Say Bob pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Foo, 100 song plays. Alice pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Baz, but plays their songs a whopping 300 times.

If it was paid out per user, Foo and Baz would both get $5. But paying out based on overall listener numbers, Foo would get $2.50 and Baz would get $7.50.

Essentially, it's a zero sum game, and one artist getting a play takes away revenue from every other artist. Even if you exclusively listen to your favorite artists, the vast majority of your subscription money is going towards the top artists.

This is why Spotify is always pushing their own playlists, smart shuffle, and encouraging background listening with ambient / sleep playlists and such; the more they can shift listeners toward music they've produced themselves or have special license agreements with, the less they have to pay out to typical (i.e. smaller) artists using their platform.

The hypothesis is really only supported by the fact that we have adaptations that make it theoretically possible, but the times and places those adaptations came about doesn't really match up with the times and places it would have been effective (i.e. woodland where the ground would be too hard for effective tracking [0]).

There are some other things that point away from it, too; it's worth doing some googling.

It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365606

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Better link (.gov):

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/trumps-transpor...

> With only about 25 percent of controllers holding a traditional college degree, this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.

They go on about how we've settled in the trough, but the whole local optimum problem is about settling in an early peak, and being unwilling to cross a trough to get to a higher peak. The workarounds would be propping up the first peak, not evidence that we've settled in the trough.

Either way, the metaphor feels kinda forced IMO.

One that affected me personally was in Pokemon XY, where if you saved in the wrong spot it would corrupt your entire save. As a kid it was a pretty memorable experience to lose ~20 hours of playtime on my Christmas present because I assumed the updates weren't important. Granted, day-one bugs that major in first party Nintendo games are rare, but it's not a given that they're irrelevant either. It can go either way.

Exactly -- a game released a week ago is unlikely to have updates that could make it feel like a compromised experience.

Take, say, Terraria. I had a blast playing it ten years ago, despite having a fraction of the content and polish it does now. Nonetheless, if that version was all I had access to today, it would feel like a compromised experience.

Updates matter significantly more for some games than others. Sandbox games like Terraria and Minecraft often lie at one end, while at the other end you'll often find first-party Nintendo games, which typically receive a handful of bug fixes at most. Of course, how much playing a 'lesser' version bothers you personally varies greatly too.

The spreadsheet just shows which games have fully updated versions available on cartridge.

(Splatoon Raiders was released a week ago so I don't think that's a good example to use for games without updates. Even it has an update already, albeit a non-critical one)

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1CEABCBrPv1tWf89h...

The problem with Sony killing physical games (and the wider culture of digital purchases) is, unfortunately, a long-term one. Nobody will be seriously affected right now, as long as Sony's update servers are up and both digital and physical are supported. But 10, 20 years from now, both from a game preservation standpoint and from a consumer protection standpoint, this will be disastrous, when many games will still be charging outrageous prices (without the soft check of reselling/trading) or even no longer exist.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48954175

Points: 68

# Comments: 24

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11856550/

(why some fan projects like Showdown are still up is anyone's guess)