From the comments, it appears as though OP may have originally posted a picture with Linda Lovelace, then changed it to Lisa Ann after reading this comment.

I’m not sure what you are saying here?

Are you saying that Valve and Itch did not respond to Collective Shout? Well, so did I… My comment was saying they were justified in doing so.

Are you saying Collective Shout are not religious nutjobs? That’s an easy mistake to make because their website and branding does a really good job of trying to hide it from a casual researcher, but the founder Melissa Reist is pretty obviously a devout Catholic- she gives interviews with Catholic organizations, appears at Catholic youth camps, and describes herself as a “pro-life feminist”, which is of course an oxymoron. She’s definitely a religious nutjob.

Yeah Louis’s situation seems pretty unique. Not on the same level as someone like Epstein or Weinstein. He didn’t do anything with his own employees or underaged fans. Sarah Silverman has been a big supporter of him and confirmed that he was always like that going back to when there was not a power disparity in their early club days together. His apology statement is one of the best I’ve ever seen.

But… There’s still some red flags, including some in just discovering as I am refreshing myself on the details now. If the 5 accusers, it looks like the first 2 were from an incident in 2002 at a festival where they escalated to to event organizers… And nothing happened. Then Rebecca Corry in 2005 on a TV show set who declined and reported the incident… And nothing happened. I can’t find when the other incidents happened, but like… Surely after these first 2 cases someone would have communicated to Louis how this was bad, right?

And Dave Becky, Louis’s manager at the time, sent letters to the victims threatening them to try to silence them. He later apologized and dropped Louis as a client, and Louis later publicly supported Becky and apologized to him as well. I’m not sure what to make of the whole mess, but if Becky was threatening victims that kinda feels like it should be worth some jail time, and if Louis ordered him to do so… Yikes.

Also I don’t think there’s an objective answer as to whether he should have retired, or how long he should have stayed out of the spotlight before returning. If I were him I probably would have just retired, but at the very least I would have spent a few years out of the spotlight. The initial article with the accusations came out in November 2017, and his next public appearance was August 2018, not even a whole year. And there was no easing in with less controversial material - he jumped into School shootings. He has since released a special called “Sorry” where he didn’t apologize but instead kept getting more controversial and used the F slur.

He’s also very good friends with Dave Chappelle, a certified piece of shit, and Jerry Seinfeld, famous for dating 17 year-old high school girls. And I get it- he got his break early on by opening for Seinfeld, but ya know maybe just tone down how public that friendship is given the circumstances?

I don’t feel the need to break out the torches and pitchforks for Louis, or pretend like none of his earlier works ever existed, but i’m also not in some huge hurry to defend him and restore his career either.

As they should have. Why should Steam or Itch.Io have to respond to every tiny cult of religious nutjibs making ridiculous requests?

I know Luis CK has gotten a bit problematic for other reasons, but I always liked his take on this in particular.

Apologies as I couldn’t find an original video, just this weird channel animating the original audio. But every time my wife and I are in a car and see someone cross multiple lanes to get to an exit they almost missed we look at each other and say “but that’s their FAVORITE way!”

Okay your first two paragraphs are just ad hominen attacks at this point. You aren’t refuting anything by just claiming I’m backpedalling on… Something? And just assuming the other people didn’t read the article when in fact it seems they did and are also making great points that you’re also just refusing to talk about. Like… Why did you even post this if you didn’t want to actually talk about points, methodology, potential explanations, etc?

Xbox is just plain doing badly. They’ve tried a lot of different approaches to change that over the years: leaning hard into alternative control schemes with Kinect, trying to push Xbox as a general multimedia machine rather than just a videogame console, pushing hard to develop small indie studios, then pushing for mega-acquisitions of publishers and developers. I’m not even sure which “old model” you’re talking about because they are constantly, desperately pivoting to something else. They seem to be terrible at predictjng what consumers want or how markets will react to their decisions. So I’m still waiting for you to explain why copying them is a good idea. As I said earlier: they have always had less focus on exclusivity because their hardware sells at a loss, and they haven’t changed that.

Nintendo is coming off the 3rd best-selling console of all time, the best-selling console in 2 decades. The Switch 2 not only had the best 1st week on history, but the best 1st month too. I suppose it is still early and totally fair if you want to wait for the first full year to make a judgement, but it seems to me like Nintendo produce a unique and innovative product that people want back in 2017 and are continuing that success now. That product is in a very different market than the Xbox, and uses a very different business model where the hardware itself is profitable. They’re the only one of the 3 that hasn’t shut down studios or laid off employees lately. So, once again, the idea that thinks he knows better than them seems pretty far-fetched right now.

There’s something else that’s been bothering me…

He’s done this job for a long time, and people trust and respect his work

I’ve been following the videogame industry for decades and I’ve never heard of this guy. Which is not all that outlandish on its own. But I also have never heard of The Game Business- it seems like a new website just created this year. And you seem to be incredibly defensive of this guy- completely ignoring any discussion of the industry and binging your entire argument here on his credibility. Are you Mat Piscatella himself on a burner account?

I didn’t backpedal on anything at all so I’m not sure why you think that. My initial statement was that he did not provide enough data to reach his conclusion and seems to be drastically oversimplifying the problem to reach his conclusion, by focusing on the unit sales of singular pieces of software in a vacuum and assuming that games are fungible. I pointed out how different videogame companies operate with different business models that are more or less condusive to exclusive 1st party titles. None of that has changed, and the only thing you’ve said to try to dispute any of it is “this consultant said in an interview that he thinks exclusives are bad”. No attempt at discerning causation or explaining it, no attempt at even refuting the arguments I present, just “you should trust this guy, who also happens to be selling a product”. If I wasn’t bored killing time at work I wouldn’t even bother responding because this isn’t really a conversation, you just keep going “nu uh”.

Not just me: You’ve spent this whole thread arguing with myself and everyone else who are pointing out the obvious and glaring holes in what he’s saying.

One of my favorites is this one. Xbox has failed to make a profit throughout the entire history of the company. They’ve spent the last few years shutting down studios and laying people off, which has led to a lot of industry speculation. Insiders have reported rumors that Spencer might get pushed to resign or even fired. There’s been speculation that Xbox might be considering exiting the hardware side of things entirely, in part because of their own marketing campaigns. I am not saying I believe that, but these are strong signs that Xbox is doing badly.

Nintendo, by contrast, just had the single best launch week 1 in the history of videogame consoles. Pretty much every way you look at the Switch 2 sales numbers they are breaking records. And this guy saying that Nintendo should copy what Xbox is doing. That is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence for me to take seriously.

And while anecdotes are pretty useless, I agree with you that many publishers have trended towards multiplatform releases and I said that earlier. I’m not disputing that: I’m disputing his comments about 1st party publishers.

If he was lying about any of this, competing firms or their business partners would call him out.

Well first of all, this interview was published today so the only people who have had a chance to really respond to this are the general public on the internet. Beyond that, it is not safe to assume that any of their competitors would have any reason to respond to this publicly at all. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and maybe that decision has more to do with wanting to either keep up with Circana or differentiate from Circana than anything related to the truth. That’s kind of the problem with dealing with bias in sampling like this.

People have been saying this exact same thing for decades and it hasn’t happened yet.

And I’m all in favor of the end of exclusivity. Exclusivity is harmful to consumers, and to society as a whole from the perspective of preserving culture and history. But just because I want something to be true doesn’t mean I’m going to believe some consultant casually speculating while promoting his company.

If he provided data and outlined the methodology of projection they used them we could at least have an interesting conversation about this. But right now he’s just about as credible as the 3rd grader at recess whose uncle works for Nintendo and says the next Halo is coming to Switch.

That still doesn’t include most of the data necessary to reach this conclusion, and furthermore the bigger issue is that THE ARTICLE ITSELF DOES NOT CONTAIN ANY. It is an unbacked claim that we cannot verify. If he can’t share the data because ris propriety, he shouldn’t be making the claim publicly.

He’s looking at software sales in a vacuum, and he is probably correct that any singular piece of software would sell more units if it were released on more platforms. That’s not new or interesting: that’s obvious.

What he’s missing, even in the screenshot of claimed data he has, is everything else.

Consultants like this are not trustworthy sources. They’re trying to sell their own product.

Does he have access to the proprietary sales data of Nintendo, Xbox, Sony, Valve, and Google?

I’d be shocked if he did, because those companies are all big enough to have their own in-house departments for that. He’s trying to sell consulting services to smaller publishers. Consults don’t get paid for saying "well I don’t really have enough information to say that for sure*, they get paid for making executives feel smart.

He’s backing it up by misusing data. He’s lumping games together and assuming that they all would hypothetically have the same market characteristics, then extrapolating that to other games.

As an example he brings up how the Pokemon Company has released basically the same software on both Switch and mobile platforms. Which is true, but that does not mean it makes sense for Nintendo to release Tears of the Kingdom on mobile. We can already see that Nintendo knows this because they maintain Mario Kart Tour separately from the console versions. They’re entirely different business models, control schemes, and experiences.

I would argue that a more complicated analysis is required than just saying “multiplatforms are better than exclusives”.

He also just briefly glosses over what is the main BENEFIT to manufacturers: the profits made on hardware sales. There is not a lot of publicly available information, but we do know what each company tends to do. Nintendo prices their hardware above cost, so for them the additional hardware sales could offset the reduced software sales. Xbox prices their hardware at a loss, which explains why they valued exclusivity the least and have finished last in hardware units sold every generation since the original Xbox. Sony usually sells PlayStations at a loss to start the generation, but through hardware revisions and scaling ends up turning them profitable after a few years- a more balanced approach. And we see this reflected in their approaches to exclusivity: Nintendo is super-exclusive, Xbox is loose, and Sony is somewhere in the middle.

You also need to factor in how exclusives impact the ecosystem. The marketing budget for Mario Kart World Tour is not merely helping them to sell the game, but also to sell consoles. And not just consoles, but controllers and cases and branded SD cards and the USB camera and extra docks. It also encourages more software sales: the same person buying Mario Kart World and a Switch 2 might also buy other Switch 2 (or Switch 1) games. Even if they buy 3rd party games, Nintendo is still getting licensing fees. So if they release these big games on other platforms they might gain some revenue, but they lose out on a lot, plus they have to pay licensing fees to Sony/Xbox/Google/Apple/Valve to sell on those platforms.

If we were just discussing software sales in a vaccun then this would be accurate. Any 3rd party publisher has a much easier equation to determine which platforms to release on. Will the additional costs (development of a port plus the fees and asded marketing) be less than the revenue from additional units? It’s a bit complicated because some consumers have multiple platforms and will choose just one to buy the game on. This also helps explain why Sony delays the PC releases: they want to sell as many units overall as possible, but they also want anyone choosing between PS5 or Steam to be pushed to PS5 where their margins are higher.

The author doesn’t have anywhere near the data required to do any of this analysis, so he’s reaching a fundamentally flawed conclusion.

This may just be me, but I see delayed exclusives as basically being equivalent to multiplatform releases. Especially for single-player games.

0. I already have these but most people don’t: a headphone jack and micro SD card slot.

1. Removable battery. Loved this on my old LG G4, even though it wasn’t the best implementation. I really miss the days before smartphones where I could buy an external charger and just swap batteries as-needed instead of needing my phone to be tethered. I know this has largely been solved by longer battery lives, faster charging speeds, wireless charging, battery banks, and better charger availability. But I still miss the days of just swapping. Great for traveling, great for breathing new life into an old device.

2. Front facing speakers. My ears are not behind the device or below the device. The technology of vibrating the screen to use to as a speaker sounds terrible. My first smartphone was the HTC One M8, and it is still the best-sounding phone i have ever had. I will happily deal with the bars at the top and bottom of the screen to make this happen.

3. More permissions controls. Let me not just turn off my location data, but use a dummy location like the North Pole for apps that “require” it where I don’t actually wan to give it uo, for example

4. Better support for launchers, icons, and other customization. This is stuff I already DO on all of my phones, but it always feels like I’m fighting against the manufacture to sneak it by them. Especially replacing icons, which I like to do seasonally. If I have to manually override an icon, the system seems to permanently disconnect that app from ever changing as I change the system icon set, meaning I need to manually go in and change all the ones that aren’t ubiquitous every time.

5. Physical buttons. Bring them back. I am willing to compromise for the keyboard, but give me a physical Back, Menu, and Home button.

6. Phones designed for 1-handed use. I’m an adult man who apparently has medium-large hands, and yet most smarthphones are too big for me to use one-handed. I’m a musician who plays extended range guitars and basses, so I’m probably experiencing this problem less than most people and it’s still really annoying. If I really want a bigger screen that’s what tablets are for.

7. Thicker phones. This can somewhat be helped by cases, but we reached the point a while back where phones are too slim to hold comfortably too. Keeping your fingers pinched that close together for extended periods is just unnatural. It’s the same reason the Switch’s JoyCons are extremely uncomfortable for anyone with larger than tiny hands.

If the Attorney General is complicit in covering up a child sex trafficking ring, the political norm would be to fire them, and potentially investigate them and prosecute them for obstruction of justice.

So the question becomes: how much did Biden know? And considering that even I fucking knew that there was an Epstein list the government was sitting on because it was reported years ago, I have no qualms about blaming Biden for this.

I hope the Dems are able to press this issue to gain political support against Trump because that would reduce the suffering of literally the entire planet, but the Dems also need to learn a lesson from this. If the Clintons were on the list I want them prosecuted to the full extent of the law, the same as Trump. If Biden and other DNC leadership were complicit in a coverup then they should be prosecuted too.

The thing is, those costs are already built into their margins and they have acceptable thresholds for them. Do porn games in particular exceed that threshold? We would need their proprietary data to determine that.

My hypothesis would be that these games have much lower rate of these charges. The reason being that these sorts of games are already subject to stricter restrictions and parental controls. I would expect the strongest association with charge backs and fraud investigations to be with games that are recurring subscriptions (people forget to cancel) or micro transactions. Which could include both pornographic and non-pornographic games.

I would also expect to see spikes in charge backs for specific games at specific times. Like when. Publisher adds Denuvo or some other draconian malware, or when 2K decided to add launchers to their game that hurt Steam Deck compatibility, or when some update happens that ruins gameplay, or when some executive comes out and says something stupid. But those would be events, not trends.

Just because something happens doesn’t make it okay to generalize that behavior across an entire identity.

“Mansplaining” is a pretty mild example but we can look at other more extreme ones. One of the most classic is racists who love to say “Do you know 50% of crime is committed by 13% of the population?”, and use that as justification to the idea that black people are inherently more likely to be criminals. And they may occasionally walk it back and try to say shit like “not you, you’re one of the good ones”.

Or it’s like someone who feels as though they got taken advantage of in a business deal saying they got “jew’d”. And then trying to say “well no I’m not antisemitic, but I’ve personally seen and heard of Jews conducting business unfairly. And it’s common enough that the term has arisen, so it’s gotta be somewhat true. And if you are a Jew who conducts business fairly then I’m not talking about you”. If you encountered someone trying to say that, you would be quite correct to respond by saying “wow that’s actually really fucking antisemitic”. And this is the exact same thing you are trying to argue with the word “mansplaining”.

I’d argue this also violates their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders as this reduces their volume.

“Karen” is a character, a specific trope. It happens to be a woman, but there is no inherent generalization that all women are Karens. It’s gender-specific so I would use something gender-neutral instead, but it is not generalizing behavior across a group of people. The biggest issue with it is that it’s unfair to people named Karen. Also maybe it’s just me but I haven’t seen or heard anyone use this in a couple years now.

I haven’t heard anyone use the words “Phillistine” or “Luddite” as insults in probably more than a decade. If anything, I’ve seen the Luddites get a bit of a resurgence in popularity as an important early labor movement against capitalists. A lot of their concerns turned out to be true, and we are seeing parallels today with the rise of AI.

“Barbarian” means someone who is non-Greek, and later the Romans used it to mean someone who is non-Roman. This is a similar example to “retarded” where it is context-dependent. The word “mansplaining” does not stem from an inoffensive use like this, so I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up.

Eat the Rich and All Cops Are Bastards are fucking based, because being wealthy and being a class traitor are choices these individuals are making, not identities. I would call serial murderers monsters, and racists pieces of shit.

I’d say “nice try” but really this attempt kinda feels like you’re just throwing shit at the wall in the holes that something sticks. It’s almost impressive how hard you are fighting to feel good about using sexist microagressions.

I focus on bigoted thinking.

Who are you to judge which groups are the most or least impacted by anything?

If someone supports trans rights but hates black people I’ll call them a bigot. If you support women’s rights but hate men I’ll call you a bigot. This isn’t a quantitative evaluation. Bigotry is bigotry. It costs you nothing to stop using sexist language, whether that’s sexist against women or men.

1. As someone else already commented, NVIDIA does a lot more than make GPU’s. In fact, they don’t even make GPU’s, but rather design the chips. The chip manufacturing, and usually the board built around the chip, are outsourced. Chip manufacturing monopoly is a separate issue.

2. You can still break them up. I never said it would be easy. You could spend semesters in law/business school studying the process, but basically the FTC and/or DOJ would open an investigation into NVIDIA and do market analysis to determine the best solution. It would probably take a few years and smmillions of dollars to have all sorts of experts involved. I could pull some idea out of my ass for you here, but it would be just as worthless as anything else random person on Lemmy would propose.

3. Government subsidies have failed pretty spectacularly and cause more messes than they solve. Look at the dairy industry- it led to overproduction of milk, environmental devastation, the government spending billions of dollars, and contributed heavily to obesity in the US today. Or the oil industry, which is just a huge mess now (also in part because so many of the child companies of Standard Oil that WERE broken up were later allowed to re-merge). They could still be explored as part of a comprehensive solution, but I’d be skeptical of their effectiveness. Even a market with 2, or even 3 competitors if you add Intel, would probably not be sufficient. For consumers, for strategic redundancy, for employees, for board partners, for manufacturing partners, and every other business partner.