T w e n t y S i d e d

So Epic Games is in the news again. This time they’ve picked a fight with Apple and Google. That’s fine. Both companies are very worthy targets, but I don’t have much else to say about the lawsuit itself. This story is evolving by the day, and I make videos much too slowly to keep up with fast-paced stories like this. 

The interesting thing is Epic’s Nineteen-Eighty Fortnite campaign, which tries to rally users to their cause. They even have the #FreeFortnite hashtag, but it’s not about making Fortnite free for us, it’s about making the Apple store free to use for Fortnite.

This is not the first time the company has tried to frame simple corporate business tactics as something brave or heroic. 

I don’t know Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and even though I disagree with him on many things, I don’t have anything personally against him. But whether he intends it or not, the way he carries himself on social media makes it feel like he thinks he’s the hero because other people are worse. It actually reminds me of Jack from the Borderlands series: 

Jack will do something self-serving and deeply frustrating to people and then assume he’s the hero because some of his foes are bad actors, and then he acts like everyone should worship his “heroics”. 

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Epic is Not the Hero”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Well, I’ve been waiting for this game since E3 2019. I was hooked on the promise of a new game from AsoboYou might remember them as the team that made FUEL, which I and six other people really liked.. I was even more hooked on the idea of a game that covers the entire planet using satellite data and buildings generated by machine learning. 

The reviews on Steam are a mess. Apparently Steam just downloads an installer, and that installer downloads the game from Microsoft. This means you can’t properly pre-load the game, which means the Microsoft servers will get completely slammed at launch. Going by the reviews, this is exactly what happened.

Shit.

Moreover, this is a huge game. It’s ~127GB! It will probably take you more than two hours to download the dang thing. Since Steam launches the launcher, Steam thinks you’re “playing the game” while this launcher is running. Thus, by the time the game is downloaded you’ll have in excess of two hours of “playtime”. That’s long enough to burn through your allotted playtime, so that Steam won’t allow refunds.

Microsoft is basically doing the Uplay thing where they shove their shitty platform inside of Steam. This means you need to login to Microsoft Xbox for PC Xbox Games on Windows for PC, or whatever the fuck this ridiculous contraption is called. That’s exactly the thing I wanted to avoid by getting it on Steam.

I can’t get around using Microsoft services, so I might as well get it from Microsoft directly. 

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020: First Impressions”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Please forgive the dashed-off nature of this post. My plan was to spend yesterday writing something substantial and thought-out, but I got sidetracked with programming and the time sort of vanished. I don’t have many images to make it look pretty, but I’ve made up for it by having extra typos. Yo’ure welcome.

One of the great annoyances of talking about Big Tech is that for a lot of people, the word “monopoly” has come to mean “really big annoying company”. Facebook is a monopoly? Apple is a monopoly? Google is a monopoly? Microsoft is a monopoly? Steam is a monopoly? Monopolies everywhere!

In my understanding of the word, a monopoly is when you have one and only one company providing a good or service. My local gas company is a monopoly, because I can’t buy natural gas from anyone else. The pipes in my house lead directly to their… gas-making stuffLook, I have no idea how utilities work, okay?. Same goes for water, electricity, and garbage pickup. Not only are these companies monopolies, they provide essential services. And so there are all kinds of extra rules in place to keep an eye on them because of the special position they holdAre these laws any good? I don’t know..

But none of the big tech companies have the same sort of universal control. Apple users are always free to switch to AndroidHaving said that, I’m willing to bet that doing so is a massive pain in the ass.. Google users are free to switch to DuckDuckGo or (God help you) Bing.

I’m not sure if this shift in meaning is more international or generational. Maybe people outside the USA have different attitudes about what the word means and what should be permitted. Maybe young people have appropriated the word to mean roughly “companies that are so big it SHOULD be illegal.” I don’t know, but it really does make a mess of a lot of discussions.

I was surprised how many people were willing to cheer for Epic in the #FreeFortnite campaign. The thrust of the campaign is the idea that you should be able to sell stuff on Apple devices without paying Apple. That makes no sense to me.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Is Apple a Monopoly?”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.