Fire Emblem I think should be way more popular. I’ve tried to introduce people to Xenoblade games and most people I’ve had try it do not like the combat. I can manage it to enjoy the story. But others, the gameplays not enticing to most of my friends

I wonder what sort of metrics they’ve gotten on how people have received the art style/this first world they showed off a few years ago and now again today. For me it’s definitely the least appealing KH artstyle. The handheld and mobile games 20 years ago looked more appealing to me both as I imagine myself as a child and me now as a well seasoned adult

On the higher end of action cameras, it’s GoPro, DJI, and Insta360 that are very good. They are better than the budget brands. Problem being the budget brands are still pretty good. It follows phones. Before small camera sensors sucked. By like 2015 it reached a point of good enough for the vast majority of people. Good enough 1080p for YouTube. Then 4k came along and the same thing happened where camera sensors at the budget level became good enough for the vast majority of people. So it doesn’t matter if you find people in video communities all trying to get people to buy the $300+ GoPro or DJI action cam or else they’ll regret it, plenty of people will try the ~$100 ones and find them very good for their use case

DJI at least has an evolving drone business. GoPro exists as an experience enhanced brand where the experience enhanced is being undercut by other competitors and on the premium end, DJI sells more stuff and people have a habit of buying stuff from brands they already have. So if you have any thoughts of shooting video with a drone, for an action cam you’ll probably buy DJI. Just want to strap a camera to your helmet or whatever, any of the plethora of ~$100 action cameras will do. GoPro’s lane has shrunken. It has premium competitors while not being competitive for the entry level

I’ve been PC gaming since like '98. There’s been at least two dozen digital storefronts competing with steam. A few before Steam became more than a Valve game store/launcher too. Everyone else screwed up. Stardock sold Impulse and everyone that has owned that did nothing with it. Desura existed. Amazon digital game purchase and library management has barely changed in the last 15-20 years. EA downloader became Origin and that was solid but barely any games released on it for I imagine one reason being it didn’t have some easy self publishing. UPlay has sucked for 15-20 years now and gave birth to always online single player game DRM. Battle.net was nothing but Blizzard until COD started showing up. EGS didn’t have self publishing until like 2 or 3 years ago. Direct2Drive never changed. GamersGate, GreenManGaming, etc never evolved. Humble Bundle was born off Steam keys and has barely changed. Bethesda and Rockstar Social Club were trash from day one and never changed. Games for Windows Live tried to get us to pay to play online multiplayer even when it would be player self hosted servers or peer to peer or a third party publishers servers. Also install limits and an overlay that would crash your game. Windows 8+ Store used to make your storage unreclaimable without formatting the drive. Itch.io wants to be the indie devs ideal store by taking practically no cut but then it’s also the least enticing platform out there for users. Desura was more enticing. There’s now that indie game gamepass like launcher now. Android games as Google tried to get people to play Android games on PCs now through their Android VM/emulator for games thing. Probably way more I’m forgetting or never heard of. I used to actively seek Steam alternatives but now I’m like whatever happens happens

There’s what devs have been able to do since the 90s, sell on your own website. It was terribly painful to do in the 90s and early 2000s before payment processers and AWS matured as services for digital first companies. It’s easier now but still a pain if you want to be legit and have customer service and account your expenses to anticipate charge backs, refunds, stolen credit card purchases. Barely anyones going to be early Minecraft, League of Legends

Plus PC gaming is in competition with consoles and mobile. Especially consoles though. They mostly have the same games being sold. They compete for players. Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo are equivalent to PC as a whole platform, not just PC OS with Steam on it. Consoles just you can’t bypass the console maker. A PlayStation key off Amazon or Gamestop is always a code to redeem in PSN whereas PC it’s now usually either Steam, GOG, EGS, or distant fourth Amazon or Microsoft/Xbox

Really what people want but won’t build even though it’s what they effectively always espouse is to form a non-profit that develops a store with public finances and some cap on profitability. Enough to continue developing and maintaining and a rainy year(s) fund. You need a legit organization to handle bank accounts in all the countries/currencies served. Legal entity to handle all that liability. Seems like all the people capable of doing that do not have interest in coming together to jumpstart it and get the legal stuff in order. You have stuff like Flathub (games there too) which has announced a year or two ago that they’ll be incorporating the ability to charge for software or at least take donations on store pages and it’s been over a year since they formed some legal entity to handle that and it’s still not rolled out. I think we idealist are bad at effective collective action

When the expansion comes out, it’ll certainly have higher peak concurrent player numbers on steam than at any other point in its steam history

I know how your buddy felt. When I got a 970, I was worried that you’d need at least a 980ti to play Star Citizen well at 1080p. Luckily I’ve never spent a dime on the game so don’t have any strong feelings about how development has been going. Just see a news headline every couple months

Back when it was only Roku boxes, I don’t recall any ads at all on the home screen. Then when I got a TV with Roku built in, I recall it also being zero ads. That was like 10 years for the Roku TV where it still had no ads on the homescreen of the RokuOS. Then they added that big right banner ad. It was that for a number of years and then they added a row at the top advertising some streaming apps. Then they started this beta program for the new layout and they jacked up the size of the content advertisement space and pushing your stuff further down where your cursor focus defaults at when starting the TV/Roku. The expanding presense of advertisement icons have been pretty rapid.

Roku used to be have no advertisements. Then they started trying to be a digital storefront for movies/tv and that was just a button on the side list menu. Then they started adding advertisements more and more

Altman can try to hype up how everyones going to subscribe to them someday all the while their subscriber base is being eaten up by competitors.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-projects-chatgpt-plus-subscriptions-to-drop-by-80-from-44-million-in-2025-to-9-million-in-2026-made-up-using-cheaper-subscriptions-somehow/

Local stuff. I still believe the small parameter, ~1B free local, ones will suffice for the vast majority of how people use LLMs and there’s still going to be a few years of improvements there until investments dry up. Eventually I bet more and more phone companies will include one of these small ones out the box. Pretty much like a nice search engine that works offline like if you’re out on a major hike. Cloud stuff, there’ll be stuff like Proton’s Lumo where they’re taking free open weight stuff and piecing them together for users.

OpenAI’s thing is they’ll make up for falling subscribers with advertising. So pretty much we’re advancing fast in the search engine race of the 90s/early aughts. We’ll at least have Gemini. ChatGPT maybe ends up crashes in value someday and bought up by Microsoft or some other company. Deepseek, Qwen, Kimi. Claude like ChatGPT maybe survices or crashes and gets adsorbed by another company. Proton continue to exist as the company making AI products out of free stuff. Eventually the pace of improvements moves at a crawl and it’s pointless to be paying for the best paywalled stuff. Just use the free stuff like how everyone mostly uses free search engines

It’ll be packaged up in plasma 6.7, I think mid June. Then it’ll be easy for distros to make it available. I want to try it but I don’t want to change distro or build it myself. When 6.7 rolls out, I got my computer plugged into my TV with CachyOS handheld edition. Right when Plasma 6.7 is available in the Arch repos, I’m installing it

My understanding is that they pushed it to some people as a beta and eventually they would roll out the update to everyone even if they opted out of the beta. I opted out to go back to the not as bad homescreen and blocked it from the Internet in my router settings

It’s interesting to follow. Like a dozen solid engines of differing sizes for different needs. Decades of work to get here. Tens of billions of R&D done to get here today

Well put in the money out of the bloating profits and make more to meet demand. If not, there’s no dilemma. Go buy what you need to operate where it’s available

Centimeter by centimeter getting people towards signal and matrix chats

I’ve defaulted to ddg for like 2 years now. Solid. Good enough. Really what happened is that SEO optomization websites even before the AI craze made Google search so awful that ddg became just as good if not better for me than google

I post from a vpn all the time. Sometimes it’ll complain and not let me because of VPN and then I just switch node and it lets me. It’s not even country based. Like I can be on a node in Mexico, get blocked, switch to another one in Mexico and be good

Looks like postmarketos already put in work to have systemd working in it. That takes care of my concerns there

If they get out some solid linux drivers, I’d buy one. Same thing for me when it comes to anything risc-v. I’m buying out of interest in a new alternative

Have you ever enjoyed any game that’s mostly played one on one like rock paper scissors, tennis, poker, chess, go, cup stacking, most sports you see in the olympics. In one on one PvP games, you usually make friends too

Retro handhelds should be perfectly good to use without Google play protect and Google play services. Retro handhelds play emulators. Should be good with something like Graphene and ideally go to regular Linux instead. Maybe with KDE Plasma Bigscreen

Assuming you meant drm free books

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

Not every book on kobo is drm free from what I remember so keep an eye on that