent you from modifying your own car.
If we just sit on our hands now, well likely move into a future where we will be forced to either pay subscription or take public transit, which requires subscriptions.
The Library of Congress added "software that runs land vehicles" to their copyright exceptions somewhat recently. That's why farmers are legally allowed to use cracked software from Ukrainian grain farmers to run/repair their tractors
Even allowed now I would never ever modify my car firmware due to huge liability in case of any incident. Literally any insurance company figuring out you tempered with car software would try to take all the money paid for damages back from you.
You can inject CAN bus commands if you can sniff what they're sending. No firmware modification necessary. Not saying it's a good idea to do so, but it is possible to do so.
At least public transit is an ongoing service. I'm far less opposed to subscriptions when I'm actually being provided with something for them.
Car manufacturers trying to charge subscriptions for features in the car you own feels like racketeering. They're not providing an ongoing service, they're asking me to keep paying them to not remove a feature.
You wouldn’t steal a car
Cory Doctorow’s new book delves into this as well. I’m 2/3 through but it defines the problem very well for laymen and prescribes how to solve it.
How do we solve this shit?
Nukes, a lot of nukes
I think you misread that; it's "nudes, a lot of nudes."
i don't think it was due to reverse engineering but bcz of releasing specification by IBM them self due to which other manufacturer where able to make identical clone and can run extracted BIOS from IBM PC without any modification!
Enshittification
What'd Blizzard do?
Warcraft 3 reforged, Diablo Immortal, Diablo 4, ow2, anything else?
That was when I stopped playing too. Good decision. It was addiction more than anything.
They completely botched the WotLK server situation launch as well.
I waited for that shit for years, and me and many others couldn't play no matter how much money we were willing to spend to do so. I don't know if they ever fixed the servers, but back in December they were still a hot mess.
Also, to a lesser degree, SC2.
They certainly lost a loyal customer in me, at least.
eh… am I the only one enjoying D4?
Yes. You should compare the Google trends between 3 and 4. It's really quite sad
Those were good business decisions though
Well this year was overwatch 2, which was pretty much the same game but wrapped in skeezy monetization, with the excuse that they needed to drop a sequel (and delete the original) for their new PVE content. Then a few months later, they announced they weren't even going to do the PVE content, but they were keeping the new monetization.
Seriously fuck them to death for this. And their “new maps” is just like the same fucking maps but at nighttime or daytime instead! OoO what a sequel! The company deserves to crash and burn.
Also I PAID for one of the call of duty games and after a year they one day just said I can’t play it anymore because they ended support for older versions of windows, of course they also refused to refund me. I didn’t buy “one year” of gameplay I bought the fucking game. Never making that mistake again.
Just relentlessly fucking greedy and shitty. It’s a shame people enable this bullshit by spending $30 on character skins and paying out the ass for lootboxes. We need to answer them with the loss of our business. I did my part and uninstalled all their IP and refuse to give them another dollar of my money ever again until/unless I see a 180 in their policies and practices.
That right there is the root of the overall problems we're seeing: licensing, and the increasing willingness of assholes with MBAs to use licensing as a weapon to increase profits.
When you pay your money, you're not getting anything but the right to use the thing for as long as the company decides to let you keep using it. They take your money AND they retain the right to revoke or change the license whenever and however they want.
The only way to win this kind of game is to a) not play it, and/or b) take to the high seas.
This year was also Diablo 4. And they have been driving that one further and further into the ground. The OW2 lore shit is another turd on the pile. Dragonflight is continuing a "more of the same but we told it'd be different" trend, but is honestly their smallest fuck up in a list of fuck ups.
Was HotS dying last year? OW1 was basically on life support for the past two years in order to support the OW2 fiasco so I feel like that should count as it's own entity... Once we're into last year, there's Diablo Immoral
The list goes on.
They took the dev team away from hots (only blizzard game/moba worth playing) so they could work on their pve
Wasn't that last year?
Maybe? It's all blurring together for me. It was at least this year that they cancelled the PVE stuff.
That'd make sense, I just remember visiting my brother in-law around christmas last year and he was playing it and telling me about the controversy about it being the same game.
But yeah everything blurs together lately, don't know if it's because everything is so chaotic, or just because I'm getting old lol
Overwatch 2 PvE got cancelled, although it was basically the selling point of OW2.
Seriously? They've been one of the most shitty companies for years. They've been on the top of the most talked about and widely shown because of all their bad decisions. How does anyone who has even a remote idea and interest about this not know that?
Microsoft. They've been itching to go to a fully cloud-dependent subscription-only model for Windows for a while now.
I could've sworn that they said win 10 was going to be the last windows and it would just receive updates.
the surprising thing there isn't that they went back on their word, but that they said it in the first place.
Seriously, how could an OS company seriously believe they'd never need or want to release a new major version
It was to keep everyone in their eco system and just update it as they found more ways to extract revenue
Right but they could have done that without promising that 10 would be the last Windows version. Let's be honest, everyone is already locked into their ecosystem outside of enthusiasts and people with Apple Hardware. If you want a non-mac laptop/desktop, unless you go well out of your way, you're almost certain to end up with a Windows PC, they didn't need the "last version" gimmick to keep people on Windows.
Hell, a lot of non-techy people who are already used to using Windows would rather not use a computer than learn to use a new OS. It's easy to forget how tech illiterate the average person is
I’m probably one of the less technically literate people here and in my case, you’re absolutely right. I assume Linux involves typing commands somewhere and I, frankly, have to look up how to do a vlookup in excel every time it happens.
I would probably prefer to use my phone (an old ass iPhone) instead of a computer with a totally new os. I’m not a huge fan of macs, but it’s still basically the same on the user end. I suspect linux is more different.
Inb4: I straight up don’t have time to switch my os for at least a year, I just wanted to support the above comment. I am well aware that my assumptions are probably wrong, just wanted to share what the reputation of Linux is among non tech people (if they’ve ever even heard of it).
It doesn’t, it’s akin to command prompt/poweshell on Windows albeit less verbose or Terminal in Mac. It’s just something you can do but if you don’t use it on Windows then you aren’t going to need it on Linux
Android/Chrome OS are Linux, I think this is the easiest way to show people how little “command typing” is needed
Tech people use that reputation as well, a bunch of people think it makes them smarter but Linux is better for non tech people than Windows because it has a natural defense against scammers/viruses.
I switched to it because Windows was too complicated and I couldn’t get anything to run well <- Linux has less overhead but that wasn’t my issue
I believe you, I just don’t have any issues with windows, so there’s no need to change.
You just lost 99% of windows and Mac users right there.
No, no, this is entirely accurate. It's just that the Linux-a-boos would love to tell you otherwise. But it's all a bunch of circle jerking. The people who are willing to deal with that and have already dived need justification and will tell you it's simple.
Sure, some distros are a bit more hands off and "works out of the box". But you still have to find the box. And figure out how to open the box. And figure out how to get it out of the box. And then it just works. Until it doesn't.
It's not as hard as it used to be, but anyone telling you "any normie can just do it and never look back" is full of shit. It still has its hurdles and you'll still be occasionally troubleshooting your own PC. Most people don't want that. But the people who do are already running Linux.
My grandmother has been running under Linux for about 6 years now after constantly needing people to fix her Windows install. She can barely use Facebook.
Some people stay on previous versions though and that means less of a base to send advertisements to
It’s not a worry of people going to Linux, it’s a worry of people staying on 10 instead of going to 11
As a lifelong windows user, 10 is my last windows, I've heard nothing but garbage from those I know running win11.
I will be switching, it's just a matter of distros, better support for gaming/vr/drivers etc.
I've been messing around with Ubuntu on an Orange Pi 5 and so far, apart from gnome (even with extensions) I'm really pleased and feel much more in control of my hardware.
The moment I heard of ads in the start menu on 11 I vowed it won't happen, and yet the bing bar showed up on my desktop last week after am update. Needless to say I've already been into the registry to fix that issue, but yes, that basically sums up how I feel, and I know most I know feel the same re: MS Windows at this point.
I assumed what they ment where that with W10 they would transition from point releases to a rolling release model.
This is common in the Linux world, Arch being the most well known example.
Yeah then MacOS 11 came out after 20 years. The idea was to have the same version number for the dumb dumbs. It's why the Xbox 2 was called Xbox 360 so it'd match PlayStation 3, but bigger.
Firefox did the same bullshit. Was on version 5 for ages, saw chrome do insane version numbers, „oh no they might think we are outdated“. Now firefox v110.
What a pile of shit
LOL why do you care what version number it is? They could switch to using letters, I wouldn't give a shit.
The part that's cool is rolling updates. It just doesn't make sense to have a release schedule like they did. The reason why software had that in the first place was for marketing: you're supposed to get excited for the new version 6.0 or whatever and run down to the computer store and buy it to replace your old, outdated version 5.0. That model doesn't make sense for software that's free, though. Incremental updates make more sense. Features get rolled out gradually instead of being all bundled together for a big, splashy upgrade.
I do not care about the version numbers, i care about „oh no, chrome is doing something, quick we need to adjust or we will be laughed upon“.
Copying chrome is the pile of shit.
Rolling updates makes sense, i agree with that.
A giant tech company lied!? That's not something that's ever happened before.
99% of people who use Windows wouldn't even mind, I think.
This is a turning point and I'm here for it
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook=> FediverseUnity=> GodotAAA Studios=> Indie devsI sure hope so. It's about damn time.
They’re at a turning point alright. To be fair sounds like things are better, new dev fund but still
Thats some pretty sily drama.
What was the final fallout / results of that controversy? That was a couple of months ago.
I support all of this. Especially the fediverse.
Twitter Reddit Unity Blizzard Microsoft Epic Google All of the Movie industry. All of the animation industry. All of the Gaming publishers.
Basically, everything, everywhere.
You forgot car companies asking for subscriptions to use your heated seats.
Charge more, pay and offer less.
What did Epic do?
Epic is trying to make every game exclusive so they don't have to compete on the market, instead of providing a service that is actually competitive.
https://medium.com/@unfoldgames/why-i-turned-down-exclusivity-deal-from-the-epic-store-developer-of-darq-7ee834ed0ac7
Tldr: Epic waits until a game with hype annouces a launch date on Steam, then contacts the developer saying "We would love to have you on our platform" and offers an exclusivity deal.
Dev turns down exclusivity deal because backers were promised a Steam release.
Sudddenly Epic has no interest in making the game available on their store if they have to actually compete with another store. Despite saying previously they would "love to have it".
Having it on their store as well would provide a better service for their users but that's not what Epic is interested in.
Oh, I see, they have been doing that for years though. I thought maybe they did something new to spice it up this year.
Yup. It was bullshit years ago when they started doing it, and it's still bullshit today.
Exist
Also Fortnite and Epic Games Store
This is silly. Epic Megagames out out some ridiculously great products. Jazz jackrabbit, omf, zzt, freaking UNREAL and unreal tournament. If y'all wanna hate on their recent decisions that's fine not everyone stays good, but to say that simply existing is a reason to hate on them is redacted.
Big abusive company: exists
Me: Image
Corporate enshitification and the Woke/anti-Woke debate are two very different things.
Casino industry. I.e. mgm, penn, Caesars, station casinos, etc.
"Why don't you pay for every damn bullet you fire in the game you fucking peasants!!??" -Unity CEO
That's EAs former CEO lmao
Unity's current CEO is the ex-EA CEO isn't he?
Yep and he's a dingbat
Unfortunately and admittedly, we are the problem. These companies know that people pay for convenience and stick to what they know. If we were less likely to do so companies would have to raise their standards. Take Twitter for example, even with Musks over inflated numbers other sources indicate there's still hundreds of millions of Twitter users. They see all of the things Musk has done and it hasn't buried his business thus they are now taking pages out of his book.
I just think people shouldn't be chided for doing what is convenient when so much of our economy is attention based. Kind of like hating the players instead of the game.
I have enough hate for both and more tyvm
I hear Discord is due for its enshitification.
I'm surprised they made it this long. Never bought into their cutesy signaling.
But also, that place felt oppressive with a smiling face.
Moderation there is worse than a joke. I gave them a motherlode of screenshots, discord links, timestamps to Nazi content being posted on a single server, and their employees would simply pretend I didn't give it to them and keep asking for discord links, as though they were unable to follow up on it otherwise.
You are one of the oppressors
Oh no, how dare they dislike Nazis that go against Discord's TOS
TOS is oppression too
I'd really like to be able to use it without having to give up my cell phone number to do so, especially when I'm on my PC / web browser.
But how else would they tie your account to your real identity for marketing data collection purposes?
It really needs a competitor
Check out Revolt
Netflix.
The streaming industry has been slowly burning down for a while now. I see more and more people pirating than buying another subscription for another fucking streaming platform that has like one good show to watch.
Well, shares are company value, not product value. And companies are valued by their ability to create value. A terrible decision usually doesn't mean much, and share price fluctuation is mainly speculative in nature. A large company may survive a bad CEO, and create value down the road. Even a crashing company has value, as it may be split and sold with a profit, turning shares into cash.
All in all, as much as I hate, EA for example, they have a strong position and can easily eat up failed releases for years to come. Many of their releases are payed off with only pre-orders.
Companies can no longer continue to grow through innovating their products or services. Companies are no longer competing in that domain because they have already conquered it completely.
Companies can no longer grow through marketing and branding. Branding is everything and everywhere now, even normal people have personal brands, they have already conquered that domain and most people have grown to disdain marketing and branding so its less effective than ever.
Companies can no longer grow through data collection and advertising. All data is collected, ads are everywhere and they are always listening to everything we say and do. They have already conquered that domain.
Now all that's left is competition through exploitation. It's the only way companies can continue to grow. That is the stage of capitalism we are entering.
Also, for a long time back until this year, money used to be close to free. Now interest is way up and suddenly companies are forced with the prospect of needing more revenue.
Continued unlimited growth turns out to be not sustainable...
Red Hat (Enrerprise Linux) & HashiCorp (Terraform) closed the source of their products in different ways, also fucking over their community of clients and contributors, though their reasoning seems slightly more sane than "no more free money, aaargh!"
Okay wait what the fuck is this picture
I don't know, but the guy is having a hard time.
Seems to be from the "No Poop July" trend a few months ago.
Heart attack speed run
Why is this a trend?
Twitter, Reddit, and Unity have not been profitable. This was fine when money was cheap (near zero interest rates). The market was awash with capital trying to find something that could turn a profit. A business plan that was basically underpants gnomes (1. Gather underpants 2. ???? 3. Profit!) was acceptable. Twitter’s and Reddit’s 1. was “gather users”, Unity’s “gather projects”. Now money isn’t free anymore, and capital is demanding that these businesses fill in 2. with something. Twitter is doing whatever Musk thinks is good, Reddit is trying to monetize its API to make AIs pay and to serve real users ads through its first party app, and Unity is trying to monetize the projects it has gathered. All of them have been offering a product below cost, and users are understandably angry that the cost is going up. (And in many cases, finding that the product isn’t really worth anything.)
Blizzard is different. It operates in a creative field and has been very profitable. Games are art as much as they are products that are sold. As such, they’re fickle: you can’t assembly line manufacture games and make a hit after hit. Artists in music that turn out bangers decade after decade are rare, as are authors, directors, etc. Blizzard’s streak of awesome games was bound to end eventually. AAA games are also extremely expensive to make: if you make an AAA game, it must be a hit or you’ll lose money. Alternatively, you can use dark patterns to monetize it, then it doesn’t have to be as good to make loads of money. Banking on your creatives to keep beating the odds is risky; infesting a good enough game with scummy monetization is a safer bet.
You’re spot on. The changes we’re seeing are seen as “radical”, as users had previously utilized them on the cheap. Given the recent changes in the overall market, shareholders are making radical demands. So companies have to think of something to pivot.
When we look at video games, we’ve seen micro transactions creep up, a slow boil if you will, so consumers have adjusted to the increases in these “optional” purchases. Video games overall have been largely stagnant in terms of price per copy. Even accounting for inflation, we’ve really only seen a 20 dollar increase over the years for the raw “license” of a game. Then you add in premium packs and other “optional” nonsense and most have just accepted it.
I think where people get heartburn on these things is when you introduce such a whiplash of a change with such short notice. I think even if Unity changed the pricing to 2 cents an install starting 2024, then upped it to 5 cents in 2025 and kept it at an incremental increase, it would have been a better “slow boil.” By going outright with the 20 cents per install for the entry level, the market reacted just as radically as the proposed changes.
While I don’t personally agree with the changes, I can understand through your point why they’re trying it. Late stage capitalism and all that
It's not short notice, it's negative notice. They're potentially charging people who haven't used Unity in years, and had agreed to a completely different set of terms when they did use it. If they'd just made their charges apply to new versions of the engine going forward then people might still have stopped using Unity since it no longer made sense from a business perspective, but there wouldn't have been the outrage over it that we see now.
The problem is that Unity is trying to change their agreement with their past customers unilaterally to get more money. In that situation, one penny is too much.
You’re absolutely right regarding Unity. And yeah, going back to pilfer your clients piggy banks is horrible optics.
The only times I can think of when a company is justified in retroactively requisitioning cash from a client/business partner is when that client/business partner is either A) They (client/business partner) failed to honor their end of the agreement B) They lit your building on fire (i.e. damages)
Barring those two, not really anything else I can think of that warrants a company saying “oh you also owe us more money now based on your past sales.”
When I was thinking of short notice, however, I was thinking Reddit.
TL;DR quantitative tightening
I'm still laughing at reddit and the ads thing. They pushed me more into blocking all their ads and tracking even harder, and to patch their official app when I had no choice but to go to reddit. Everything they've done has backfired as far as I'm concerned.
So, you're saying that Twitter would've gone the same way without Musk?
I don't think it would've gone the exact same route, but they would've become more aggressive about gaining revenue.
Twitter wasn't very profitable, but it wasn't hemorrhaging cash either. If Musk had come in, left most things alone, and focused on killing the actual dead weight while getting a little extra cash from blue checks his simp army would have had ammunition for another decade.
It was in fact hemorrhaging money. They have been cash flow negative for quite some time now, with steadily decreasing assets. While they recently have been decreasing their short term debts, they have also been accumulating long term debt to such a degree, that in Q1 2022 their cash/debt ratio became negative.
All this long term debt must be becoming an increasing problem during the current economic climate.
No matter what you think of Musk, radical changes were absolutely necessary.
I am extremely skeptical of the claim that these companies have not been profitable. Fuck they said LOTR trilogy lost money and they were some of the biggest movies of all time. I don't think these companies are above cooking the books to make it look like they are losing money on paper.
It varies from company to company, but when infinite growth becomes unrealistic they get desperate for new revenue and start doing shitty nickel and dime tactics.
More specifically for Reddit thoughts are they realized that these new AI tools had already pilfered all of “their” content and they did not see a cent from it and responded wildly.
Not only Infinite growths, but infinite money. Since at least 2008, money was almost free for tech companies and somehow nobody cared, that they never made any profit - Twitter had like 2 profitable quarters in its entire history.
Now that interest rates went up, investors want to see results and if you can't burn through venture capital anymore, you have to get money somewhere else.
Reddit's decision about 3rd party apps and API changes actually made business sense. Not only was their content being pilfered on Reddit's expense, but a decent portion of their user base were using 3rd party apps that didn't collect as much data nor serve Reddit ads like the official app. At the expense of losing a decent portion of their community, moderators, and any goodwill their userbase had towards them, Reddit now has all their mobile users on a single, add ridden app that they own and can collect as much data as they want going forward as well as ensures that they get paid for AI API usage
Not really. I just patched my app, and the app of others, so it doesn't display anything nor track anything. Reddit caused themselves way more unnecessary harm and damage/ self inflicted wounds than they should have. That's all if i/we actually still need to go to reddit for anything. I've been purposely avoiding them and their search results and doing fine. The traffic I/we would've given them is significantly less.
All these guys talk to each other, they don't really have unique ideas
They're all Disrupters
if everyone is disrupting then no one is disrupting.
Who will disrupt the disruptors?
Disruption to settle into a new norm.
Please somehow let YouTube/Google be next. Somehow.
I keep up to date with a lot of tech stuff through youtube so I genuinely don't know who can offer a service as big and reliable as google. I'm pretty sure they're offering at a loss or something right? I've tried Peertube and Oddysee but not all creators are on those platforms.
yeah YouTube looses a shitton of money for google, so much that they stopped reporting it and just add it into their total loss now
Netflix... except that move is sadly paying off
I've done my part. 🏴☠️ Cancelled that shit immediately.
The year is 2023, every single major companies are racing each other to become Public Enemy No.1 and shoot themselves in the foot in as many ways as they can think of.
That's what happens to monopolies and oligopolies. Pretty much unilaterally. That is the steady state of capitalism without very heavy government regulation
companies want to go back to feudalism
Literally every top 500 company
I heard Plex has something going on so people are switching to Jellyfin
Plex has been like this for years, I dropped it as soon as the first jellyfin version was out. Fuck everything about plex
I’m still using Plex successfully. I bought the lifetime pass for $75 a few years back and they haven’t been able to track me down and kill me off, so my movies find me wherever I pause long enough to watch a few minutes
They've banned the use of Hetzner
Why not others than hetzner
Plex has been garbage for longer than their latest outrage.
For sure, I swapped over when I was setting up my automated TV/movie obtainer after I ditched netflix last year, tried to watch something on my phone and it immediately starts complaining that I haven't bought the special version. Also GPU encoding was either nonexistent or paywalled too I don't remember. I'm not going to throw money at something before I've had a good enough period of it working how I'd like.
Oh really? I was just thinking about trying it. Maybe I'll look at other options first then.
Why jellyfin?
Preference aside, Plex has a single cheap lifetime pass that you don’t absolutely need, I don’t see how they can compare to any of this corporate squeeze you for every dime you got bullshit akin to blizzard and friends
i fear mozilla may be in the line here, finally giving-in to google on manifest 3's limitations, web 'drm', and targeted ads program, in exchange for keeping the lights on (google is their single biggest source of funding via payment for being default search).
I actually don’t think so.
See it looks like Mozilla needs Google, but it’s actually the opposite.
Google needs Mozilla more than Mozilla needs Google.
Google is in a huge antitrust suit over chrome and web searches. They’re in trouble.
They need to be able to show that there’s a valid competitor, and Mozilla is the only REAL competitor, all the rest are little more than skins on chrome.
Look up Microsoft in their antitrust suit. They invested heavily in Apple, literally saving Apple from bankruptcy just so that they weren’t the only show in town because having eliminated all your competitors makes the antitrust suit a slam fucking dunk.
Have hope my young padawan, there is still some moves left to be played.
This is good.. But also we're fucked if it's come to this... God damn...
I see literally no incentive for them to limit their API to just the Google version of Manifest v3. If I recall correctly they already expanded their implementation to offer more.
If they ever implement WEI (the "web DRM") then it's because the Internet forces their hand. A web browser is only as useful as the websites it can browse. If our banks will demand WEI support Mozilla doesn't have much choice. We need to worry about the website providers changing the web, not Mozilla adjusting Firefox to these changes. In the latter case it's already too late and it's hard to blame Mozilla at this point.
I agree on WEI, and that's the scary part since crappy companies will demand it in the name of security and everyone gets fucked and the Internet becomes a little less free.
People wouldn’t use Firefox if it couldn’t run google and if it made bing default then you’d see a bunch of idiots making memes about how it’s so bad and they won’t use it because it’s default
Google has been worse than bing for a decade and chrome has been worse than Firefox for longer. But people still use them and think they are the best.
You even have people make jokes about edge only existing to download chrome
I feel like you vastly overestimate the audience
For my searches, Google still works better than bing. I wonder for what topics bing gives better results?
Sports, piracy, video games, videos, and tech support for me
Google’s advantage for me is the date filter. If I want to find something from a decade ago then I have to use it
That would be a tragedy
I'm honestly astonished that Google hasn't pulled the plug on Mozilla yet. After all, their missions completely and utterly oppose each other and Mozilla probably causes the biggest losses to Google.
If your prediction comes true, which isn't unlikely, Firefox forks that already exist would probably take its spot. Or privacy friendly Chromium based browsers. I know, the latter sounds like an oxymoron, but they exist and one of them I would be hated on for naming has actually been proven to have better out of the box privacy than Firefox.
The problem with privacy-friendly Chromium is that no one is building a mobile counterpart.
Mozilla's mobile version of Firefox supports desktop extensions. It's not inherently privacy friendly but you can make it that way.
Yeah but chromium..
But if Mozilla goes, Google are setting themselves up for a hell of a lawsuit, since the only cross-device browser would be Chrome (and it's children)
I don't think any of these companies resist at all! They keep their head from going red and just choose the path of extra short-term money!
Sure, but many of the decisions probably don't even get them extra sgort-term money. They're just bad in every aspect.
This is such a fucking post. Activision-Blizzard is drowning in cash because people continue to buy their garbage. Diablo Immortal was a great move. OP is completely clueluess.
Companies be like:
Short term gains .... and gain them as fast as possible .... because the end is coming near and everything is going to be over soon.
While depressing, it makes sense, seeing as this market model isn’t sustainable in the long term, let alone short term.
Interest rates went up and with it the era of free money. Now the investors come knocking for profits and lots of it. As they get squeezed, they squeeze the customer harder with worse products and services for more money.
I sometimes do wonder if the rich are just all in the endgame now and we’re just like but we didn’t even get a turn!
Whats wrong with Brother? Bought one of their toner printers recently. Doesn't require any bullshit drivers, borderline malware software, or even genuine toner cartridges.
Shit was up and running within 60 seconds and prints/scans on Windows, Android, Mac, Linux, (and maybe iOS idk) without any additional software.
Epic Games
What did they do?
Rather than build the epic game store with features and bug fixes, they've decided to go for exclusively deals. This means they are paying publishers to publish their games only on the epic game store in an effort to force people to use their store instead of making an actually good store.
So now everyone is forced to use yet another launcher because epic can't compete fairly
I can't believe how slowly people are coming around to this. I've found it ironic since day one that their "freedom of choice" narrative is being back by exclusivity. It's the most ass backwards shit I've seen, and their launcher is A W F U L.
I feel people still aren't realizing this and epic is still stringing most people along.
Not to say that they destroyed the fall guys community and now such a mess with full of drama
Yeah the fall guys stuff is kinda crazy too. I couldn't believe they'd lost "freedom of choice" while also buying Rocket League and removing it from steam...
I think most are either just on there to get the free games, or they're on there for specific games that are exclusive, I don't think most would use it if they had a choice
Creative Assembly really shot themselves in the foot lately.
What did they do?
They released one of the worst DLCs for the highest price ever in Total War: Warhammer 3. Instead of backing down when called out by the community, they doubled down. This has killed almost all good will, after a long series of whoopsies by them.
They haven't been patching their flagship title (Total War: Warhammer 3) because they're throwing all of their staff onto 'Hyenas', which is an upcoming battle royale likely to die on release. They only have one person part time on bug fixes in their flagship game.
Also, their soonest upcoming game is Total War: Pharoah, which when polled only 7% of people said they'd purchase because the setting of bronze age Egypt is boring in terms of unit variety to most. It is also just a complete reskin of Total War: Troy. The latter of which was a cheaper 'saga' title--you bet your ass they're charging full price for Pharoah, though.
Oof! That's a rough situation to be in.
I guess we'll see how people vote with their money in the end.
Oh, it was pretty wild. Globally, their past DLCs have always been top 3 on steam at least day of release. This last one only rose to #17. It was insane to see so many people boycott it. I'm curious to see how Pharoah does.
I'm just sad because I want Total War: Warhammer to succeed because it's my favorite game series. On top of that, the developers, liasons, and artists are great. It's just a shame the suits and executives opted to destroy everything for the almighty dollar.
Imgur and Tumblr too
What did Blizzard do this time? Or is a reference to their same old bullshit?
Mostly same old bullshit just add D4 being a cashgrab/flop on the pile if you were unaware of that part. As far as I know that's their most recent community oriented fuck up following overwatch 2 drama.
I didn't know D4 had flopped. I got D2R on a huge sale that came with D3 in a combo bundle that was cheaper than D2R alone at full price, and IMO it's fine as an ARPG but TERRIBLE as a Diablo game. Grim Dawn is a better D2 successor, even if it doesn't have procedural dungeon generation. Torchlight 2 is okay for that part, and having a pet to sell loot for ya is nice too. As for Overwatch I have a low opinion on multiplayer games (I play ARPGs solo) overall and competitive gameplay especially, so IDGAF about that game. Blizz is still a shit company now though, and a prime example of what happens when you sell a franchise to a big corporate overlord.
Nothing.
Brands inherently has no value. It's the people that make these decisions. and after the management changes , people expect the same amazing product again but new management wants is profit.
Who is this and why is he red?
Oh my god, you can't just ask people why they're red.
He could be sunburnt and need some Aloe!
Stop trying to make 'Aloe' happen.
Actually, I allowed it.
So you agree...you think you're really pretty?
It seems like it.
I dunno. He came packaged with the meme at the meme store.
Gordon Ramsay during his first day on the job
[email protected]
And yet, they ain't going anywhere! Guess they're not so bad after all. Look we can shit on stuff all we want, we're still the minority
They are going anywhere because they have a monopoly. This is why the Invisible Hand of the free market doesn't do anything except for flip us off.
Budweiser
Except... its not. Basically nothing changed for InBev. That lip-service marketing thing only generated extraordinairlly loud conservative screeching from 1% of their customer base, that ultimately amounted to a small downward jump in their stock price that hasn't moved since.
Doesn't count when compared to the likes of Unity who have quite literally alienated every single user of their product.
They have seen a legitimate downturn in sales across all their brands, with Bud Light suffering the most, however that's been the case with pretty much all beer brands in general. People are just drinking less beer.
Yeah, thats overall market trends affecting sales, not a result of their choices or marketing "oops" (that wasn't even an oops, nobody other than inbred homophobic fag-haters gave a rats ass about that campaign)
What people don't understand is how absolutely fucking huge AB InBev is. Just scroll through their list of subsidiary brands for a second. They have over 400 individual brands under their control, they don't give a damn if you stop buying Bud Light. Guarantee almost every single conservative boycotter switched to another beer brand owned by InBev and didn't even realize it lmfao. They were never in any danger.
My uncle was literally complaining about Bud Light being "Woke" while drinking a Space Dust at a family gathering when all this was still fresh lol. I chose to not say anything for comedy reasons lol
Im from the STL area, have a couple friends that work there. They've pretty much confirmed exactly that. In fact, there was a short spike in sales revenue because half the ones switched to more expensive InBev brands.
Probably not unexpectedly, BL saw virtually no downturn in sales in STL
Are people drinking less beer, or just more local/craft beers? Because my experience has been the latter. I honestly don't know anyone under the age of 40 who regularly drinks the "big name beers", not when they have other options at least.
Talking to said friends that work at InBev, it's less beer in general. Gotta remember that the core customer base of beer companies are people knocking back 12+ most nights of the week. Those people are (literally) dying out and (thankfully) are not really bring replaced.
Also have to remember that a fairly large portion of "local" craft breweries, at least in terms of sales volume, are owned by corporations like InBev
This is a fair point, I was a bit dissapointed when I learned that my go-to beer that I thought was from an (admittedly large) craft brewery was just an InBev subsidiary (Space Dust)
Budweiser has always been a crappy water-beer. That is kind of its selling point.
Lol. No. Y'all just got taken for fools.
Budweiser?
Conservatives mad that a trans person received a special, ONE OFF, PRIVATE, can with their face on it.
*croaks* Bud...
Y
Sir?