I realized after writing this all out that it was closer to a sequel than a remake but… oh well, I thought it was a neat idea nonetheless.

And yes now that you mention it this is actually similar to the Golden Sun series irt the dueling groups of protagonists (antagonists?), but I swear I did not realize this and was going more from the DB Xenoverse time demon angle.

I do not actually know as this is the first time I am even hearing of Chrono Cross.

Youre telling me theres a sequel?!?!?

I only ever managed to play Chrono Trigger on ZNES something like 20 years ago and remember being blown away by how different and more interesting it was from basically every other JRPG up to that point.

Now I must find this sequel.

Yeah this is because (if we limit the scope to multiplayer games), the gaming world is sooooooo used to basically minor niche hit or mediocre games that are not actually that fun and engaging that when an /actual/ hit comes along, everyone’s brain explodes.

A decade or two ago you would actually fairly commonly have multiplayer games that were actually hits, actually had broad appeal, that had actual continuous sustained growth from actual organic recommendations.

That hasn’t happened in such a long time that its now practically inconceivable.

In the last roughly 5 years, barring an occasional indie hit with actual staying power, Multiplayer games have been so lackluster, flawed, exploitative or all of those combined for so long, promoted by giant marketing campaigns and hype machines, that everyone has just gotten used to new game come out, its not that great, but NEXT GAME SOON!!!, buy, rinse, repeat.

An actually good multiplayer game with wide, broad appeal is now so nearly totally unimaginable to the basically intelligencia and managers and CEOs of the video game world that the very language of describing video game popularity has morphed to accommodate the expectation of expensive mediocre garbage that is thrown away when the next flashy bauble comes along.

Well I am surprised no one has mentioned this but:

This is the best possible JRPG to do a retcon/reimagining of as is going on with FF7, but a bit differently.

Time travel!

So, start a new story with new characters, but intermix this with the old cast and story beats resulting in a completely new story that brings back old favorite settings and characters, introduces new ones.

Maybe you change significant plot points of the old story, maybe you don’t, maybe you doom the world to some entirely new kind of catastrophe, maybe you get stuck in what would otherwise be called a soft lock but is actually in this world an intentional plot device that just looks like a soft lock but isnt.

Hell, if you /really/ want to go hog wild with this:

Make the new set of characters generally opposed to the original set of characters, have their own method of time travelling, and make it so much of the game is actually about attempting to out-time-travel-wit the others, basically with certain characters attempting to be time demons ala DB Xenoverse and others trying to stop them… all mixed with the narrative possibilities at many points for many characters to switch allegiances, go rogue, or mostly team up.

even moooore possible endings

No I have no clue how you could actually write something this complicated, but the entirety of Kingdom Hearts exists and people tell me somehow that all makes sense, so I am confident a team of competent writers can pull off an absurdly complex multivariate story line.

And thats what we call gaslighting!

Very cool, very funny, very good behavior!

/s

It isnt so much vaporware as basically massively bad funding model and development practices.

They have software. There is a ‘game’ you can ‘play’.

Its just that its still buggy as fuck and the gameplay doesnt really meaningfully work.

Its… more like an alpha that never stops adding features and content… and as a result, never does a feature lock and actually make what they have into a non buggy, actually compelling game.

Oh yeah, I watched the whole series at one point around 5 years ago. I could do with a refresh, love Adam Curtis!

Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.

I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.

But theres no immutable law that says ‘there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.’

I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream… this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.

I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.

Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.

Ok, now compare the populations of both places for the category of ‘mammals with chlamydia.’

Just popping in here to toot my own horn:

I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.

When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.

EDIT

https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127

(no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)

Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.

I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.

As far as meth addicts go, using the bathroom is actually considered polite, as it probably has a vent fan and is better than stinking up your whole apartment with fumes, and it keeps the meth smoke to a minimum for non meth users in the same apartment.

Very similar to marijuana etiquette in many ways.

Obviously if youre not a meth user chances are you will still get contact high if you enter the bathroom less than 30 minutes after the person leaves the bathroom with the fan on, or at least be able to smell it pretty strongly.

And if you do this often, the smell will never come out of the paint, even if you paint over it. You gotta strip it all and redo it.

Anyway, generally speaking, how addicted to meth do you have to be for this to make sense?

Pff this is entry level, literally what you’d do for your first time in many cases.

Now… posting this picture to facebook? How much of an addict do you have to be to do that?

Basically either exceptionally stupid (exceptionally stupid for a meth user) + novice level, or youve basically gone through a few cycles of using then abstaining then using, at that point, you basically are so normalized to smoking in the bathroom it doesnt even occur to you that posting this to facebook is really odd, /or/ you are intentionally posting this to facebook to basically complain that someone in your life was so shitty to you that well now im back on meth, thanks asshole.

Source: While I have never been addicted to meth, and was only ever forced to take a hit once (I basically nearly coughed up my lungs and died), I was homeless for around a year and had no other choice than to attempt to befriend other street people, and got a first hand look into how fucking insane meth and fentanyl users are.

I hope for this lady’s sake its actually meth, and not laced with fentanyl.

Pros: Thats pretty clean for a meth pipe.

Cons: … theres quite a lot of cons.

Yes it is true that the seeds of the oligarchs that would emerge were sewn by inadequacies of the former Soviet system, but

1. Dear god is that complicated, difficult for non Russian speakers such as myself to get a thorough grasp on without a good deal of research, and not something I feel I could approach accurately and correctly summarize.

2. I didn’t want to do the Putin thing and explain the entire history of Russia, I figured starting at the collapse of the Soviet Union is a decent starting point for giving at least an incredibly brief but hopefully accurate bit of historical context focusing on Russia under the leadership of Putin.

They had to wait for the worlds first quadruple A game to definitively flop before they confirmed Sea of Thieves.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a bunch of Anglo American economic advisers recommended economic shock therapy of basically removing still existing subsidies for lots of basic consumer goods, apartment rent, etc.

The effect this actually had was to basically completely collapse the economy even further to the point that it was pretty common for a worker to be paid not in money, but in what a factory produced, and theyd have to go barter it for other things.

It was also common during this period for people to have to attempt to barter say their TV or a tool for food.

What emerged from this is basically a naked oligarchic kleptocracy.

While the official mechanisms of government existed… people barely had any faith in them as the new democratic government had essentially immediately collapsed the economy and led to coups and coup attempts.

Putin stepped into this basically with the idea that over time general faith in the government could be restored with real economic gains and a strong sense of nationalism, focused around him.

Initially his strategies and tactics, while brutal, did deliver real tangible progress, as Putin is exceptionally adept at basically negotiating with the other oligarchs. Corruption was and still is the norm.

Overtime… yeah, basically now the entirety of Putin’s tactics and worldview and how the propoganda he uses domestically meets most if not all of Umberto Eco’s tenets of fascism.

One can have a fascist leader in charge or involved in many different forms of formal government, as fascism is closer to the ideology of a movement than it is to a form of government.

But now, is it a dictatorship?

Well, basically, officially, no, unofficially, yes, but with the caveat that basically the whole thing could fall apart if various oligarchs are not sufficiently placated, or if someone can basically emerge as a more competent strong man… or if the entire economy/society collapses.

Putin has proved extremely adept at keeping himself in power for the last 20 ish years, extending executive term limits, and basically for a period of time sitting back and letting Mebvedev be President for a term while Putin essentially semi-temporarily-retired to merely being the Prime Minister, then resumed as President.

tl;dr: Basically yes Putin is a fascist dictator, though there are some interesting differences with other fascist dictators.

Also please note that Trump is also a fascist, also by Umberto Eco’s tenants of fascism, and has outright stated he wants to be a dictator ‘if only for a day’. Yeah thats how that works, just one day as a dictator.

Ultimately this is why the MAGA crowd is so pro Russia and Putin. Both their leaders and movements are fascist.

No clue, never heard of Bangs or ddg.

Don’t Be Evil.

Yep same here, SearX is clunky and confusing compared to other popular search engines but it actually /works/ once youre familiar with it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

The technicals of all the ways this is done nowadays are complicated, but basically SEO itself is now a pretty huge industry, just website owners paying SEO companies to show up higher in search results.

Basically the scenario we are now in is that companies that can afford to game and manipulate the way google’s search algorithm works in terms of prioritizing ‘relevance’, ie, what you see first, have been so successful at this that it has essentially ruined the ability to find any website that cannot afford to do so.

This would be something like 99.999% of existing websites are going to be much harder to find without going through pages and pages of results, whereas a tiny number of websites that can afford massive SEO are going to show up on the first page, as well as in search results for search terms they are barely related to at all.