Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:

This shutdown doesn’t just affect Ryujinx

Nintendo is rumored to be looking at other emulators like Yuzu, eyeing them with the same scrutiny.

How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?

I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did

What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.

For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.

So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.

Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.

Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.

Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.

So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.

They use a hybrid system now and only use peer to peer when dedicated servers aren’t enough, so they could just swap to purely dedicated servers.

However ignoring that, even a peer to peer system can do similar tricks if you don’t isolate the host peer to just one machine. That can even be done by spot checking with a company owned server. You use the server as a verification peer and have it as a backup host to the assigned peer. If your verification peer gets different ram values or what not, you shut the server down at the very least and place that peer on a suspicion list.

But even if they went the cheap route, just distribute the peer network. Let’s say that you have a game of 12 people. You could make it so that each peer is only assigned a certain part of the simulation and players (with overlap on assignments) and cannot track the entire simulation. It’s more complicated than a single server hiding info from you, but they could at least make it to where you’d need multiple infected peers to take over a lobby.

I don’t mean individual servers. What I more meant was let’s say a game uses a standardized anti-cheat. Like EasyAntiCheat or Battleye or similar. And whoever runs your game service (Steam, PSN, Xbox) can vet these anti cheat programs and allow them to create a record on your account of cheating.

And obviously these things get false flags so you can account for that, give people strikes and allow appeals. And games would have the option of banning you for: having too many strikes total, violating only a specific anti-cheat X times, or ignoring this system except to place extra suspicion and resources on those already having strikes.

Also having an account tied to hardware is a no brainer and I’m surprised that this doesn’t get employed often. I know IDs can be spoofed but that’s another barrier potentially.

I think the best thing I’ve heard for long term solutions is to fix a lot of the cheating using server side solutions. In a game like CoD, that means the server doesn’t send you player positions unless you absolutely need to know them.

The other thing honestly is just increasing the investment required to cheat. That could mean that in order to play competitive game modes, you need to have signed in at least once for 4 weeks straight and played the game. Or you need to be a certain level. Issue hardware bans and IP bans to people. Require phone number verification.

What those things do as barriers is actually increase the potency of current detection methods. This should also carry over to accounts. I’m not sure why steams VAC ban system isn’t more popular. As in accounts need to be flagged as a whole when cheating in just one game is found.

There are many solutions but it’s just not a big deal for companies as the prior person said. Plenty could be done to at least make cheating harder and cost more time/money. But that won’t happen

I don’t think that’s true. If YouTube were ever freed up, it would likely survive. YouTube actually generates a significant profit for its parent company so even if it did have to pay for resources, it would be okay. TikTok would also survive if sold in the US and held independently. As would most of the major social medias which are essentially stand alone companies.

That’s also borne out by companies like Nebula existing as well as Patreon. The problem with serving videos is live video specifically which takes a lot more infrastructure than normal VOD. That at the moment is not profitable for anyone as far as I know.

It depends what you mean. If you’re saying any live streaming service like Twitch, yes I agree. If you’re just saying video streaming services in general I’d disagree.

Im not sure why people are disagreeing or downvoting me while also making my point. I said they’re lucky to be alive and I highlighted why. They cannot survive without Amazon or AWS. That was the whole point. Yes they serve some alternate purpose to Amazon surely, but again that’s also a threat.

If for whatever reason they stop serving that purpose (whatever it is) or someone high up stops seeing their value, they’re done for as a business altogether. Because they can’t justify themselves internally much at all and their financials are probably awful. That was my point. And if Amazon decides they’re done with them for whatever reason, they cannot survive without AWS being so cheap for them. Not sure how that point got lost in the sauce.

Seems I’m being misinterpreted badly. I’m saying that Amazon has no monetary interest in Twitch. So yes they’re dependent on an Amazon vision to be able to have that internal access to AWS.

The problem with that is if somehow that vision doesn’t pan out or Twitch steps in the way of it. That was my reason for remarking they’re lucky to be alive. They’re lucky Amazon thinks they have value because the moment they don’t think it, they’re dead without internal AWS support.

I do know that, Amazon could kick them off at any time. Just because Amazon owns the service does not mean that they view it as valuable to use their AWS resources on it. Normally it makes sense to lower costs to do so but if the service isn’t seen as valuable or missteps their admin actions, they could easily end up on the side of the road.

They also exist in this weird space currently where their existence is justified by getting Prime subscriptions up (Prime members get perks on the platform). Now I don’t have their numbers but streaming is ungodly expensive even for Amazon. So I doubt twitch is rolling in a huge pile of cash for them and I doubt they have the Prime numbers to back it up.

Leading to my conclusion that Amazon could say “sink or swim” and kick them off AWS or just sell the company outright since another company would just use AWS anyway and they might make more money that route in fees.

Let me be the first to say that it is amazing that Twitch is even still alive and honestly if they got kicked off of Amazon Web Services, they’d be done for.

Their moderation is historically the worst of almost any platform I’ve ever seen. It seems like every six months or so I hear about something heinous that their moderation teams have done.

Off the top of my head I remember the hot tub controversy, the female nipple thing, the tasteful or artistic nudity thing, the extremely inconsistent ban times for large vs small creators, the awful VOD mute controversies, the VOD deleting, forced ads being mishandled, covering for Dr Disrespect, and general sexism that isn’t even consistent.

Twitch is a dumpster fire on their mod team. All the dang time. One week someone will accidentally show porn on stream and get a 3 day ban, the next week my favorite streamer will show a glimpse of a bare ass from a mod in a game for 0.5 seconds and receive the same 3 day ban. That actually happened. How is it that you have soft core porn on your website and yet you’re banning people for showing too much cheek for a handful of frames?

Looks like they use Easy Anti Cheat services which run at the kernel level on windows but not on Linux, that leaves a huge loophole available for Linux which I actually believe will increase cheating dramatically.

As for the software development, that’s on EAC to fix. And in fairness it doesn’t make sense for them financially to do so. Cheating already costs these companies a ton of money to fix as is.

You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.

Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.

Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.

I’d argue yes. What people care about more is minimum steep time and minimum leaves by weight per mL water. You can use the brew ratio for this to actually define your tea to a standard like black tea. Though you’d have to define brew ratio which I trust the British to do.

After you define those things though, you’d probably measure the amount of liquid and kind of ignore the weight of the tea and steep time, so long as they go over the minimum per serving. Unless you want to argue that adding more leaves/steep time means that you’re consuming more tea, which seems wrong.

Not to mention that some of the cracks are incredibly lightweight in the first place so even disabling a small amount of their code would improve things. Removing the encryption mechanisms alone works wonders.

They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.

It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.

Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.

Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.