Ink for the ink god, drivers for the driver throne.

That’s still my favorite EU legislation. The price that is displayed must be equal (or higher, discounts are still allowed) to the price that you pay. Taxes, tips, fees, everything must be included in the price.

“Team restructuring” is so much fun, you never know what you’re going to get.

Your boss’s boss now reports to a slightly different VP? Everyone is getting fired? No way to know which it’s going to be, until the end of the meeting.

34, Slovenia, same story.

There’s nothing “inexpensive” about that though.

On the other hand, I recently started doing the other kind of magic with cards. That sounds really cheap, all you need is a $5 deck of Bicycle cards, some YouTube tutorials, and you’re all set. Turns out, that can be a money sink as well if you decide to go deep (or wide) enough. Still far less than MTG though.

Can confirm, not in retail but a fully remote programmer, managers are still very often concerned that “everybody has something to do” much more than “everything gets done”.

Neverball seems far less known than the other ones, but it’s really good and has tons of levels.

That is the opposite of unpopular.

AI is whatever machines can’t do yet.

Playing chess was the sign of AI, until a computer best Kasparov, then it suddenly wasn’t AI anymore. Then it was Go, it was classifying images, it was having a conversation, but whenever each of these was achieved, it stopped being AI and became “machine learning” or “model”.

I only use it because my job mandates it. They allow us to use the same key for private stuff, but it’s just too inconvenient.

The great leap forward was such a colossal clusterfuck that you can’t blame it on any one thing (although most of them would be prevented without the authoritarianism). Literally everything was wrong. Sparrows, lysenkoism, forced collectivization (basically, and perhaps ironically, farmers not owning the means of production), Mao just being evil, backyard burners, rigid chain of command that gave the chairman absolute authority but at the same prevented him from knowing what was going on, everything.

There’s no immediate “big car = bad person” logic that’s valid.

It’s very easy to tell the difference between a big car that’s big for a reason (7 seats for large families, van for a business) and a car that’s big just because (i.e. a large SUV).

I worked and paid for my property too, what makes you think it’s ok to pollute it with your oversized car?

Every platform is nice at the start, for mainly the reason you say: people who join early have an interest in the platform, so we actually try to keep it nice.

Then every successful new platform gets its own eternal september. A large influx of people who don’t care about the platform at all, they just want to use it to talk to people. And of these, yes many are still nice people, but also many aren’t.

You see this in all kinds of communities, not just online. If you’re in a new or niche hobby, everybody there will have an interest in improving the hobby and the small community, so it will probably be very nice. When it gets mainstream (I’m looking at MTG here, but other people probably know other examples) then it starts to attract people who do nothing but complain.

Sadly, it was destined to fail. In Diaspora and in Google+.

The thing is, while people definitely do have different circles, they don’t like to think about these circles in an explicit way.

Facebook has had something like this for a while now, you can set visibility settings on every post, but again almost nobody uses it.

Is that not the opposite? Sure I get less buggy version, but you also have how many years to play compared to me. And you are getting the same game I am when I buy it. You eventually get that content, which one could say is added value to the 25 bucks vs the 35 I spend. You got 10 bucks of content from free essentially.

No, you’re forgetting the fact that when I bought it, I didn’t know what I’ll be getting in the future. I lucked out with Factorio, but it could happen that the devs just stopped working on it, I didn’t know at the time.

It’s not the publisher rewarding me. The reward comes from me waiting and getting a cheaper game then those who bought it earlier. As you state

Who do you think sets the price, if not the publisher?

the publishers lose, not me.

And yet, it’s not the publishers complaining about it online.

Does anyone remember Google+? When they tried to make everyone with a YouTube account also have a Google+ account.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well

To me the issue is the inflation price increase that most recently happened. Typically when a digital good releases in a finished state, it tends to stay at a max price. 30 USD is what Factorio decided on. Then it’s up to 35. Sure its had updates since the full release but why should I have to pay more then the full release price because I waited?

Because when you buy it now for $35 right now, you get more for your money than what I got years ago for $25. Even ignoring the additional content and polishing, you’re also getting the benefit of all the testing and bug reporting by early adopters, as well as the bug fixing by the developers.

Typically sales are the reward for those who wait.

This is just the wrong mindset. Why would the developer, publisher, valve, or anyone else want to reward you for not buying their product?

(yes, I know software pricing is a clusterfuck. But the common theme is that the seller wants to extract as much value from every customer as possible, so ideally they would set the price individually for each customer based on the highest amount that customer is willing to pay. Sales after a while are a mechanism for this.)

Does the value you get of the game change depending on which time of the year you buy it?

Actually, the only change is up, as the game was improving and expanding pretty much constantly from the first early release to version 1.1. And it value is going up, when you buy in early access you’re only getting the current (unfinished but playable) state and a “promise” that it will get better in the future. When you buy the finished product you’re already certainly getting that better state, so it makes sense that it’s more expensive.