Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.

I think you're ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.

But, people don't have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that's not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people's time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.

It's not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.

Proud user of GIMP and DaVinci Resolve. These tools work great, and I really don't see a reason why I would want to switch to anything else.

Fuck Adobe.

If only Amazon didn't need to waste a billion dollars on a failed LotR series.

Absolutely. Been using GIMP for years, and I have zero need to switch to bloated, Windows-only, monthly-subscription garbage.

DaVinci Resolve, too. The improvements on Resolve 20 are amazing.

With GIMP 3 and DaVinci Resolve 20 out there, this seems like a very bad idea.

Something something slips through your fingers.

Even with places like YouTube, where LUFS level is strictly defined, there's sooo many creators who have no earthly idea what LUFS is, which levels YouTube enforces, and how it corrects for it. They post their videos with quiet narration and wonder why viewers get annoyed at all of the turning up and turning down of volume on each video.

See, YouTube enforces LUFS on videos by reducing volume on loud videos down to -14 LUFS. But, it doesn't do anything to quiet videos. If you ever bring up the "Stats for Nerds" and look at the "Volume / Normalized" value, you might see something like "content loudness -5.9dB". That means it's -5.9dB quieter than it should be, and the creator should have amplified the video to normalize the volume levels before uploading it to YouTube.

So, you end up with a video that's about -6dB quieter, and you have to turn up the volume to actually hear the narration. Then your TV or whatever device you're watching will get blasted by the next video, which is properly normalized at around 0dB, and you're forced to turn the damn volume back down.

YouTube has finally started to acknowledge the problem by introducing the Stable Volume feature. But, really, creators should educate themselves on how to properly mix their audio. I know editing is hard and there's so many moving parts to deal with for YouTube uploads. But, audio quality is everything in a YouTube video. Nobody cares about whatever random B-roll video game footage, or PowerPoint slide presentation, or watermarked stock images, or videos of you presenting the narration with a lapel mic tied to a tree branch you're using on the video side. It's all about narration and audio quality.

This stupid new slang meaning for the word can fuck off.

Agreed. I've been replaying Space Pirates and Zombies, and all of the crew are called goons. Something Awful's forum posters were called goons. Watch any TV cartoon from even 15-20 years ago, and the villain probably has a workforce of goons.

I don't mind repurposing old words, but you got to give it more time to go out of style.

I didn't like how much they argued during the first season. The book crew were much more professional and acted like they already knew each other for many years. Which they did.

TV Holden and Amos still had their moments. Still some of the best characters on television.

It's not you. Pretty poor choice to use inverted colors, but keep the red eyes.

Although, I don't see this on the front page. I just see the basic white version. Where is this at?

Linux, and variations of it, dominated every device, because you can download the OS for free and use it without issue. Blender is one of the biggest 3D modeling tools, because it's open-source and free. DaVinci Resolve, GIMP, and other Adobe replacements, are steadily becoming the standard tools because they are freely available and people are sick and tired of greedy subscriptions. Corridor Crew put out new greenscreen tech for free to a very hungry audience, and it may end up as the de facto keying technology for years to come.

People want free. People demand free. The internet has been founded on the concept of free since its inception: information wants to be free. If you are not offering free, you are in the way, and that monopoly will fall over eventually to your free competitors. You cannot possibly beat free, especially when the ecosystem is well-established and maintained.

I'm posting on Lemmy, and hopefully, everybody here already knows this.

Valiant efforts, but I hope Adobe and their software die a horrible death.

I was on lemmy.film.

Many creators that I follow reached a level of professionalism that comes with significant costs. You need expensive cameras, microphones, lights, high-end computers, drones, personnel costs for cutters and people that help with research. They have travel costs, sometimes rent for offices etc. All that just to produce the content.

Not everybody needs that. You can still produce good content without spending thousands of dollars on all of that. In fact, swinging the level of professionalism too far can alienate an audience. It's all about manufacturing authenticity.

On top, there are significant costs for hosting. I mean YouTube is hosted on multiple data centers rather than a bunch of servers or even home computers. Already Lemmy, which is mostly text and pictures, is a decent financial burden to instance owners. Not to mention the time for moderation and administration. And even here, in a place full of hardcore FOSS supporters, it’s not like admins are drowned in donations.

I agree. PeerTube is neat, but I don't think it's there yet. Even with peer-to-peer options, it doesn't really work when there are more video posters than viewers.

If YouTube ads and product placements are the only source of income for content creators, then the only alternative would be that consumers directly pay for the content and the platform.

You mean Patreon? YouTube ads are no way to make a living, so Patreon has taken over as the revenue source for most creators. Eventually, they want more money and start taking product offers, trying to sell you G-Fuel or whatever disreputable product lands in their inbox.

I really liked the first season, and they had a lot of episodes in that one. I feel like that was the most explicit season because they were really trying to sell the whole Love, Death, and Robots angles. Kind of wished they didn't temper that down with the rest of the seasons.

The second season was kinda meh, but there were some good ones here and there (Pop Squad, Snow in the Desert). I was disappointed at how few episodes there were. I still plan on doing a video on those two episodes, though.

Third season seemed to ramp back up with good episodes again (Bad Travelling, The Very Pulse of the Machine, Swarm, Jibaro).

All of the studios shifted to the Secret Levels (on Amazon) for video game related animation stories, and most of those were really good. Warhammer episode was fucking epic.

LD+R S4 isn't bad so far. Spider Rose and 400 Boys were pretty good. I had to do a double-take when I recognized the Investor race in Spider Rose, which was another Bruce Sterling short story in the Schismatrix universe (same one as Swarm), and they actually reference the Shaper/Mechanist factions this time.

I think it needed more episodes, though. It feels like S2 again, and they are wasting their time on these goofy episodes (the mini claymation stuff, anything related to Three Robots). Golgotha felt like cheating, considering most of it was real acting and light on animation. And that Red Hot Chili Peppers music video was cringe AF.

Also, including Mr (Pedophile-Enabler) Beast in one of the episodes was not a good move.

Voyager has its moments, but I would consider it the weakest of the three. Admittedly, I didn't keep up with the whole series, because I was kinda bored of the concept.

TNG is classic episodic Trek, with very good writing in most of its episodes, even if the first season was a bit weak at spots. Even then, parts of the first season were still interesting. It really hits its stride on the 3rd season.

DS9 is my favorite Trek. It tackled darker themes that TNG and Roddenberry didn't want to touch, shades of gray that exposed cracks in the Federation, but still remains Star Trek. It didn't completely throw away the ideals of the Federation in a weakly-written, grimdark manner like Picard. DS9 had some of the best written episodes, and by the 2nd or 3rd season, it was (copying off of B5) telling an overarching narrative that really kept you interested.

Though, Babylon 5 is the series that really started the whole narrative approach to sci-fi. I love both B5 and DS9, but DS9 did steal a ton of ideas from the B5 bible that JMS gave Paramount, during his initial pitch. DS9 had a lot of really good individual episodes, but I thought Babylon 5 had a better, more memorable narrative.

OMG, this is like the best/worst time to be working on a two-hour video about the first game. I guess I better get cracking on finishing it up.

I have REALLY gotten sick of the “git gud” crowd.

I've always been sick of it. It's impacted how developers create games.

Once upon a time, hard and difficult games on 8-bit and 16-bit platforms were created accidentally, either because of design bugs, or developers not having time to run through proper play-test cycles, or only doing the play testing themselves. We put up with it because we were kids and had a limited budget for games, so we played what we had. It was never intentional, since they wanted to make sure it was balanced enough to appeal to the general audience, but still have difficulty levels for people who wanted to try out a second harder playthrough.

Then, games like Dark Souls came along, which pretended that hard games were a From Software invention, and propped up a community of egoists and digital sadomasochists. All they did was make the designs more deliberate, to the point of developer trolling. (I know this started earlier on in the indie scene, especially roguelikes, but Dark Souls popularized it.)

The "git gud" crowd pushes this narrative of "if it's possible to do, then it's the player's fault for not having the skill to do so", to the point of personifying a game with statements like "the game is punishing me with bad RNG" or "the game is actively trying to kill me". This completely ignores the developers' responsibility of instituting balanced difficulty levels, since it's the developers' fault that "the game" does these things.

Again, it has really impacted how developers create games nowadays. First, the "git gud" crowd is loud enough that developers now think they deserve a voice, as if difficult games weren't absolutely everywhere, even before Dark Souls. The popularity of speed running makes them think that have to cater to that crowd, and streamers streaming impossible challenges skews that difficulty Overton window even more. Developers think they have to make some impossibly difficult game, so that streamers, who famously play video games for a living for thousands of hours a year, will advertise their game and push it to the top.

Tooting my own horn here, but I just put out a SOMA video essay recently, for when you finish the game: The Lessons of SOMA Are Timeless (or on PeerTube)

Simon is the most audience surrogate of all time. Also, I think his continuous lack of understanding is partially due to his "flat" scan, being done when the technology was in its infancy.

There's a Safe Mode, and if you don't like horror games or anxiety-inducing chases, it's a good compromise. I talk about that in the intro.