My guy.......

With AI and stuff like rea.tools does that really matter anymore?

Let's just accept that this is the new norm: Giant companies who had over 20 years to open their shit up, chose to be ass about it and refused, and now we can just take it. Screw them.

Read the room and look up what "discontent" means.

It's like talking about a button on Trump's suit and expecting no politics to come up.

And it's not a swing: it happens over years. Discontent built up by a thousand small cuts.

Things failing when you need them the most, so often that it makes you reflexively afraid the next time you think about trying it.

Try walking with a pebble in your shoe or sitting in a crooked chair or sleeping on a lumpy mattress and see how long before you get pissed, O Awakened Unattached Sage

Stop bending over for mediocrity.

Now I must soundly say: Screw Apple.

Momentum and their hardware quality are the only things setting them apart from other platforms, while their ecosystem and individual software products are going to shit.

There's no way to have ourselves heard by them. Their "official" forums are just peer support for users to bang heads against each other.

Ironically, our best hope for computing now is that someone eventually uses AI to make a better OS and ecosystem, like they've started doing with the Adobe and Office clones.

We should be de-siloing, not more siloing

It needs to be a more open platform like itch.io

Guilty (∪ _ ∪) It was months ago.

but.. to be fair, I haven't purchased any music in years either, but I listen to music all the time; everyone just streams it now.

Can something similar be done for games? That's what the "low-friction monetization" was for.

Like some mechanism where you can go to itch.io and just play in the browser, and the creator gets paid for it somehow? Some itch.io PS+-like subscription maybe?

Guy made $150,000 from the precursor game to Ultima… at 19 years old, in 1980.

The 1980s were full of kids becoming thousandaires by making games from their bedrooms after school, in just a few weeks or months at most..

Can we bring that back somehow?

Those early devs had almost no "prior art" to draw from, just the imagination in their heads (and non-game media).

And they had to code on the VERY FIRST home computers and consoles, in assembly language, before many people could master that hardware and explain all its tricks in a consolidated knowledge base like we have on the internet now.

Now, we have infinitely easier tools, an infinite amount of inspiration, and there is a lot of incredible creativity in the indie game scene, but the discoverability seems worse:

The most popular platforms, iOS, Android, consoles, are notoriously difficult to get a game on and make money from, especially for a kid.

On the other hand there's too much low-effort slop to sift through (which was also a problem during the 1980s)

Seems like what we need most is better discoverability, filtering, and low-friction monetization that isn't ads..