Notices by Chris 👾 (chris@mstdn.games)

"...consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games.."

👆 This is how Sony PR tries to frame the ending of physical discs as something gamers want. It’s corporate gibberish and an outright lie. There are two more plausible reasons for this move.

1. There is ZERO competition in the digital Playstation games market, there simply is no other platform, not counting "codes in a box". It's a monopoly and Sony has full control over pricing. Expect Sony exclusives to cost full retail for a very long time (see Nintendo).

2. This will completely eliminate the secondary, pre-owned market for upcoming games. You can't sell or share digital games.

As an unfortunate side effect, public libraries can no longer lend future Playstation games - sorry, kids.

A sad day for gaming fans and game collectors.

#gaming #playstation #ps5
#libraries

@silver_huskey @Dio_Senrab ☝️Exactly. Nintendo is successful because they don't sell their exclusives for cheap on Steam. And I can't remember I ever heard someone complaining that Zelda, Donkey Kong and Mario haven't been ported to PC. It's just common sense that you need a Nintendo console to play Nintendo games 🤷♂️

@Dio_Senrab I always wondered why they would water down their brand and USP by releasing PC ports. A few million more sold copies of formerly exclusive games means cannibalizing their console sales because why would I buy a PS5 Pro or any portable Playstation"PSPDeck" in the future when I can play God of War on PC or Steamdeck? Which also means massive potential losses considering Sony's share in ALL other games sold digitally on their Playstation Store. I would assume that the average lifetime value of a PS5 owner is higher than the profit from a couple of PC ports per user. I'm sure someone at Sony did the math and was like 🤯 "This has to stop right now".

GoG giveaway: You can grab the Alone in the Dark Trilogy for free here: https://www.gog.com/en/game/alone_in_the_dark_the_trilogy_123

#freegames #gaming

#silentsunday

This is really cool: Pinchflat lets you build your own YouTube offline library by automatically downloading playlists and updates. The best part? It integrates with Plex, Kodi, and #Jellyfin.

Nothing on YouTube is guaranteed to be available forever, so this is great for preserving things like language courses or channels that might be gone at some point.

Added bonus: it removes ads, can skip intros and has a few other cool options.

Setup took me less than 10min with docker compose, it's a single self-contained container. I'd recommend to set some cutoff dates and pauses between downloads.

https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

#selfhosting #selfhosted

The #Windows10 end of support is infuriating. But the gatekeeping and the "just use linux" or "just pirate the LTSC" reply-guys are just as frustrating. The tech community needs to do better.

#Microsoft #Linux

PSA: The excellent #murderbot series by Martha Wells is available as a Humble Bundle right now, all 7 books in the series + 7 short stories and other novels. DRM-free epub files. Highly recommended.

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/martha-wells-murderbot-and-more-tor-books

"Despite being a powerful and lethal security unit, Murderbot is an extreme introvert. Its primary goal is to be left alone so it can spend its time watching hours of its favorite soap operas and other media. It's highly cynical, sarcastic, and finds human interaction to be awkward and tedious. However, it also finds itself unexpectedly forming bonds with the humans it's supposed to protect, which leads to a lot of internal conflict and reluctant heroism."

#SciFi #bookstodon #books

Looking for a #FOSS, #selfhosted #Trello (Kanban to do lists) alternative. As simple as possible, for a non-techie family. Any recommendations? An app would be a plus but not a requirement. Trello/Atlassian just updated their UI recently - it now requires 5 steps for something so simple as deleting a card 🙄

1. open the card
2. click 3 dot menue
3. select "Archive"
4. click "delete"
5. confirm "delete"

That's ... not efficient at all 🤔

Finnish strawberries really are the sweetest. Afternoon coffee with freshly baked 'mansikka muffinsi' from the farmers stand 😍

#suomi #finland #archipelago #food

My copy of Lunar: Silver Star Remastered Collection for Switch has arrived 😍 Here it's shown on top of the double-page spread for Lunar: The Silver Star in the wonderful 'A Guide to Japanese Role-Playing Games' by Bitmap Books.

#shareyourgames #Switch #JRPG

@killyourfm I dig the new Garbage album. Shirley Manson isn't holding back.

@killyourfm Really enjoy reading about your adventure, it's inspiring. I actually started planning a 1-2, maybe 3 day hike in June. We live in a very densely populated area not nearly as beautiful as Oregon, so the long distance trails will have to wait and need more planning and travelling to Scandinavia. Norway and Sweden both have some amazing trails like the Kungsleden (Kings Trail) up to 440km / 270mi) - I've meet a long distance hiker on a trip to Sweden once who's been doing (parts of) this trail every year for 30 years. Anyway, happy hiking and enjoy the rest of your hike!

Adding meaningful alt-text is not only important for everyone using a screenreader and an essential #inclusion and #accessibility requirement. Alt-text is also searchable and used by filters. People who prefer to filter certain people and topics for mental health and other reasons can't filter memes or images without it. Please use alt-text and cw generously 🙏

Added bonus: with added alt-text you can find images in your own posts with "from:me" and people are more likely to boost your posts.

#screenreader #fediverse #Mastodon

It's easy to spent hours in the #monsterhunterwilds character (face) designer, it's one of the most detailed I've ever seen. These are just the eye shape options (default character #1). I just wish there would more than one body type.

@killyourfm Let's just hope it won't be another 3 week outage. At least we had plenty of offline games on PS2 and PS3 back then. Today's generation couldn't cope with an outage like that, the panic and distress on /r/playstation is real. Most of us are hopelessly dependent on online gaming platforms. Can't wait for the memes.

Oh no. #PSN still down 😱

#playstation #monsterhunterwilds

@killyourfm Out of touch, oblivious, bad news for the Mass Effect team. And for ME4 - laying off half the BioWare staff won't make it a better game.

EA has been the scourge of the gaming industry for years and they'll always get away with it because the majority of their customers don't know about these issues and they don't care: parents, grandparents and sports fans will continue to buy the new FIFA, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and Sims game every year, no matter what.

Interesting enough Sony seems to think differently, they have cancelled several Live-Service games recently 🤔

Dear @Mastodon can we have a setting for: "automatically hide/collapse all #hashtags except for 3" please?

I really appreciated the recent influx of new photographers (many coming from Instagram I presume) but the excessive hashtag use is getting out of hand. No hard feelings, it's hard to break old habits - but there is NO #algorithm here that needs gaming. Very few main hashtags will suffice. Choose 3 that fit best. Write hashtags for people instead, i.e. #silentsunday #fediverse #photography

I often see posts with more than 30 hashtags, sometimes taking up more space than the actual picture. That's unnecessary keyword stuffing and it's not helping accessibility and screenreaders either. Please use a meaningful ALT-text description instead 🙏

(The image below is auto-generated, not an actual post - but it could have been one 🙈 )

@killyourfm I know 😭 but it is what it is. Individual seasons are 40$ PER season in the UK and these are not even available in Germany or the rest of EU, except for some older DVD S1-S3s. And with all the licensing shenanigans I seriously doubt we will get a worldwide collection or even 4K release anytime soon.