Plugging *arrs into public torrent trackers is always a losing proposition. Consider either paying for usenet or getting into some entry level private trackers (lurk on Reddit’s /r/opensignups)

I use Navidrome for music because Jellyfin’s Android TV client still can’t handle playlist lengths above 300 songs.

Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.

Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.

TBH if you didn’t want hostile people that know the planet better than you manipulating sandworm aggro to kill you, why did you install a Dune survival MMO

That’s like, the main form of factional interaction in Dune

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?

I didn’t buy and don’t have the console. But either way, refunds wouldn’t “hurt” Nintendo the way they would on a platform like Steam - you can’t refund Nintendo digital products, and even if Walmart accepted a return on a Switch 2 with the digital account-based (non-transferable per TOS) Mario Kart redeemed, Nintendo already made their sale by getting the thing on a Wal-Mart shelf in the first place.

It’s just silly to see a comment about “keeping” giving Nintendo $80 for mario kart when the people affected by stuff like this… Already gave Nintendo $80/$500 for Mario Kart. The “support” has already been delivered.

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing “gshsjajfkfksiwn” in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we’re really micromanaging every art shortcut as “potential pay to hire more artists” now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn’t change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It’s not a “the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!” situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is “good enough” just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They’re using generative AI. Every last one of them. They’ve been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced “content-aware fill” algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone’s job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than “asking” chatGPT to “translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese”.

Anyone who knows how Mario Kart World works well enough to be bothered by this change already gave Nintendo $500 for the game. What are they gonna do? Refund it to Walmart?

A second device on site is still infinitely more resilient than just letting it rock. Most use cases where a backup would help can be covered by an occasional one way sync or scheduled copy to a USB drive. Offsite is for catastrophes like your home burning down or flooding.

you’re not particularly worried about “someone”, you’re worried about bots that are scanning IP ranges and especially default ports. A lot of people will install a program, not really understand what it does, and forward a port because the setup told them to. Then proceed to never update the program (or it’s a poorly secured program in the first place).

if they got in…

You’re trusting Jellyfin to not have some form of privilege escalation attack available. I’m not saying they do have one or that anyone’s exploiting it in the field, but yeah. Also if your Jellyfin admin account is allowed to download subtitles to content folders, a “just fuck shit up” style vandal-hacker could delete your media probably. If you mount the media read-only that wouldn’t be a concern.

Do note that without that layer you were using Pangolin for, your system might be compromised by a vulnerability in Jellyfin’s server or a brute force attack on your Jellyfin admin account.

Everyone I know that actually keeps backups has the same kind of story. It’s sad that no matter how many other people talk about keeping backups, it always takes a tragic loss like this to get people to buy hardware/subscriptions.

I settled on Tubesync. Pinchflat mysteriously stopped downloading new vids from a playlist I had it monitor. Surely I could have fixed it by checking logs or whatever but Tubesync has the exact same feature list and no downsides, so I just killed my pinchflat container and spun up tubesync.

Can “your apps” access it when their device isn’t on your home LAN?

In 2025, a company that is just looking to make a shitload of money is enough to automatically “win”.

Valve: “What are you selling?” Video games, video game hardware without vendor lock-in, and in-app purchases. “Who are you selling it to?” PC gamers.

Literally everyone else in the space except for Itch, which is decidedly focused on too-indie-for-indie games and is small enough to be acquired if it ever gets popular: “What are you selling?” The promise that we’ll make more profit next year than this year. “Who are you selling it to?” Shareholders or a corp that’ll buy the whole company.

It’s an absolute no-brainer. Until anyone else can answer these questions in the same way Valve does, Valve is automatically the best player in the space. Even if another store sells games for cheaper, or has exclusives, or bans DRM, or manages to make a better storefront program, or pays developers a bigger cut. I’m not on some “good guy Gabe” circlejerk shit. There’s no morals to ascribe here. Valve makes enough money and is okay with making enough money, forever. MS, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony, CDPR, Apple, Amazon, ActiBlizz, and every other storefront operator will be considered a failure if they don’t make “more more money than last year” every year forever. I know which platform I want to maintain a library on. I’ll happily use GOG and Itch to buy DRM-free installers though, those will outlast any enshittification the platform does in the future.

If there weren’t enough people put off by Origin and uPlay to not install them or use them to buy games, Origin and uPlay would still exist. Steam didn’t kill them, all it did was exist and be a better platform that people actually wanted to use. There’s a whole graveyard of companies that tried to make “our own Steam”. Fucking Discord tried to do it. What’s that going to do for a marketplace where you’re selling “licenses” to users? What good’s your licensed copy of Fallout New Vegas on Amazon Prime Games Launcher when that launcher no longer exists? Say what you will about Steam, most people are pretty confident it’ll still be around in eight years.

If there weren’t enough people put off by the Epic Games Store, the EGS wouldn’t still be paying developers to put their shit on the store. Steam hasn’t killed it, and isn’t even attempting to kill it. It’s just existing and being a better platform that people actually want to use. If EGS can’t compete with Steam while giving shit away for free, that’s not a “Steam monopoly” it’s an indicator of how dogshit the opinion of Epic as a corporation and storefront is.

Origin failed because nobody wanted it. uPlay failed because nobody wanted it. The perks (being able to buy exclusives) weren’t worth the downsides (literally just making another account and installing another program on your computer). I think that’s beautiful. I hope it happens to Epic next.

Steam’s existence as an IPO/enshittification-proof platform has prevented the PC gaming storefront market from going the way of Netflix. Remember that? We had cable channels, pay-per-views, piracy, and VHS/DVDs/blu-rays as the only way to watch movies at home. Then a Blockbuster-over-mail company started getting licenses to let you pay to watch movies at home with one subscription, which was a massive success. Then every other IP holder went “hey wait, why are we paying Netflix when we could just eat the whole pie ourselves” and now we have Netflix Disney+ Max Peacock AppleTV+ Amazon Prime Video Fandango Paramount+ AMC+ Philo Hulu Tubi Fubo Dippy Weeno Poob all trying to be the new Netflix. And because Netflix itself is a shareholder-value-driven company, it’s putting ads in its paid product and jacking up prices and paying for exclusivity.

Y’know what people do seem to like? Microsoft Gamepass. I’ll never install it myself, same reason I’ll never install the Epic Games Store. But Microsoft is using an even less consumer friendly strategy (timed access to games with a subscription) to propose the same “upsides” as EGS (you don’t have to pay full price for games).

For me, it failed because I wasn’t willing to install some shareholder-driven company’s storefront app on my computer just to play Mass Effect 3, so I pirated Mass Effect 3. Then I got to watch it fail because it turns out I wasn’t the only one willing to skip/pirate games because they came with Origin attached to them.

Epic’s exclusives are the exact same.

I get my PC games from five sources. Steam, GOG’s website, Itch’s website, standalone launchers (I’d probably be okay with a “store” of games as small as the Riot launcher, but I don’t use that because I don’t install rootkit anticheat), and piracy. Launcherless Itch and GOG have convenience parity with piracy with the added benefit of the devs getting paid (and the ease of acquiring updates), and I’ll usually use them over Steam if available. Itch could easily get bought by a corp like Humble did and CDPR is already a shareholder value company, but they sell DRM-free products that I can use even after the stores die / sell out.

A recent launch I paid for and didn’t use Steam for is “The Bazaar” - it has a standalone launcher. The game went pay to win so I uninstalled it, but its lack of presence on Steam didn’t keep me from playing it.

I’ll use stuff other than Steam no problem. But I’ll always cheer when a platform owned and operated by a shareholder backed company dies in favor of one that isn’t. My experience in the hobby space of PC gaming is better when there aren’t exclusives locked on EA Origin or UPlay or Microsoft UWP store or Epic, because I might want to play those games without installing a stock-ticker company’s adware on my computer. Having the space “capitalism free” is unrealistic, unless we’re talking “pirate everything”. I’ll settle for “profit driven” over “YOY growth driven” leaders in the space any day of the week.

Now, if Steam’s position as the best distributor/launcher platform is a de facto “monopoly”, what’s the solution to that? Anecdotally I know plenty of people that play non-Steam games while not playing any Epic games. Epic tries to fight Steam by directly paying developers to not publish on Steam, and also effectively guaranteeing studios a financial success by cutting a deal to put their game up for “free” on the Epic storefront. Plenty of games have been “Free” on Epic while full price on Steam. Valve tries to fight Epic by… Acting like Epic doesn’t exist. They don’t chase exclusives or get into a price war with Epic.

Steam is the most popular platform for PC game releases. A subset of users will not consider ever using other platforms. If we accept this as the definition of “monopoly” the way we’d say Windows has a monopoly on x64 PCs, how would changing the revenue split for devs (which appears to be the issue this company’s suing Valve over) alleviate this “monopoly”? Sounds to me like forcing Steam to explicitly allow “the game is more expensive on Steam” tactics would just make Steam even more of a no-brainer for devs over stuff like Epic or their own platform.

You could say that paying the devs/studios a better cut is the point, and I’d see the validity in the argument. But it’s completely unrelated to whether or not Valve operates as a monopoly.