This is why work/life balance is so important. I wouldn’t ever call myself “well-off” but I don’t have kids and my job allows me ample time off to play games and watch movies and shit.

Neither do they! They aren't workaholics, they're home bodies that work the least they can!

It's just that the workplaces are shit. One went back to mandated RTO for no reason even though much of the work is overseas at odd hours. The company's literally trying to make employees miserable so they quit without severence. The other is work-from-home, but with enough pointless meetings and complete workplace dysfunction to eat energy.

And these seem like well above average jobs.

All I can say is: unionize. My position is union (and has been for a very long time so its ingrained into the culture there), and it's difficult to even comprehend the number of ways it has improved working conditions. Literally invaluable. I couldn't work there more than 35 hours a week if I wanted to.

True, I'm definitely doing arm chair analysis. If I was in charge, I probably wouldn't have entered the console market at all. I'd probably have tried to build steam. That had to be easier if you own the OS, too. On the other hand, they utterly fucked up "Games For Windows! Live" or whatever it was called.

Yep they definitely missed the boat on that one. Which is why I think they are so keen on turning Xbox into a platform. With how PC hardware is going, they have a chance to take back some market from Valve and maybe convert people from Playstation as well. The risk here is that they can’t sell the “consoles” at a loss, so they will be undercut by Sony by a significant amount of money. But their answer to that is probably “it doesn’t matter, everything is an Xbox now, the console is for the enthusiast market”.

Bold strategy, we’ll see if they can pull it off.

You wouldnt happen to be on linux would you?

I remember at the time titanfall came out, the mechs moving like a human was a selling point. I do agree though it is odd to experience when its not a novelty.

Not fixed later, fixed maybe.

Can’t wait till the indie wave wakes up the realization that there is a goldmine of 90s games that were incredible. Star control 2 for one could probably be mistaken for a new indie hit nowadays.

Give me a call when they’re in the bargain bin years from now.

If they're still functional, thankfully there's the Stop Killing Games movement.

I love the movement that has gotten. I’m cheering for it.

Yeah, I think the decline is a drop in a bucket considering. I know plenty of people still buying the Switch 2 etc. on launch day.

The hobby is getting more expensive while income left over after cost of living is going down. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

I've been playing X-Wing. The mad lads who built XWVM have essentially modernized the game and got it working on and with modern hardware, while strictly preserving its feel. It's amazing.

We desperately need to ban all forms of real money gambling in games, or at least prevent kids from accessing it.

Oh shiiiit, do that and come back and talk to us when you get to the time travel level.

Are we just in the phase of the medium where technology isn't the defining quality. It would be slightly weird to try to stay at the forefront of, say, novels without any regard for reading classics. Why shouldn't games be the same?

BLS jobs report was a beat, +140k jobs and unemployment down a shade. I agree with you on the themes but it doesn't help to cherry pick data.

Old people be stealing

Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is:

• Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff.
• Release date is announced.
• Game is delayed.
• Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video.
• Game is delayed again.
• Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that's 30%, 40% or 50% complete.
• Game doesn't work.
• After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway.
• Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they've fixed all the broken stuff this time for real.
• Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced.
• Game is delayed.

Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.

The BLS jobs estimate report is utterly garbage data.

Go look back over the last year or two.

Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior.

All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions.

Also, the BLS jobs estimate is an estimate that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependency on other statistics like estimated populations growth.

Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls, from actual money going out to actual employees.

You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.

...

Also the unemployment rates that are widely reported on don't count people who've been unemployed so long that they fall out of the labor force.

In our modern economy, if you fall off the treadmill, you stay unemployed for that long, you'll likely never get hired in that field again, or at least not without having to start out at an entry level or junior position, because of how absurd companies are with job requirements, how every job opening has 1000 applicants in 72 hrs, how something like 2/3rds of those job openings are fake and will never hire anyone.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylrobinson/2025/04/02/why-no-one-is-hiring-you-and-its-not-your-resume/

Maybe they can ask their AI to inspect the size of everyone's nose? Maybe that's the trick to get us to buy more AI chips in our games and TVs and phones and cars and in our fruit probably. There's gotta be AI in our food somewhere.