YurgenJurgensen

That’s not a great example to pick, given that Demons Souls exists.

Why were those games on the top of your head? If things were as healthy as you claim, surely your head would be full of exciting new titles? Would you have, in 2006, brought up Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or Doom as titles to show modern gaming’s superiority over the Atari 2600?

If the pace of quality titles is such that people have to go fishing through multiple decades to find what they believe to be a convincing-looking list of titles to compete with the OG Xbox, that is an indication that yes, even with more games coming out, fewer good games are coming out.

Surely that just shows how much things have stagnated. If a 2011 game and a 2026 game don’t “feel” different, where’s the innovation?

This is not the first time this thread has been made, nor will it be the last, and there’s someone (or at least two people in this case) who does it every single time.

It’s too late for that. You crafted that list after seeing the criterion, so it does nothing to disprove the point that the games people think of when they think about “good modern games” aren’t actually modern.

Things aren’t look great for modern games because when people think ‘modern games’, they think of titles from the last decade.

Anyone who didn’t guess the ‘plot twists’ of Clair Obscur at least 10 hours in advance wasn’t paying enough attention to even remember how to spell the title of the game. It’s structurally extremely standard if you’ve played Dark Souls and more than a couple of 90s JRPGs, and its foreshadowing is about as subtle as being hit in the face with a stale baguette.

2019, 2019, 2025, 2019, 2019, 2017, 2017, 2021, 2025, 2017, 2024, 2018, 2020, 2015, 2011.

I only see three games here less than five years old. The oldest is from three console generations ago. Do /you/ actually engage with modern games? Remember the time you’re comparing to had 5-year console generations. This is like someone on the release date of the PlayStation 3 saying that Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a “modern game”.

1) Anyone who says Celeste’s music is better than Super Mario Bros’ is a liar, and I don’t even like Nintendo games. 2) Let’s look at some of those release dates, shall we? 2019, 2013, 2020, 2017, 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2016, 2013, 2013, 2008(!), 2019, 2021, and 2016.

That’s a period of 15 years. For an American, the NES released in 1985 and the PS2 released in 2000, also a period of 15 years. The fact that your “games of today” list is kind-of competing with four console generations itself is an indication that quality isn’t higher now, even with a considerably higher volume of releases.

Also only two of those games came out in the last 5 years, so things really aren’t looking great for modern games.

Well, your claim was 99%, and you’re making the claim so the burden of proof is on you, so you first: Give me ninety-nine examples that support your position and explain why for each of them, and then I’ll give my one and do the same and we can see who has the stronger body of evidence.

None of these companies are making money, so all we need to do is wait until the VC money runs out and it turns out there’s no market for any of this slop if the people creating it have to actually pay for it.

War predates human history, and the worst thing about chemical warfare is that it’s warfare; therefore there is no need to ban chemical weapons.

Oh boy, it’s this again. You’re essentially admitting to having had no meaningful experiences in your entire life, as you’re incapable of imagining doing anything other than consuming content. Good art says something about the world, not other art.

I was surprised that exporting from Photos on iOS to an SMB share on a local network Just Works.

Well, you’ll never see an erotic film on YouTube, or a war documentary using real combat footage for example, so there are many categories where it’s simply not capable of competing. And even without straight-up banned content, ‘advertiser-unfriendly’ content is aggressively buried by the algorithm, which discourages people from making it, so the ‘quantity’ part might not be true. Some content might be so heavily punished by the algorithm that almost nobody thinks to make it. This is a problem for your position, as it’s not enough for YouTube to win in some categories; it has to win in every category.

But GP said their reasoning worked regardless of what standards for quality were being used. It was a much stronger statement than the one you’re defending.

That reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.

Elecom Relacon, the only wireless input device worth owning.

Factory farms consume far more feed than they can grow on site though, so the real power isn’t in the chicken farmers, it’s the ones growing chicken feed, and they’re probably used to switching crops to suit market demands.

And the farmers who do grow their own feed are probably smaller operations targeting higher quality meat than factory-farmed chicken, so they’re not the ones that vat-grown meat-substitutes would be competing with.

The feedstock has to come from somewhere, right? I’m assuming many farmers would prefer feeding it into stable vats of algae or fungus than dealing with the risks of another epidemic-induced chicken cull.

I would personally simply heavily tax ad revenue rather than banning social media, as while a blanket ban is ironically less of an infringement on free speech than banning it for children, it’s still something of an infringement.

There’s a bunch of benefits to an ad-tax too, beyond revenue generation: Users won’t be encouraged to use VPNs (and most VPN users probably also use ad blockers anyway). It’s difficult to evade, since an advertising business kind-of has to operate in the open; if nobody knows you’re running an ad business, your ad business has failed at the one thing it’s supposed to do. Advertisers are also purely profit-motivated, and so won’t hesitate to rat out their competitors if they’re using some loophole to gain a competitive advantage. It’s also very difficult for them to hide which country they’re targeting, since that information has to be available to their customers, so the taxmen can get it by subpoenaing customers or posing as them. And there’s not that many big ad-tech companies, so you don’t really mind if a few small-fries slip through the net.

Of course a poll that asks a leading question can get 70% in favour. It’s not a conspiracy by TLAs (the people they’re interested in won’t be fazed by these paper-thin measures) or big tech (this hurts their bottom line). It’s legacy media, who have lost a lot of ground to the Internet, and stand to lose nothing by making it worse, and coincidentally also have a captive audience of voters who wouldn’t know one end of a USB cable from another who simply don’t understand any of the downsides.

When the ratchet only goes in one direction, it doesn’t matter that each click isn’t the worst thing ever, it only matters where it’s headed.

We’ve seen how this goes. If it doesn’t pass, they’ll try again and again until some combination of political chicanery lets it slip through. They only have to win once, we have to win every single time.

Time to open a business in Roblox selling eSIMs delivered in-game through QR codes? (Assuming Roblox hasn’t been banned before we can get the MVNOs on board.)

In mobile telephony, one of the first things new hires are told is “don’t even try to work out what all the acronyms stand for; it won’t help”. You just have eat all the alphabet soup. Worse is that they nest themselves. You can have acronyms where every letter stands for another acronym. Writing a thousand words without using a single noun is easy. And of course all the short ones are overloaded. Is an AP an Application Processor or an Access Point? Depends on which subfield the person you’re talking to is from.

But they’re a necessary evil, since MSISDN is still less cumbersome than Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number.

10 minutes is a long time now? Is this what TikTok does to a person’s brain? Cartoon Network typically had 11 minute episodes, so you’re complaining that you don’t even have the attention span of a child.

You could, but would most people? Most people voluntarily subject themselves to garbage adware-ridden SmartTVs even though this is a problem you can solve with a £12 dongle and no software installation at all. If the humble HDMI cable defeats the average person’s technical ability, what difference would it make if they could technically install their own firmware?

Are we at ad-supported rental apartments yet? “Sorry, it’s in the rental contract that we’re not allowed to turn off the TV or cover it up.”