If only Amazon didn’t need to waste a billion dollars on a failed LotR series.

I didn’t like how much they argued during the first season. The book crew were much more professional and acted like they already knew each other for many years. Which they did.

TV Holden and Amos still had their moments. Still some of the best characters on television.

Only 5%. That seems to be a rather optimistic take.

I was on lemmy.film.

Terraria has always been $10. Stardew Valley: $15. Undertale: $10. Braid was $15 when it launched, and even then, people were bitching about the price. So, the price tag has always been in that range since the first indie game launched.

I think you’re ignoring the incredible amount of oversaturation in the industry. Games are everywhere. I could throw a thousand sticks into the wilderness and it would smack into a thousand different game studios, all working for years on their big hit that (in their eyes) would make them millions of dollars.

But, people don’t have time to even play their own Steam backlog. On average, people buy more games than they even have time to play, and that’s not even counting the sheer amount of movies, music, TV shows, YouTube videos, whatever that is competing for people’s time. If they are playing video games, then they are not watching or listening to other media.

It’s not just the gaming industry. The entire creative industry is propped up on the backing of a 98% failure rate, or sometimes even a 99.99% failure rate. The lucky few get to spout off their survivorship biases, under the bones of former companies and individuals, crunched under the weight of oversaturation.

Will do! One of my favorites as well, which is part of the reason why I’m working on this thing.

OMG, this is like the best/worst time to be working on a two-hour video about the first game. I guess I better get cracking on finishing it up.

It’s kinda of a generational issue, though, because people are borne into this new world with new habits. It’s no longer paying attention to a single piece of media on a TV, but instead, turning on something in the background, while watching or reading something else on a phone.

I don’t really understand it, even as somebody with ADD. If you don’t like what’s on TV, change it or move to a different room while you read on your phone.

Even with places like YouTube, where LUFS level is strictly defined, there’s sooo many creators who have no earthly idea what LUFS is, which levels YouTube enforces, and how it corrects for it. They post their videos with quiet narration and wonder why viewers get annoyed at all of the turning up and turning down of volume on each video.

See, YouTube enforces LUFS on videos by reducing volume on loud videos down to -14 LUFS. But, it doesn’t do anything to quiet videos. If you ever bring up the “Stats for Nerds” and look at the “Volume / Normalized” value, you might see something like “content loudness -5.9dB”. That means it’s -5.9dB quieter than it should be, and the creator should have amplified the video to normalize the volume levels before uploading it to YouTube.

So, you end up with a video that’s about -6dB quieter, and you have to turn up the volume to actually hear the narration. Then your TV or whatever device you’re watching will get blasted by the next video, which is properly normalized at around 0dB, and you’re forced to turn the damn volume back down.

YouTube has finally started to acknowledge the problem by introducing the Stable Volume feature. But, really, creators should educate themselves on how to properly mix their audio. I know editing is hard and there’s so many moving parts to deal with for YouTube uploads. But, audio quality is everything in a YouTube video. Nobody cares about whatever random B-roll video game footage, or PowerPoint slide presentation, or watermarked stock images, or videos of you presenting the narration with a lapel mic tied to a tree branch you’re using on the video side. It’s all about narration and audio quality.

Does any of this include improving the front page to actually serve content that people want? Because PeerTube has a serious problem with advertising what people want to watch on the Home and Discovery pages. PeerTube isn’t going to work as a replacement for YouTube until people will be able to find new channels that they like.

Is there even an algorithm behind any of this mess, or does it just push random channels?

Sparse gameplay, tied together with lots and lots of implied worldbuilding in a lore book that contains most of the story. The gameplay was okay when you got to it, but there was far too much written story locked up, instead of “show, don’t tell”.

Also, the game wants you to finish six tournaments before you get any sort of decent ending.

This is why large corps often still use decades old software that may be terrible by that point, but impossible to move away from.

And sometimes those large corps slowly die off because of those decisions. Technology moves so fast that you can’t afford to be a dinosaur using 20 year old software.

I really liked the first season, and they had a lot of episodes in that one. I feel like that was the most explicit season because they were really trying to sell the whole Love, Death, and Robots angles. Kind of wished they didn’t temper that down with the rest of the seasons.

The second season was kinda meh, but there were some good ones here and there (Pop Squad, Snow in the Desert). I was disappointed at how few episodes there were. I still plan on doing a video on those two episodes, though.

Third season seemed to ramp back up with good episodes again (Bad Travelling, The Very Pulse of the Machine, Swarm, Jibaro).

All of the studios shifted to the Secret Levels (on Amazon) for video game related animation stories, and most of those were really good. Warhammer episode was fucking epic.

LD+R S4 isn’t bad so far. Spider Rose and 400 Boys were pretty good. I had to do a double-take when I recognized the Investor race in Spider Rose, which was another Bruce Sterling short story in the Schismatrix universe (same one as Swarm), and they actually reference the Shaper/Mechanist factions this time.

I think it needed more episodes, though. It feels like S2 again, and they are wasting their time on these goofy episodes (the mini claymation stuff, anything related to Three Robots). Golgotha felt like cheating, considering most of it was real acting and light on animation. And that Red Hot Chili Peppers music video was cringe AF.

Also, including Mr (Pedophile-Enabler) Beast in one of the episodes was not a good move.

Didn’t stop me from switching to Linux for my entire workflow. Industry standard is just a phrase. It doesn’t truly mean anything when viable and real alternatives exist.

With GIMP 3 and DaVinci Resolve 20 out there, this seems like a very bad idea.

Something something slips through your fingers.

Not yet, but I plan on trying it out soon.

I never really understood the hate for GIMP 2. What didn’t you like about it?

Proud user of GIMP and DaVinci Resolve. These tools work great, and I really don’t see a reason why I would want to switch to anything else.

Fuck Adobe.

What has ACTUALLY decimated my industry is the overvaluation and inflation of everything in the economy

The real answer, like every creative industry over the past 200+ years, is oversaturation.

Artists starve because of oversaturation. There is too much art and not enough buyers.

Musicians starve because of oversaturation. And music is now easier than ever to create. Supply is everywhere, and demand pales in comparison. I have hundreds of CC BY-SA 4.0 artists in a file that I can choose for use in my videos, because the supply is everywhere.

Video games are incredibly oversaturated. Throw a stick at Steam, and it’ll land on a thousand games. There’s plenty of random low-effort slop out there, but there’s also a lot of passionate indie creators trying to make their mark, and failing, because the marketing is not there.

Millions of people shouting in the wind, trying to make their voices heard, and somehow become more noticed than the rest of the noise. It’s a near-impossible task, and it’s about 98% luck. Yet the 2% of people who actually “make it” practice survivorship bias on a daily basis, preaching that hard work and good ideas will allow you to be just like them.

It’s all bullshit, of course. We don’t live in a meritocracy.

Stable Diffusion does a lot already, for static pictures. I get good use out of Eleven for voice work, when I want something that isn’t my own narration.

I’m really looking forward to all of these new AI features in DaVinci Resolve 20. These are actual useful features that would improve my workflow. I already made good use of the “Create Subtitles From Audio” feature to streamline subtitling.

Good AI tools are out there. They are just invisibility doing the work for people that pay attention while all of the billionaires make noise about LLMs that do almost nothing.

I compare it to CGI. The very best CGI are the effects you don’t even notice. The worst CGI is when you try to employ it in every place that it’s not designed for.

Getting the settings right for video is critically important, too. Scaling needs to be done with the nearest neighbor pixel method, not more modern blend methods.