I recall an estimation that about 1/20 players leave a review, but this probably depends a lot on genre and other factors.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, it’s definitely good to hear daily life is not as scary as it may seem from news coverage.

Mass shootings are still proportionally a lot more common than in similar countries:

There were 109 public mass shootings in the United States and 35 public mass shootings in 35 other economically and politically comparative countries between 2000 and 2022. The United States makes up 33 percent of the combined population of these 36 countries; however, it also accounts for 76 percent of public mass shooting incidents and 70 percent of victim fatalities in these countries. (source)

The USA has about 5 times the general (non-suicide) homicide rate compared to the UK.

Add to that the 20 times higher gun ownership rate between USA and Scotland, plus the mental health crisis and extreme political polarisation, and I would rather just not be there, you know 🤷

True! How could I have forgotten!

Haha this was me, except even around age 20, when I moved to the UK, I was thinking I might want to move to the USA later in life. But the more I’ve learned about the country since, the less I’d want to live there. The gun mania, the religion mania, the actual political options being all squeezed into the centre-to-far-right spectrum all sound nightmarish. (Tbh we’re kinda having that last issue in the UK too, but to a less extreme degree.)

reason #2 why I would never visit that country

(#1 is the mass shootings and gun mania)

(tbh the only thing I’d want to visit to begin with are the giant sequoia in California)

Poe’s law 🥴

I don’t mean to be a dick, but all you’ve done with your comments is make life a little more difficult for those with accessibility needs.

It’s not even just people using screen readers, it makes sighted people have to do extra mental work too. Whenever I come across a thorn character, it distracts me from processing the actual meaning of their comment, and I just give up the effort after a few sentences. (Case in point: I just skipped the 2nd half of their comment and read yours instead 😅)

I want to know if AI was used or not to make a game; it’s a deciding factor for me, as I will not buy anything built with AI. No matter if it’s a placeholder or not

Same. Once they dipped into the convenience, I can’t believe they wouldn’t use it again when they’re in a rush, crunching, etc.

I don’t even touch games with AI-generated store assets, they just feel so cringeworthy. If you can’t afford an artist, just use assets from the game ffs.

I’m glad for those disclosures (because I’m not touching AI games), but tons of devs don’t disclose their AI usage, even in obvious cases, leaving us to guessing :/

It did :P

Maybe not worth it for you, but I’m enjoying them too much to ditch them 🤷

^ This, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming from 7 to 10, and now looking forward to another 3 years of Win10 security updates, while fervently praying that Adobe and my online games add Linux support during that time >_>

Oh this might be what pushes larger companies to drop kernel level anticheat! That would remove the main reason that keeps my gaming on Windows.

I guess Genshin also counts. The monetisation is horrible, the character designs are facepalm-worthy, the localisation is so bad it makes me wince, Paimon is the worst, but damn, I love the exploration gameplay, landscapes and music 🤷 (Also it helps that I’m f2p, so at least I’m not supporting Hoyo’s predatory practices…)

all those Artifex Mundi hidden object games :D

They’re essentially reskins of the same simplistic gameplay and weak stories for like 15 years, but sometimes I still get in the mood for one :D

I love the better ones’ environmental art, but I’d be wary to pick up ones made in the last few years bc I’m pretty sure they started to use AI as soon as it became available, due to the conveyor belt nature of the genre.

EDIT: Ok apparently I was wrong, and they just altogether stopped releasing their games on PC since the pandemic O.o

I already disabled all that “smart” crap years ago.

wow this is really fun!

I’m glad they posted about the background, I was one of their pissed users on Github complaining about their sudden blocking of the 2nd largest archive site, while it wasn’t blocked by my UK ISP. (It didn’t emotionally help that as a paying AdGuard customer, I was spending money on a service that temporarily made my browsing experience worse.) Fortunately they managed to unblock it after a few days.

Hmm sadly that’s a very different gameplay to Just Dance, here’s an example. In JD they record dancers with motion capture, and you need to follow that choreography, while the game tracks your accuracy with a phone, console controller, or camera.

So it needs a bigger production team than FLOSS indies can probably manage :c