I love the movement that has gotten. I’m cheering for it.

Yeah, I think the decline is a drop in a bucket considering. I know plenty of people still buying the Switch 2 etc. on launch day.

The hobby is getting more expensive while income left over after cost of living is going down. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

I've been playing X-Wing. The mad lads who built XWVM have essentially modernized the game and got it working on and with modern hardware, while strictly preserving its feel. It's amazing.

We desperately need to ban all forms of real money gambling in games, or at least prevent kids from accessing it.

Oh shiiiit, do that and come back and talk to us when you get to the time travel level. Are we just in the phase of the medium where technology isn't the defining quality. It would be slightly weird to try to stay at the forefront of, say, novels without any regard for reading classics. Why shouldn't games be the same?

ADP forecasting sucks. Actual jobs report was a beat, +140k jobs and unemployment down a shade. I agree with you on the themes but it doesn't help to cherry pick data.

Old people stealing

Exactly this. The new game cycle these days is: - Game is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff. - Release date is announced. - Game is delayed. - Reviewers/early access people get it, turns out it has none of the cool stuff form the announcement video. - Game is delayed again. - Game finally comes out, with 3 different tiers that are like $80, $100 and $120 CAD depending on if you want the version of the game that's 30%, 40% or 50% complete. - Game doesn't work. - After about two years and 10 DLC packs you have about 80% of the functional game, the other 20% being stuff they were supposed to add but just never bothered, what are you gonna do about it? By this point you no longer care about the game anyway. - Sequel is announced with shiny video showing all sorts of cool stuff, devs promise they've fixed all the broken stuff this time for real. - Company gets bought by EA or Epic, all devs are replaced. - Game is delayed. Like genuinely who wants to bother with that nonsense anymore TBH.

The BLS jobs **estimate** report is utterly garbage data. Go look back over the last year or two. Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior. All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions. Also, the BLS jobs **estimate** is an **estimate** that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependcy on other statistics like estimated populations growth. Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls. You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.

Maybe they can ask their AI to inspect the size of everyone's nose? Maybe that's the trick to get us to buy more AI chips in our games and TVs and phones and cars and in our fruit probably. There's gotta be AI in our food somewhere.

I'm current stuck in a long term cycle of mainly Project Zomboid, Factorio, Valheim, Oxygen Not Included, The Lone Dark and Rimworld, were when I'm fed up of playing the last of them, it's been long enough since I played the first one that it's once interesting to play it. Even when I manage to be fed up with playing all of them at any one point, I still have other progression games with complex emergent gameplay (often but not always games which have algorithmically generated game areas) like Kenshi. 7 Days to Die or OpenTTD that pull me in and if that fails, I can always pick up one of the old open world roleplay jewels such as Skyrim and play that. I've barelly tried anything else in the last couple of years and of those only Oxygen Not Include was the only one with any lasting power and I picked that one years ago. It's not even because I can't afford it (though out of principl I refuse to pay more than €20 for a game) - whenever I try an AAA game nowadays (always games that came out years ago) it's almost invariably an inferior experience that either feels too constrained or doesn't have enough gameplay variety and complexity to be fun for long.

Yes, I am using Arch btw Sorry but I couldn't resist the opportunity

I'm not young or American, but I can tell gaming has been changing. I can't even remember what was the last "AAA" game I bought, because it must have been a couple of years ago. Most games I buy are 40€ connoisseur titles or 20€ indie games. I don't hear about any "must-play" AAA titles through the grapewine these days. I *do* hear about interesting indie stuff all the time, though. Most of the 60€+ games I hear about are kind of niche stuff.

The Cult of Consumption

I know mine has gone down, but I'm not playing less games. ‍️

They're charging more money for lower quality games. Glad less people are buying.

What are you talking about? They're both estimates extrapolated from samples. I think most statisticians would prefer stratified sampling over one company's payrolls processing, but whatever. Maybe chuds would argue that ADP is so much more efficient/accurate because it's outside of the "swamp" of govt, it's certainly *an* independent data point. I mean I agree with you in that BLS is not reliable either. Real time economics is hard. If you honestly preferred ADP all along and will continue to espouse it's superiority when it next contradicts your view rather than confirming it (as it will because data are noisy) then more power to you.

Older games are better plus gamers can play all our existing games.

GameCube games were $50 or $20 for player's choice titles