theparadox

I’m not a game developer, but I honestly most of these settings are more or less taking a constant from a config file and putting in some UI to explain what they do and allowing the user to edit the values themselves. That doesn’t take much time and frankly is something the most junior dev could do during some downtime.

Sure, they might need to do some testing of the use of different values but I imagine they already spend a good bit of time tweaking these constants when determining their optimal values. I’d really like an example of an accessibility feature that the OP thinks has absorbed a lot of development time to implement.

I honestly feel strongly in the opposite direction. This specific is thing my absolute favorite trend in gaming.

My first time was a long time ago at CompUSA (RIP). I purchased a joystick (like for flight sims) took it home, and found only the heavy power brick in the box. It took me at least 45 minutes of arguing at the store to get them to give me a replacement. Eventually I had to get a new box from their shelf and show them there was no plastic tape seal thing on new boxes to demonstrate that mine likely didn’t have one when I bought it either.

I’ve also had brand name micro SD cards from Amazon several years ago when things had just started to go down hill there. They had their capacity faked despite the packaging and seller looking legitimate. It may have been when they had “fulfilled by amazon” meant Amazon just treated all stock like Amazon’s general stock. If I sold a widget via Amazon stored in a Chicago warehouse and a fraud sold the same widget stored in a warehouse in NY, a NYC customer could order the widget from my store page and Amazon would just ship the one in NY because it was closer to the buyer and cheaper for Amazon to ship. I’d get a fraud complaint even though it wasn’t my product that was fraudulent.

Maybe 5-10 years ago someone used my credit card number, in a shopping center I frequent, to make a bunch of purchases at stores I’ve never visited (women’s fashion accessories). I reported this to my credit card company and they removed the charges without any complaint. I guess they managed to get the card info and my zip from a data leak and figured purchases in my zip code would be less likely to be flagged.

I’ve sure there may have been a few times where I was none the wiser.

The amount of profit and money in the oil industry will ensure that it’s product remains relevant for as long as possible. If it’s not through gasoline, it will be something else.

Meanwhile they’ll be doing their best to sabotage and lobby against any competition to make it harder for individuals to even have the opportunity to do the right thing. The change has to come from the top (government mandates) in order for it to have any meaningful impact any time soon.

I think the point is not that the individual should abandon efforts to modify their own habits. The point is that we should also be focusing just as much if not more energy on efforts to regulate and/or change industries that are responsible for more emissions by orders of magnitude. Some small but significant subset of the population going vegan, buying electric cars, or biking to work isn’t going to offset the biggest offenders.

The biggest offenders are fighting tooth and nail to be as profitable as possible at literally any cost. You can be damn sure that if what they produce becomes less desirable in one industry, they will try their hardest to get picked up in some other industry. They’ll have scientists finding some way to be useful somewhere and demonstrating it with research and lobbyists that will then get the government to mandate/subsidize it so that they make as much money as possible.

I’ve personally tried to “vote with my wallet” but industries have found ways to green-wash their products to give the impression that choosing their products would be the responsible choice when in reality it is not. Ensuring that your spending only goes to companies making an honest effort to do all they can to be carbon neutral or environmentally friendly is more than a full time job at this point. The only way is to ensure that governing bodies dictate the behavior of these organizations and even individuals so that it is no longer up to the organization/individual to “do the right thing”.

Without proactive, strong government intervention we will be well, well, well beyond the point of no return by the time “voting with our wallets” and “modifying our behaviors” changes industries and society enough to have a significant impact.

I want to avoid enshitification, and enshitification is more or less the ultimate goal of those who own reddit. This isn’t the first time they’ve tried to extract value from the site with utter disregard for users and moderators. If they didn’t get their way this time, they’ll just try again later. Perhaps more politely or more slowly, but the writing is on the wall. Has been for a while.