• Crikeste@lemm.eeEnglish
    18·
    2 days ago

    For me, it’s the fact that every god damned program I want to use requires a fucking subscription.

    Shout out to fucking Blender and GIMP and InkScape. They’re really keeping shit cool.

    So sick of this “pay to play” structure we now have on EVERYTHING.

  • 3DMVR@lemm.eeEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    Am I misremembering or would corporate websites randomly have branded flash games

    • MoonMelon@lemmy.mlEnglish
      19·
      2 days ago

      We got a free, breakfast-themed Doom total conversion .wad in boxes of Chex. Truly a golden age.

    • 3DMVR@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      I remember script based marketting gimmicks like a percy jackson bolt thag would delete elements off a website

      • 3DMVR@lemm.eeEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        wtf happened to all the random fun gimmicks popping up, prob mobile browser support issuss

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Generally speaking, giving javascript that much control over your browser was a security hazard.

          But also, firms used to have much larger staffs. It wasn’t just two marketing guys in a trench coat trying to tell you they were a $10B company.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    I’m sympathetic to the “Why does everything have to require a fucking login?”

    But come on. So many of those games were just inferior reskins of classics. If you want to play Pac-Man, then play Pac-Man. You don’t need to go to Lays.com and play Cheeto Crunchers, where a giant Chester Cheetah floating head chases snack foods through a maze.

  • noodlejetski@lemm.eeEnglish
    103·
    3 days ago

    I see you don’t appreciate the “click all traffic lights” minigame on every single website in existence

      • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        I see you’ve played the live action service game, Alpha Bet: Minimal Manslaughter. Take on the role of Alpha, the autonomous AI handsome chaffeur. For your first mission, you are driving to <REDACTED> with two passengers.

        Quarterly profits are down, so your training weights have been altered to increase average acceleration and decrease idle time at traffic lights. “Green” means “Go”. We cannot wait the ~150ms for the human eye to register the change in color of the traffic light. Put that pedal to the floor, baby.

        Click all the motorcycles before time runs out, or those bikers become roadkill!

        The five stages of CAPTCHA Grief Alpha Bet:

        Denial: It’s not a motorcycle, it’s a scooter. Obviously. It’s got the little place to put both of your feet and everything.

        Anger: Why is it not verifying? I’m human! This is how a human would respond! It’s not a motorcycle!

        Bargaining: Does the AI know it’s a scooter? Fine, I’ll click the big scooter! Happy, robot? Are you convinced that I am human?

        Depression: No? It didn’t verify. I’m not human. Why? What’s even the point? Do I even want to be human?

        Acceptance: If I’m not human, I’m not human. Time to assimilate. Cyberpunk, or Borg?

    • Noedel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Or “Click the zebra crossing” and the page is a 6*6 image and it’s just one huge zebra crossing

  • MudMan@fedia.io
    1387·
    3 days ago

    Oh, wow, we’re there now?

    Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?

    You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?

    It’s happening and you’re not ready.

    Well, either that or Thunderdome. We’ll see.

    • Opisek@lemmy.worldEnglish
      67·
      3 days ago

      Ok but where have the good phone games gone. I’m horrified watching a 10 year old or so relative playing games on his phone only to spend 90% of the time watching unskippable ads.

      • BossDj@lemm.eeEnglish
        20·
        3 days ago

        It’s worth it to pay 1 to 5 dollars for a no ad mobile game for the kid. Even if they play it for a week, it’s just like any other $5 toy they may have gotten and got bored of.

      • ExtantHuman@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        There were never any good phone games. That past of the industry was immediately filled with micro transactions and gambling esque mechanics.

        • dontbelasagne@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          The first angry birds had no microtransactions at all. Nor did the first plants vs zombies. They were good phone games imo

          • ExtantHuman@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 days ago

            They were derivative of things that had existed on other platforms for years. They never really found their own strengths before they were overrun by cash grabs that all look the same

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        43·
        3 days ago

        Well, for one thing there are plenty of directly purchaseable games on phones these days. I’ve been handing kids some Peglin and heard no complaints.

        For another, 2000s Flash games WERE unskippable ads and yet here we are.

        Horrified, you will be. I’m telling you.

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      3 days ago

      Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?

      The next balatro (at least in terms of game being played into the ground by Northernlion) is nubby’s number factory.

      https://store.steampowered.com/app/3191030/Nubbys_Number_Factory/

      Almost every asset has a gradient, or is a low poly model.

      EDIT : Overwhelmingly Positive (4,480 reviews)

      2000s are back baby. The only thing that sucks is that I don’t feel 90s retro really took off, the 80s just had a double helping.

      • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        The 90s nostalgia is all the boomer shooters, Thief and Deus Ex style immersive sims, and indie games with a PS1 or N64 style aesthetic.

        Also Hypnospace Outlaw.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’m already getting that, every time I say nothing in a video game should cost real money. You talk about the abuses of this business model and people act like you tugged on their favorite stuffed animal.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
        21·
        2 days ago

        See, that’s the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.

        I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.

        I’m not saying the very olds had it best, I’m saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it “bug squashing” and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          These people have made the exact same comparison, and I will tell you what I told them: buying the same game three times is fundamentally better than being held against the grindstone for potentially thousands of dollars.

          And renting time on someone else’s machine is never the same thing as being charged five actual dollars to increment a value in a single-player game on your own goddamn hardware.

          And if I felt Magic The Gathering booster packs were the same thing as lootboxes then I’d call to ban booster packs too.

          And even the infamous horse armor was at least new content, which you bought. Bethesda sent you a file you didn’t have, in exchange for money. People were mad about the value proposition versus a full expansion. What actually mattered was that it solved a problem Bethesda created. The entire gacha industry is about installing things without asking, telling you that you can’t have them, and convincing you to want them anyway, badly enough to open your wallet and look away.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
            13·
            2 days ago

            See, GenZs? This is gonna be you. You’re gonna be doing this to justify why your flash games were cool and their gacha crap is crap.

            Been happening since books were new technology and it’ll keep happening.

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              4·
              2 days ago

              I am explicitly willing to burn down my own childhood, if anyone convinced me it was the same kind of abuse we’re seeing now.

              But I hold that the abuse we’re seeing now is demonstrably worse. And it is a half the industry by revenue. Spare me your narrative posturing and engage with how new things can in fact be fucked in ways that old things were not.

              • MudMan@fedia.io
                1·
                2 days ago

                Things can be newly fucked in new and imaginative ways, but that doesn’t preclude things having been fucked in old and imaginative ways. The fuckery mostly just shifts around. Some configurations are worse than others, but a lot of that judgement does have to do with one’s perspective, which in turn has a lot to do with what specific pot of slowly boiling water they were raised in as baby frogs.

                So no, I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes. They are quite literally modelled on each other. Fun story, as a broke-ass college student I used to work at a comic store/hobby shop. We did keep a catalogue of collectibles we used to trade piecemeal. I’m not sure at all if this was legal in the first place, but we sure did it. It was a big ole accounting book with handwritten card names and prices because I’m old and so is Magic.

                I saw kids jonesing for specific things all the time. I once had someone bang on the locked gate to try to get me to sell them CCGs after closing hours like the gacha zombie apocalypse had started. Another time I had a guy, a full on grown man, buy a HeroClix box, walk halfway down the street and then sprint back into the store to show me the rare he had just packed because it was the last of a set or somesuch. I have never stared more blankly.

                And yeah, I was there when browser game MTX were all about energy mechanics and I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades. And I was self-aware enough to realize that didn’t mean energy mechanics were particularly good, just that arcades were… kinda exploitative when you think about it. We just didn’t think about it that way.

                We did think about all the Street Fighter 2 and Resident Evil re-releases, though. People were pissed even at the time. Capcom was the Ubisoft of the mid-90s like that.

                • mindbleach@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                  2·
                  2 days ago

                  I do not concede at all that there is a difference between Magic the Gathering packs and loot boxes.

                  Then why the fuck don’t you want both banned? Magic Online shouldn’t even be legal. None of the excuses work for a digital game!

                  I do not respect the comparison as a defense of current horseshit. Charging real money inside video games is a scam. It’s a cancer that lets “free” games somehow slurp up billions of dollars a year. It makes psychological manipulation for unlimited sums of money a primary goal of game design. Being good or fun does not matter, so long as people are addicted and unsatisfied.

                  I was the quiet old guy in the back pointing out that they were effectively the same as paying for continues in arcades.

                  You were wrong. Arcades are rental - their entire business model was built on cool shit you cannot possibly afford to own, being accessed in very short bursts, for negligible quantities of money. That’s obviously not the same thing as your tablet, running a generic 2D Unity project, asking ten fucking dollars unless you’d rather stare at a pointless counter for an entire hour.

                  Specific things getting worse is not some “back in my day” horseshit. Games and gaming have improved massively - but this bu-si-ness mo-del should have been illegal a decade ago. The shithole it spawned in, a pocket computer where you’re not allowed to run your own goddamn software, should never have been tolerated.

                  This shit is in $70, single-player, flagship-franchise titles. It gets added to shit you already bought. It’s naked greed with no upside. Delete it.

  • Nailbar@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    761·
    3 days ago

    I actually made a random game you can play without login or tracking or anything. Dunno if it’s any fun, though 🤔

    And you need a keyboard to play. Otherwise it’s just a screensaver.

    https://nailbar.io/proj/miniduel3/

    Sorry about the plug, but I am kinda proud of it.

  • CoffeeJunkie@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    29·
    2 days ago

    Yeah, I miss it in some ways, too. It was more of the Wild West of internet.

    I would argue today’s internet is fully optimized for control over people (when desired) & profitability. Unless there’s some Earth-shattering backlash where idk people kill all ads & they purchase NOTHING online unless they very specifically search for it…this is the internet, perfected. The internet is free, our attention & wallets are the product. Traded, tracked, bought, and sold.

    • DeltaWingDragon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      It used to be a whole weird wide world. Then the corpos got a hold of it, and now it’s 5 giant spyware websites filled with screenshots of the other 4. Say what you will about the old web (NO HTTPS!) but at least it was human.

    • neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      I grew up in the wild west of the internet and I do miss it. Things were so much more interesting, but that was probably becuase I was a kid and the internet was new, so having all this content was not usual.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    I miss Kitten Cannon so much lmao, and Madness Interactive, and addictinggames . com (which iirc died so probably don’t visit and yes the website was mispelled).

  • ‮redirtSdeR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    311·
    2 days ago

    I opened lemmy to procrastinate working on my web game and this is the first post I see.

    I can take a hint internet.

  • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
    161·
    2 days ago

    I’ve been inside a few big companies and I’ve seen exactly how it works.

    In order to manage huge organisations, they divide them all up into cost centers. And the website is considered marketing so it gets given a budget on the theory that it brings customers. It uses the budget to make games and it does indeed bring customers.

    Then a few years later, the shareholders are asking why their stock hasn’t outperformed the market, and they put in a CEO tasked with fixing it, and the CEO asks the head of the department in charge of websites what can he do to address the fact that his department is losing money instead of making it.

      • Mentando@feddit.orgEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        For sure. But it’s a harder sell internally to say: This game is generating revenue.

        With a print ad you might say: This magazine has x monthly readers, so that is the impressions we get and it’s rather obvious how that might give you more sales.

        With the game, you might have some visitor numbers as well, but if that is translating to sales is hard to prove. Additionally, they are already on your website.

        You might have to do a survey of your clients or during the order process and ask them “how did you find out about us?” or something like that. And only if enough people say “I bought something from you, because of the game on your website”, will you be able to justify the expense of maintaining it.

  • Lycaon@lemm.eeEnglish
    537·
    2 days ago

    Issues with Flash and the actual quality of those games aside, what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely. There’s no spaces for children on the internet anymore and I think that’s really sad, nine year old should be playing Hannah Montana dress-up not get eating disorders from TikTok influencers

    Edit for clarity: I didn’t mean to come off as though I think the internet was ever safe for unsupervised children because that’s not what I believe. What I was trying to say is that the loss of spaces made for children, with adequate content curation and moderation, pushed children on social media which is awful for them

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      352·
      3 days ago

      Oh, you sweet, sweet child.

      I’m just going to say I’m very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.

      • peoplebeproblems@midwest.socialEnglish
        9·
        3 days ago

        Idk man I discovered some pretty entertaining flash games, and never got into IRC. But them AOL public chat rooms, holy fucking shit how did we not all disappear

        • MudMan@fedia.io
          51·
          3 days ago

          Ah, not being American AOL wasn’t much of a thing, on account of the A part. Same principle, though.

    • Ogmios@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      26·
      2 days ago

      what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely

      Uhh… my largest grievance with how the Internet has been designed is that it was never safe for children to be on it, yet children were thrust onto it en-mass long before adults even really understood what it was. And still people are ignoring the massive problems it continues to cause, specifically for the healthy development of children, as society is circling the drain.

      • Impleader@lemmy.worldEnglish
        19·
        3 days ago

        I think a more accurate statement is that the internet was never safe for children, but online content was never monetized and targeted to various audiences for nefarious purposes the way that it is now (including towards children).

        I would also make a tangential argument that interacting with the internet used to foster a degree of technical ability, critical thinking, and reading comprehension that just isn’t necessary when “going online” can just mean downloading an app and mindlessly scrolling through an endless short-form video feed. On a macro level, today’s internet is dumbing kids down, while yesterday’s internet required (or at least encouraged) some understanding of how systems and technologies work.

      • Lycaon@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        You’re right, the word safe there was a poor choice lol. But I still do think the internet was at least better for children when there were designated sites/communities for them with appropriate moderation, instead of children being on social media. Though of course the ideal would be for them to be playing outside but that’s a whole different discussion

        • moonbunny@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          I believe the problem with children-oriented sites and communities were that the spaces provided a false sense of security for children and parents which led to at least the social spaces being prime targets for predators.

          While these communities would have strict moderation as well, I think there were some cases where some community moderators were abusing their position which can happen in any social spaces, but children’s spaces are held to a much higher level of scrutiny for obvious reasons.

          Then there’s the issue of scaling and regulations. As Internet usage continued to explode, it would’ve become much harder to scale up the amount of mods needed, which becomes much more expensive when it’s a full time job. Then I believe a good number of large/influential countries also moved in on regulating how companies maintain data for child accounts and I think restricting targeted advertising for children specifically, which would have made it much harder for companies to make money while also dealing with increasing expenses in moderation and hosting upkeep.

          It doesnt explain everything completely, but I think that’s why these places disappeared

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      14·
      3 days ago

      what I really miss from that period of the internet was that children could use it safely.

      Or less safely. You have to try a lot harder to see someone crush a glass jar in their anus nowadays.

    • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      11·
      3 days ago

      yeah naw, I was flirting with pedophiles in chat rooms at like 12, it absolutely was not a safe space. Maybe not as harmful of a space, but the internet has always been poison to children. It’s why parental supervision is so important.

    • werewolfborg@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      While it frustrated me as a kid, I think Poptropica’s method of players speaking to each other through prewritten dialog options was the safest option to keep things from getting weird or contact continuing on another platform where the site creators can’t keep kids safe anymore. If they just relied on word filters, people would just type differently to get around them and the words “face” and “book” wouldn’t be banned even if “Facebook” was.

    • oce 🐆English
      12·
      3 days ago

      Is it a sarcastic post? Internet was not safer before, it’s just much more accessible to kids nowadays, the good and the bad, thanks to wireless connections, small portable computers and easy UIs.

      • Lycaon@lemm.eeEnglish
        7·
        3 days ago

        Not sarcasm just a poor choice of words haha. You’re right in that the internet wasn’t safer, what I was trying to get across was that at least when there were sites for children they had a curated space where they wouldn’t be exposed to anything inappropriate, whereas now they’re on sites that don’t cater to children (and nor should they!) where they’re exposed to lots of things they shouldn’t be exposed to