People love a launcher. People hate multiple launchers. People despise launchers they use for a single game.

That said, it probably wasn't the launcher that killed sales, other than the fact that it wasn't on Steam for some random discovery sales. People who wanted to play the new COD bought it, and then found out what the launcher was, not the other way around.

If they just mean you won't have to create a new account, that's a pretty low bar. I've never been impressed with Nintendo's online support, but wow, this is pretty weak news.

I can just imagine the craziness that would result if he admitted that exclusives are anti-competitive. That would go so badly for all console makers.

The Bobiverse series eventually features some aliens. I don't think that's a spoiler at all... But they aren't space-faring, so I dunno if that counts for what you're looking for.

While you're developing a game, there's going to be a lot of things that won't be coded yet. Many of them are simply going to need to be stubbed in until you can implement them fully, or somehow worked around.

Which ones get what treatment is going to be very particular to your game, and your development style. There's no wrong way to do it. Do what works for your situation.

It could be a conspiracy, or it could just be that developers implement those features when they get money/help from nVidia and AMD, and don't when they don't. Or maybe AMD's offering is easy to implement and nVidia's isn't. I vaguely recall that nVidia's is tied to the game more tightly than AMD's is, but don't quote me on that.

In the end, I expect we'll eventually converge on a system that both work with, and this'll all just be a blip in history, like every other standard worth supporting.

When they didn't mention gaming at all, I had a feeling that something about the device made it unsuitable for it. It seems crazy to not advertise it to the current biggest market for that kind of device otherwise.

I suspect this isn't quite the reason, but that there are reasons beyond it.

And you think the people behind Genshin Impact are going to make an offline game? :D

I agree that a building/farming game shouldn't be always-online, though.

I can understand being underwhelmed if you went into it thinking it was going to be Fallout in space. But I went in knowing it was a space western RPG, and I quite enjoyed it. I've been thinking about replaying it, and it was just in the Humble Bundle this month, so that'll probably happen soon. (I played it on PC Game Pass the first time, I think.)

As a developer, the experience is so much better on Android for me. And I oppose the walled garden on a ideological level.

But I have to admit some of the features are compelling. Some of them aren't even really Apple's doing, such as Genshin Impact supporting wireless controllers on IOS14+, but not Android at all. Others are built in, such as the lidar scanning.

They haven't yet tempted me over, though, because phones are incredibly expensive and even if I weren't opposed to the walled garden, I'm pretty invested in the Android ecosystem now.

At some point I plan to borrow someone's iPhone and try Genshin on it, and if that works well... Well, I might just switch anyhow. Or maybe I get sick of that game before that. ;)

I feel like I have read quite a few books that I felt that way about, but it's always hard to bring them to mind when someone asks. That said, the first few that popped into my head:

• Cradle (series)
• Wool (series)
• The Martian (Audio book is especially well narrated!)
• Murderbot Diaries (series)
• The Bobiverse (series)

I think the PS Vita tried to overreach, and priced itself out of relevance. I feel like I had a lot more fun with my PSP than my Vita, even ignoring the cost, and I think that's because it had weird features that developers didn't know how to use properly, and Sony seemed to incentivize devs to use them for any game that was made for it.

The loading bar that I implemented in our app at work is real. It only advances when it has done something, and it advanced that % of the total when it has done it.

It gets away with that because unlikely other bars mentioned here, what's it's doing is a lot of little things that all take about the same time, and so it's actually a pretty decent approximation of how much is done.

So there's at least one that isn't fake. ;)

I don't use a respirator at all, but I also don't hang out in that room while it's printing, and I have a small air purifier that runs in there full time.

Communities need to be maintained and moderated by someone. If you love a game enough to do that for it here, you should consider making a community for that game. People definitely shouldn't make communities just because they think they should exist without having the time or energy to maintain them.

Because of federation, I suspect they can't just disappear. But they should lose their content and be marked as deleted, rather than viewable.

2 years? It used to be 3 years. It's one way to get constant raises, as a company is unlikely to keep up with your value otherwise. That said, "unlikely" is the key word there. I've been lucky in finding companies that kept up with that value, at least until I fell out of favor with management. And at some point you're basically topped out anyhow unless you want to deal with FAANG-like stress. And I don't.

But yes, if you're being undervalued, you should look at changing jobs and fixing that.

I guess you could hope to find someone here that could help you with that, but it occurs to me that you're working with people who definitely understand it. Perhaps you could ask them for some guidance?

I used to upgrade every generation, and yeah, it was stupidly expensive. But it was my only hobby, and you could actually seen performance increases each time.

But for the last 10 years or so, there's much less point. Sometimes there are major advances (Cuda, RTX) that make it worthwhile for a single generation upgrade, but mostly it's just a few FPS at highest settings. So now I just upgrade every few years.

It does say it was cross-posted (to 3 places) at the top on the web.