Soda bottle caps for newer types of soda fit worse onto the bottles. They’re harder to re-thread on, for example, the new Oreo Coke than they are on the old Diet Coke.

The reason that newer bottle designs are harder to thread is that they’re trying to make people drop the cap, leading to just giving up on re-capping.

This is to reinforce the narrative that people lose their bottle caps.

Which is to lend support for the drive to make caps attached to a little ring on the bottle, like in Europe.

The insurance would lead to a payout that funds an annuity.

If one’s insurance buys a new car, that doesn’t make the car insurance.

“What makes money” is always relative to how much it costs to make though.

I would argue the market for every kind of game is expanding. There’s a bigger market for Tetris now than there was in 1987, in terms of actual economic resources that could go into making Tetris profitably.

The Tetris market is a smaller percentage share of the overall gaming market, but in absolute terms it’s more money than it was in 1987.

That’s my suspicion at least.

Then the challenge is connecting that market slice with the dev shop that wants to serve that market slice. Which isn’t trivial. But I think it’s worth keeping in mind.

Every market is getting bigger, based on at least these four factors:

• More cultural acceptance of gaming
• Higher percentage of humanity achieving economic status where leisure becomes relevant
• Proliferation of technology to greater portion of humanity
• Expansion of human population

All markets are growing.

Heck, the market for COBOL programmers is larger today than ever before. That’s really interesting if you think about it.

Good story and fun replayability (to me that means branching story paths and discoverability) is tough to combine. I’m hopeful for generative AI’s ability to make good stories that are also unique. Real, in depth dialogue that stays in character, AI directors for new story paths, that kind of thing.

Halo as an open world is fucking awesome. I love Infinite.

The next step, in terms of budget and computing power required, which I eagerly await, is a massively multiplayer co-op Halo:

• open universe
• Humanity versus Covenant
• massively co-op
• 10,000+ humans in perpetual battle against endless Covenant invasion

That’s probably gonna require billion dollar budgets and quantum computers to pull off, but it’s coming. And I can’t fucking wait.

Another way to look at it is that the multiplayer market is the only pool of money big enough to support games at that level.

Maybe if single player gamers would be accepting of feature scopes from 10-15 years ago, there’d be a stable niche for single player games.

I’m in my 40s and only get enjoyment from multiplayer games. Single player just dries up for me in terms of dopamine release.

When I was in my 20s I was unsocial, heavily autistic, couldn’t stand multiplayer because I didn’t control the variables.

Basically, my wallet and my brain followed a coupled pair of paths. The version of me with more money has more need for other people in my games.

I have more tolerance for other people. But also I’m more lonely in life. Used to be, games were a refuge from the other people I was constantly surrounded by in school, college, roommate situations. I could just go be alone and have fun, and I needed to be alone.

And that was when I was broke.

Now, I have more money, and I crave social contact. I live alone, don’t have constant social overwhelm any longer. Games aren’t my refuge of solitude any more. Now they’re a way to feel other people without having to go out my front door.

I’m not made of money, but I can afford games now.

Probably a connection there.

My main thesis though is just that maybe the world of multiplayer gaming just has more money in it period. Maybe it’s only the world of multiplayer gaming that can actually support AAA games’ budgets.

15 years ago, no game had a budget with the same orders of magnitude we see these days. Also, 15 years ago the oldest gamer demographics were 15 years younger.

Which brings me back to my original point: maybe it’s not that the multiplayer games are somehow nullifying the market for AAA single player games; maybe it’s just that no such market ever existed. That the multiplayer market is a new market that didn’t exist 15 years ago, not a transformation of an existing market.

For me at least the correlation is that me having this kind of gaming budget is correlated with me having overall social isolation more than overall social overwhelm like I did in my twenties.

Hell is a crucible that produces gods and ash.

It’s like trying to trace an outline of a fractal.

These guys bidet

What you’re tapping is another universe. They’re wondering where their water is disappearing to.

One time I was on mushrooms and used echolocation to clear my garage of axe murderers

Me. I’m competent as fuck.

I was circumcised

gravBoots

So he shamed someone for being courteous to him?

Timing timing timing

Welcome to the letter E

Yeah if they got power they might try to ban their political opponents!

Not just mines, but sleeper drones with onboard AI that just sit there for decades due to an extra zero in a config variable before suddenly activating as if the war is still happening.

Yes. It only takes one party to initiate violence involving two parties.

This is why it is necessary to be prepared for violence even if one never initiates violence.

Violence is for situations when one’s choice of other resolution methods is gone. Such situations do exist.