Food, especially fresh food, used to be a lot more expensive when adjusting for inflation. A canned chicken like this doesn’t look super appetizing right out of the can, but it probably tasted OK after you shredded it and put it in a casserole. And it was significantly cheaper than buying a fresh whole roasted chicken, assuming you lived somewhere that fresh whole roasted chickens were even readily available. Food like this became particularly popular during the great depression, and stuck around for decades afterwards.

Nowadays, between industrialized farming, highly optimized supply chains, and a buttload of government subsidy, fresh food is comparatively cheap. You can get a whole roasted chicken right off the spit for $5-10 at just about any grocery store. So for most people the value proposition of a $3 canned chicken isn’t really there anymore, especially if you don’t have an enormous baby-boom-era sized family to feed.

Some things cannot be effectively regulated in this manner. At all.

There is simply no way to stop people from building their own 3D printers. There are too many open source designs, and they can be built with very simple parts that are readily available at the hardware store. Most hobbyist-level 3D printers basically come as a kit that they have to assemble themselves anyways. What happens next? Background checks to buy stepper motors? Background checks to buy a microcontroller?

To me this is like trying to mandate government backdoors in encryption algorithms. There is literally nothing that would stop criminals from just using an open source encryption algorithm that doesn’t have a backdoor, so you end up just making it so all legitimate communications are less secure than they should be.

i think that is a bit unfair to bethesda’s engine. all those other engines have achieved their scalability at the cost of extensibility and easy to work with game systems. this manifests most visibly in how mod support works for bethesda games versus games built on other more “optimized” engines, but it affects the core game design as well.

even if id software released their internal tooling to the public, it wouldn’t be all that useful for making the kinds of mods people make for bethesda games, because their engine isn’t built for all the systems-driven game design that bethesda’s is. that moddability is born out of how bethesda has designed their engine, the gameplay systems they built in it, and the tooling that supports all of this.

it’s truly insane just what you can do with bethesda’s engine with relatively little work. and it shows when you compare to games that try to imitate their game design on other engines. the outer worlds felt really static compared to fallout new vegas and skyrim, because it was missing so many of these systems.

bethesda games have a lot of problems, but ditching their engine for something like unreal or id tech would most likely destroy most of what makes their games unique.

the witcher 3 had the benefit of not needing to run on a ps3

obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill

the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.

the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.

to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.

this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.

netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons

1. they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.

2. netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.

basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.

the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.

content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money

so it seems to me there are three paths here:

1. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)

2. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price

3. studios branch off into competing streaming services

i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

They don’t want to hire people to build and maintain a secure login platform when their parent company already has one. This is way more work and liability than most people realize.

These numbers aren’t arbitrary, they are from different base numbering systems.

60 can easily divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10.

12 can easily divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6 (notice how much overlap there is).

10 only divides easily by 2 and 5. Common fractions like 1/4 or 1/3 now require decimals.

Basically, base 12 and base 60 make it significantly easier to think and work in common fractions.

It is also historically significant, as base 12 used to be more common than modern base 10. Our timekeeping system dates back to the ancient Babylonians, who worked in base 12. This influence is still felt in other places, such as the fact that eleven and twelve have unique names in many languages rather than following the same pattern as everything that comes after them.

I don’t think so, because it has become less common over time for Denuvo to be the cause of bad performance. Doom 2016 is an early good example, likely because Id Software takes optimization very seriously. Stories of games having bad performance due to DRM were a lot more common back then. The worst example I can recall was Rime in 2017, which was borderline unplayable until the developers removed Denuvo in a patch.

There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.

There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.

Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:

1. It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.

2. It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.