According to their recent feedback hub, what gamers really want is exclusives.

Why do consumers want so badly to be abused?

At first I was going to say, the 3 2 1 Backup rule won’t stop the planet from being destroyed by a meteor. But then I remembered the data on Voyager1.

Don’t worry, trump controls the fed now. He’ll make sure the dollar becomes worthless, and everyone will be billionaires!

A Low Budget Alan Wake would have been better than one that doesn’t sell

I don’t follow. As a fan, I get to play the game either way. Why would a lower budget version that more people buy be “better” for me? It might be better for the companies involved, it might even make future installments easier to sell to investors which means I get more games. But at the end of the day, as a player I end up with a worse AW2. Why would I want that?

I do wonder how the crowdfunding route would have gone for them. I don’t know that they could have raised the full $50M though. The original had a cult following, and Control did really well, but it would be very risky. If they failed to hit their goal in a crowdfunding round, then they could be guaranteed going forward that no one, not even Epic would have seen it as worth funding. It would have been forever dead.

Yes, it’s an unfortunate reality that EGS was the only option. But still, my hope is that someone can crunch the stats and prove to future publishers that the revenue delta can be attributed to EGS exclusivity.

Everything is like that. You buy a CD, DVD, record album, painting, concert ticket, movie ticket, whatever it is, you don’t own the artwork, the creator retains the rights to the artwork, you just own a limited license to view it. You can’t go put on your own concert or show using that license without consulting the owner. You can’t create derivative works without consulting the owner. You can’t make copies without consulting the owner.

It’s not just video games, that’s just how copyright works.

Edit: did you know that a tattoo artist retains the rights to the artwork on your body? If you’re an actor with a tattoo, anyone who hires you needs to either get permission from the artist to show the tattoos in their work, or cover your tattoos.

Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.

It’s not a matter of privacy vs UX. I actually think Plex has ruined their UX. But if you have friends and family, some are tech-illiterate, some have their own media servers, and you all want to share with each other quickly and easily, Plex is the only viable option. Same if it’s just you, but you travel a lot, and want to watch something from your home server without lugging around a device that has access to your VPN and a screen/hdmi-out.

Jellyfin is really only viable if it’s just you on your own network.

To add on to the top post: with Plex you only need 1 account and can exchange access to multiple servers. I can browse all the media my account has access to with ease.

Jellyfin needs an account per server. If the client multiplexed between them seamlessly, that would probably be fine enough. But it would be nice if they supported some method of federation.

And Jellyfin has a list of CVEs that they haven’t addressed in years, which makes not want to make it visible outside my network.

I want to ditch Plex, but this is the primary sticking point for me. No criticism to the Jellyfin devs btw, they’re doing the lord’s work, I have nothing but respect for them.

Another minor one is that the Plex app works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC, but the Jellyfin one was hit or miss. I could get it to work once, and then the next day the controller would do nothing and the UI would be acting weird. I will go back and try it periodically to see if it’s ready, but last time I checked it wasn’t.

Yeah, but anti-consumer is soooo IN right now.

As a lifetime owner, the number of features they’ve deprecated is probably the worst part.

• Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
• Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal’s decision)
• Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)

It’s close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.

Alright, yeah if that was the intention of the headline, then fine enough. I think I’m not the only one in this thread who didn’t read it that way.

Cheers.

They are designed the way they are now largely so they can collect data from you. It is consumer hostile.

You mean with centralized servers? No, it’s so they can be server authoritative to guarantee some level of stability, matchmaking, cross-game state, anti-cheat, etc. Ex. you would not be able to have the Arc Raiders experience with p2p servers. As for your data, they can gather that regardless, this would not be a cost effective way to do it.

No one here is disagreeing with the motives of SKG. The discussion at hand is whether this article you posted refers to a scenario that would be improved by the SKG initiative. And it sounds like you agree it satisfies what SKG wants. So the headline should read more like “2K is doing <blah> which is good. Reminder that SKG is trying to guarantee this.”

That does not mean that they cannot seek or want more, though.

For SKG, all that matters to me is what becomes a government-enforced requirement. We can advocate for more all we want, but we were already doing that, and will continue to. Ross can believe whatever he wants about what a company should do, but if SKG isn’t advocating for it as legislation, then I don’t see it as relevant to the initiative.

From the article,

2K games is delisting casual racing game Lego 2K Drive this week, but it’ll remain playable online for another year and work offline once support ends.

Assuming “work offline” means players don’t lose any game modes, this is literally a best case scenario. Stop Killing Games wouldn’t/can’t ask for any more. They could literally use this as an example of what should be done.

what if they were required by legislation to inform the consumer before purchase how long their game would have full functionality?

This is often something that can’t be known. They might be prepared to host the servers for a decade if it makes financial sense, or if there are only 20ppl online a week after launch, they’ll probably have to shut it down in a month, and possibly go bankrupt. As long as they don’t prohibit [those 20] buyers from continuing to play the game, it doesn’t matter. Stop Killing Games can’t make them know the future, but it can make them provide a way for the community to continue without them regardless of what happens.

From a customer perspective, like 80% of the population is functionally tech-illiterate. They want to play games with the confidence that things will “just work”. They buy the console, it has everything they need for a set price, they hook it to the TV, they choose a game, everything just works, and if it doesn’t they know it’s defective and they can just return it.

From a developer perspective, the hardware is fixed, so you don’t need to consider every possible configuration of hardware, (CPU, GPU, displays, disk speed, controller, etc) windowing, OS versions, driver versions, etc. Every single one of these factors adds another dimension to testing requirements and debugging. You also get lower-level access to hardware, which allows for more granular optimizations. As a result, the console designers can put mid-range hw in it and expect devs to squeeze out performance compareable to high end PCs.

As a customer, I prefer PC, but as a dev, PC is kind of awful to deal with. So much time spent hunting down weird little corner cases that only occur in very certain circumstances.

Woah, I forgot about that one. Also reminded me of Spank the Monkey.

Could you maybe elaborate on the feature parity?

1. I travel often. There are a lot of devices in hotels, bnbs, and friend’s houses that have native plex support. Not so much for jellyfin.
2. Casting to cast-compatible devices is very hit-or-miss, but mostly miss. I know the casting ecosystem is already a mess, but as far as user experience goes, Plex has spent more effort ironing it out.
3. The native Plex client works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC when launched from the steam ui, while the native jellyfin client doesn’t.

I keep trying jellyfin out every few months, but so far keep hitting enough friction that I can’t reliably make the switch.

as in separate jellyfin account per each different jellyfin server?

Yes, if me and 5 of my friends have jellyfin servers, we all need accounts on each other’s servers. I then need to juggle accounts to access their content.

Jellyswarrm is a reverse proxy plugin I could run to mask the problem for myself, but it’s not a solution for mom who may have access to my server, and one other friend’s server that I don’t know.

The correct solution is federated accounts, but the devs have already stated that they don’t want to do that.

Why would you host it openly rather than in a VPN like Tailscale or whatever wire guard is?

Then friends and family have to be on my VPN to stream anything.

To me this means they know they don’t have a viable business model. It’s possible they took on a lot of debt years ago, and now they have to enshittify to pay it back. I paid for the lifetime membership years ago, and I would say I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth and I’m mostly still happy with Plex, but I would drop them in a heartbeat if jellyfin was a viable alternative.

People don’t like to admit it, but jellyfin doesn’t have feature parity yet. I think they could solve a lot of the issues if they went the federation route, but until then, it’s just easier for my family and friends to each have 1 plex account instead of N jellyfin accounts. Not to mention the jellyfin vulnerabilities that prevent me from considering hosting it openly.