I really thought there was going to be a bezos hidden in there.

Oh I see. Sorry for the off-topic response then!

It’s a shame that multiplayer games really struggle with paid models these days. It heavily cut into a player base if things aren’t free to play. That kind of forces all but the biggest releases to turn to other monetization models in order to keep the base game free.

I think it’s tough with card games because they come from a physical form of lootboxes. Being expensive is kind of baked into their lineage. Collecting cards is a big part of the fun, and if you made it very easy to do I think it’s hard to say whether people would enjoy them as much.

I don’t play any collectible card games anymore because I don’t want to pay for it anymore, but there is something very entertaining about the model even if it’s easy to argue it’s a scummy business model by today’s standards.

I haven’t looked into this game beyond your description, but it does sound like a pretty weird model. Do you also have to pay for cards on top of that?

I remember kind of disliking the arena system in hearthstone because I liked the game mode a lot, but as a casual player it was really hard to get to play it much. I guess they wanted to keep people from spending all their time there since you didn’t need to buy cards to play. I much preferred magic arena’s drafts where you pay an upfront cost but get to keep all the cards you played with. Much more accessible for casual players and more satisfying, too, since you always get something out of it.

This meme is selling shovels, and the comments here are more than happy to dig holes it seems.

You mean CE doesnt stand for “clear everything”? And here I thought more letters meant more clearing.

My version of this is 4X games. I always was intrigued by them as a kid, but I wasn’t nearly patient enough or willing to put in the time to understand them. As an adult I’ve finally been able to enjoy them.

I mean look at him! Jesus doesn’t seem like he has much of a shot against that beast of a deity.

tap a face to tag

Funny how the key stakeholders are never on the chopping block, huh?

Wow, that letter to employees was even soulless by corporate non-apology standards.

Right, that’s the article that doesn’t explain why they’re doing it.

I’ve seen so many edits of this comic I realized I no longer remember the original

Why are they doing it? Legal troubles? I didn’t see any explanation in the article.

You’re not wrong, but I’d still encourage everyone to celebrate the small victories. If we wait for perfection it may never come.

As a game designer, I would prefer my security be maintained through an elaborate series of puzzles.

My condolences to anyone who has to spend enough time on LinkedIn that you would need to kill time there.

They mean the start of 2026, right?.. Right?

It has a long way to go but it’s a good start. The community is very homogenous right now (maybe excluding some of the mainly politically focused servers). It’s predominantly male tech people right now and it shows in what is active and the general vibes of discussions. My hope is not only for more niche communities to grow, but also for a lot more diversity of interests and of people in general. We need more women’s voices on here for sure. I miss that diversity from reddit. Things have been steadily, if slowly, growing so far from what I can tell, so hopefully over time all this will improve.

Wow, those were some impressive effects!

If you look at old games, the reason they didn’t need this was because they couldn’t have nearly as many props in a scene. I like to use classic WoW as an example. It didn’t have any kind of highlighting for objects to interact with, but you didn’t need it because there just weren’t that many objects period.

Highlighting interactables, whether it be through a pulse like the meme, or just based on proximity, is a compromise in modern games to make things playable while also having dense, prop-filled environments. The infamous white or yellow paint for climbing surfaces is another example.

I doubt many designers love these solutions, but they’re currently the best we’ve got. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but I hope a more immersive solution comes along someday. In the meantime, having it is better than not, I totally agree with you.