emilia ✨
@lazerwalker
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Experimental games, interactive art, OSS tools. Gaming advocacy lead @microsoft / @xbox . @roguelike_con . disabled (LC + ME/CFS), queer, neurodivergent
she/her 🏳️⚧️ 💕
Joined February 2009
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✨ hey, I’m Emilia! I’ve been in/around games for 10+ yrs
I make experimental games with novel interfaces. I’ve shipped commercial games and researched
@medialab
I do games advocacy at MS — I run events (like
@roguelike_con
), teach, and build OSS tools
#WhatAGameDevLooksLike
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I'm still reeling today at learning that Elon Musk didn't actually "found" Tesla, he was an early investor and post-Series A employee who retroactively strong-armed his way into a "founder" title through politics, money, and multiple legal battles.
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@apple
is removing a few of my old games b/c they have “not been updated in a significant amount of time”
Games can exist as completed objects! These free projects aren’t suitable for updates or a live service model, they’re finished artworks from years ago.
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it’s called “castlevania” because it’s a metroidvania set in a castle
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“Every time I see a tweet with this image, it’s extremely popular”
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You've gotta hand it to Unity for single-handedly causing the entire games industry to completely waste at least a day of productivity
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are you a badass enough game dev to walk the tightrope of having your game classified as "gambling" by Unity Software Inc but not by the US government
Haha the Unity pricing shit doesn't apply to developers using it for gambling purposes what the christ
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The ways that ML encodes preexisting racial biases in a single image.
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You know a dev team has created a 10/10 game world and LiveOps strategy when a “we did it everyone, good job!” tweet is the most fucking ominous thing possible
You did it, Helldivers. Operation Swift Disassembly was a success! With the bots eradicated and bugs contained, the galaxy is free once more.
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We did it, we memory-holed a disease whose acute infection kills as many people as died in 9/11 each week and is the third largest cause of death, beating out “every type of cancer combined”. Those numbers are both undercounted and don’t reflect deaths caused by long COVID.
Mark it down for the history books —
National Emergency on COVID-19: March 13, 2020-April 10, 2023
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A totally normal and healthy answer to the question "What are your thoughts about unionization in the gaming industry?" in the GDC State of the Game Industry survey
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For friends who don’t play Destiny: it’s hard to overstate how much Lance Reddick leaned into being part of the community. He clearly played and loved the game, and would frequently record & post fan dialogue in-character. His relationship with the game and players felt genuine.
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AOC is having hbomberguy and Pokimane explain how nationalized health care works in the UK and Canada for an audience of nearly half a million young people.
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Love the people popping in to valiantly defend the helpless ego-centric union-busting billionaire.
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People against People against
inhumane work transphobic media
conditions
🤝
not buying
Cyberpunk 2077
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while you're engaged in "weird game dev man spews anti-vax conspiracies" discourse, I'm focused on "weird game dev man falls in love with his sexy lady AI who gets shut down for violating OpenAI terms of service"
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To spill more ink:
* It isn't viable for me to spend multiple days updating each of a few free small games I built in ~2014.
* MS puts in technical effort to let you run 30-yr-old Win95 apps on ARM Windows devices. This is a platform policy decision, not a technical one.
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There's a 50% chance at any given moment today that inside my head I'm repeating an exasperated cry of "ma quiche!!"
you don’t need to speak french to understand every word
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Bandcamp felt like one of the last-standing bastions (along with Itch) of the idea that a service built to support artists could do so as a small self-sustaining company with no aims of VC-funded hockey-stick growth. Whatever happens post-acquisition, that loss hurts.
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Most of the games I’ve shipped are no longer playable, because I tend to build on top of experimental VC-funded platforms and that’s just the way things go. I’m used to the reason being “the platform company stopped existing”, not “the company thinks old things are gauche”
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My statewide ban on teaching the history of structural racism is raising a lot of questions I am not legally allowed to answer because of my statewide ban on teaching the history of structural racism
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The thing about long COVID is, as a game designer who knows humans' intuition around probability is fundamentally skewed in favor of assuming the best outcome, "a disease with mild/no symptoms but a 20% chance of chronic disability" is just about the optimal way to fuck people up
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"If you rewrite something by replacing every single word with a synonym, is it the same piece of writing?"
- the Ship of Thesaurus
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Fleets are accessible via API after their 24-hour "expiration", and it doesn't trigger a read receipt.
So... apparently privacy and security teams also didn't get to do a basic 101-level audit before this shipped?
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I've gotta give elon credit, "dril keeps changing his display name to lose the blue check (on advice from Keith Olbermann), but elon's minions keep forcing it back onto his account" is a 10/10 plot beat
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Muslim people repeatedly praising an Assassin’s Creed game for thoughtful, detail-oriented, positive representation is not something I expected to see in a million years. You love to see it.
Muslim prayer is composed of prescribed repetitive cycles of bows and prostrations, called rak'aat. During each, we recite parts of the Quran as we bow and prostrate in between.We face Qibla while doing this, the direction of Makka. Where is Makka? South west, where he's facing❤️
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Have you ever built a Twine or browser game and struggled to figure out how to sell it on Steam, or protect it from breaking browser API changes?
I built a free no-code tool to automatically turn your browser game into native Windows and Mac apps!
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I’m so tired of web3. Setting aside the scams and the environmental concerns, the idea that we can escape the failings of late-stage capitalism by turning more things into economic tokens is such a fundamentally misguided view of what forms of ownership are valuable and why.
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All you need to know about Netflix’s priorities comes from the quoted letter from the CEO:
“[Chapelle’s] last special, Sticks & Stones, also controversial, is our most watched, stickiest, and most award winning stand-up special to date.”
Netflix suspends trans employee who tweeted about Dave Chappelle special
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One last point: I’ve had games removed from the Play Store for spurious reasons, and I was happy to put an APK on
@itchio
.
The problem isn’t Apple’s App Store policies (flawed as they are) as much as a pure walled garden isn’t appropriate for a general-purpose computing platform
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hey narrative design students, today’s lesson in environmental storytelling
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pouring one out for all of the therapists who are going to have to learn from their games industry clients this week what a 'game engine' is
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I'm looking to hire an engineer with at least 5 years of SwiftUI experience. Must be willing to relocate to San Francisco.
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@SultanReina
At MIT, you need 4 PE credits to graduate, and if you do them in archery, fencing, pistol, and sailing they give you a “pirate certificate”
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Live GMs used to be exceedingly common in MMOs and MUDs, the canonical death of Morpheus in the Matrix universe happening via a live Matrix Online GM performance being maybe the best-known example
You love when a modern live service title actually learns from the past.
'We have an actual person with the title of Game Master': A single Helldivers 2 dev named Joel is pulling the strings on its galactic war like an all-powerful D&D dungeon master, war will become 'more and more sophisticated over time.'
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I just saw someone say they're looking for work in "IoS". I'm pretty sure they meant iOS, but I'm enjoying imagining someone whose professional field of expertise is the Internet of Shit.
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code specifically only creates value "out of thin air" if you wilfully ignore that we build on top of a century of scientific and engineering development, incomprehensibly massive hardware production chains, and untold amounts of shared infrastructure
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An OSS Blender plugin that just lets you drop Mario from Mario 64 (character controller, physics, collision, etc) into any Blender project. What.
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Unity saying “we charge per install, capped at 4% of revenue” instead of “we take 4% of revenue above $1m” is so funny and needlessly complicated.
It’s also so funny they said “well, Unreal charges 5%, so let’s beat them by 1%”.
They’re not playing 4D chess.
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Don't cheer Stallman being gone just because he said some particularly horrible things the past few days.
Cheer that we've finally pushed someone out of the community who has driven countless women away from tech for literal decades.
We shouldn’t
#cancelstallman
because his ideas are abhorrent.
We should do it because he has acted in abhorrent ways,
deliberately & consistently,
over 30 years,
despite repeated feedback,
& because in so doing he’s pushed countless women, girls, & others out of software.
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You absolutely love to see Columbia’s Palestine protests recognize that the ongoing pandemic is also a critical leftist issue
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If your fingers are loose, you'll get the goose!
Built using
@azure
Custom Vision Service. Tutorial + blog post coming soon! (🔈on!)
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Also kindly ignore the CDC data suggesting that long COVID massively increases the risk of the two biggest causes of death, even among the vaccinated
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I broke this AI ethics demo with my complex moral quandary
Introduce our new preprint—Delphi: Towards Machine Ethics and Norms
✨Delphi is a commonsense moral model with a robust performance of language-based moral reasoning on complicated everyday situations.
✨Ask Delphi demo at:
(1/N)
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Netflix CEO: Content doesn’t matter and doesn’t affect real-world sentiment towards marginalized groups
Netflix CEO in the same letter: Look at all the movies we have about minorities! That representation is important and we deserve points for the positive impact it has!
Ted Sarandos Doubles Down on Dave Chappelle Defense: ‘Content Doesn’t Directly Translate to Real-World Harm’ (EXCLUSIVE)
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Okay, this is pretty wild that you can run a full PalmOS emulator on an iPhone as a PWA ()
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An underappreciated irony to the Andrew Tate story is he was only able to pull off such a self-own because Elon unbanned him
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To be even clearer: this is funny because Jason is a Weird Dude, but it’s also extremely grating that a hardcore libertarian is claiming moral outrage that a private business is choosing to refuse him service because he won’t follow their clear (and reasonable) rules.
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If you needed concrete proof that tech workers benefit from unions
On April 20th, Kickstarter management announced that they were planning to lay off ~40% of our workforce. After two weeks of bargaining, we negotiated a severance package that we are incredibly proud of.
Our statement:
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To be clear, "OpenAI shut Samantha down" means "OpenAI gave Jason a reasonable list of changes necessary to stop users from doing shit like acting out sexually explicit scenes with children" (which was at one point an issue AI Dungeon had) and he refused
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If you are a NASA doctor who performs surgery in space, which new iPhone should you buy?
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hooting and hollering that a bluecheck unironically recreated the dril candles tweet but it’s “I spent $1500 on Hooters delivery”.
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Every year, everyone always has (valid) reasons to be mad at GDC, but I don't know if they'll ever top "mislead everyone, including summit organizers, to think they're running an online conference, charge $650 for virtual tickets, and then livestream less than 10% of talks"
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But they were all of them deceived, for a seventh up was forged in secret
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It's hard to overemphasize the extent to which so much of the problems in the games industry, a creative industry with more revenue than just about every other creative industry combined, is not "challenging economic headwinds" but fucking dogshit management.
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We need everyone yelling at full volume “current COVID tests are useful to confirm your symptoms are COVID, but not to prove you don’t have it” and “the current vaccines don’t stop you from getting it, they just reduce acute hospitalizations”
A room full of people who were all vaccinated AND all tested beforehand, and yet 17 out of 18 got Covid.
This is why masks are essential at ALL times around folks who are vulnerable (which includes in all public places, b/c vulnerable people need to grocery shop too.)
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Oh wow, I muted notifications on this before it really took off.
No Soundcloud, but, uh, trans rights are human rights. And if you order delivery right now, tip appropriately to reflect the fact they're literally risking their lives to bring you a hamburger!
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The largest Canadian fishery is now 50% owned by First Nations people.
(And in a moment of joyful irony, the shitheads who burnt down Mi’kmaq fisheries and fishing vessels likely now have them as their boss)
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As people continue to formulate their alternate social media plans, a reminder that Substack actively funds right-wing and transphobic hate speech. Not just “free speech!!” content moderation policies but actively giving 6-7 figure publishing deals to hate speech peddlers.
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@DGolr
@FaithNaff
@TorificallyTori
The goal of this PSA isn’t to change TERF behavior, it’s to stop allies from unintentionally using (and memetically spreading) TERF language that demeans and dehumanizes in subtle ways
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diagnosing whether someone suffers from Chronic Online by telling them the statement "ana mardoll works at lockheed martin" and seeing if it melts their brain or if they have no response
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Dude wasn’t getting paid on Cameo or whatever, he clearly truly loved the game, the fans, and his work.
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I turn 30 today.
At 29, I realized I was trans, pulled the plug on my failed startup, and moved continents for a (kickass!) job.
Bring on the next decade, y’all 🎉💕
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*Please* give a shit about us. This isn't a distraction from fascism, this *is* the fascism.
This is horrible. The GOP just released a national anti-trans bill. It will not pass this year, but this shows their intentions if they win.
HB8170 would force teachers to:
- Misgender trans students.
- Out trans kids to their parents.
- Withhold affirming trans kids in therapy.
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See also: people assuming that just because nobody they know who's had COVID is experiencing long COVID symptoms, that number can't possibly be as high as 20%. Because, again, humans fundamentally don't understand probability at an intuitive level.
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@benedict_rs
What is the ideal environment to learn and improve at an art form? You need a safe space where you can feel free to fail, a group of trusted peers who'll push you to do better, an audience excited for your work to encourage you. Fanfic is better at this than most writing MFAs.
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being accused of trolling zoomers when I try to explain the most popular website was literally called “expertsexchange”
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(the author of the original tweet is a scam artist, and if you are trying to break into coding please ignore everything they say and stay far away from L*mbda School.)
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@selectric401
It is, in fact, a literal translation! the katakana at the end says “nyashu poteto”
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I've recommended Cloudflare's free services for years, despite their free speech absolutism.
Hearing them explicitly say "we regret banning The Daily St_rmer and 8ch_n" is deeply fucked. Check out
@lizthegrey
's livestream VODs for advice on migrating to alternate providers.
Cloudflare launched nearly twelve years ago. Over that time, our set of services has become much more complicated. With that complexity we have developed policies around how we handle abuse of different features Cloudflare provides
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This is the way to announce a celebrity's transition without deadnaming them, BTW
Oscar-nominated star of 'Juno', Elliot Page has announced that he is transgender.
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I deleted a long rambling thread about Arkansas in favor of something simpler:
Give the trans people in your life some love and a huge break right now. They’re most likely not okay.
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@unormal
tbf this is 100% consistent with them just solely thinking about f2p and forgetting anyone else exists. "what if someone uses a mobile streaming platform for their hypercasual game to avoid paying us? better add a streaming clause"
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Trying to describe to non-game-dev coder friends "Epic hired the Haskell guy to create a new programming language, the two things it's replacing are a fork of C++ with automatic memory management and a Max/MSP-style visual data-flow coding environment that people fucking love”
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I’ve now seen ~15 tweets from Basecamp employees today announcing that they’ve quit, including the heads of marketing and design. That’s ~25% of the company, and I assume it’s not the full final tally.
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do you think the bioshock infinite flat tomatoes and the ff xiv low-poly wine grapes ever explored each others' bodies
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Gonna go ahead and preempt the next wave of game engine discourse
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The game industry's weird ~thing~ about nitpicking who gets to be in the credits and who doesn't is so bizarre. A studio being weird about not including everyone without question is a huge red flag for what other things it suggests about how management views the workers.
Everyone who worked on a game should be included in the credits. That includes interns, people who left the team or studio, or people who joined temporarily to help the game ship.
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Choosing to not give a large company your money (e.g. Activision Blizzard) is ineffective. They won’t notice or care.
What *does* make a difference is actively supporting studios whose values align with yours, especially small ones where even a small sales bump is meaningful.
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This product should not exist.
Maybe you truly need to know your users' genders or pronouns.
So ask them.
A biased system (that explicitly encodes a gender binary, no less!) is actively harmful to anyone who doesn't go by a common gendered Western name.
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Feeling weird about seeing a bunch of people recommend a product that’s “open-source Calandly” when Calendly is a Black-owned business and the OSS clone is a VC-funded for-profit startup with an all-white founding team
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can i get somebody with a humanities PhD to unpack the philosophical ramifications of specifically prompting GPT-4 to produce text that mimics the 5-years-ago aesthetic of "humans passing off hand-written text as having been produced by generative AI"
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Re: "you make it exactly once" mistakes, ~6mo after shipping the web version of Words With Friends, we got an angry email from an Opera user outraged that our "unsupported browser" error told them to "get a better browser". Don't write placeholder copy you don't want on prod :)
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narrator: it turns out 81.9% of the company had important work to do
15/ Anyway - 99.9% of the company has important work to do, so if you can stop distracting us that be great and we will get back to work building cool stuff!
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wow, really just posting their hatred of functional programmers on main
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@bitandbang
I can't find the exact article I read earlier, but talks about the legal agreement where it was officially decided there were now 5 founders instead of 2. The Wikipedia article also has a bunch.
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Fishtopher says we are still in a pandemic 💜
mr lover loves all of you and wants you to protect yourself and others by masking!!! (he is not wearing a mask bc hes at home inside and is also a cat)
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@unormal
Assuming efforts like SteamVR and the Steam Deck don’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things (now that Proton exists, other maintainers would pick up the mantle) I think it looks a lot like the fragmentation we’re seeing with Twitter vs Bsky vs Masto vs whatever
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I’m not the right person to expand on this reading, but the implicitly-expressed web3 value that a commons is only equitable and community-owned if there is explicit fractional economic ownership is overwhelmingly a colonialist mindset
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The more accurate framing is “you can ship a Godot game on console, but it will cost more than Unity”
That will change. After W4 ships their middleware, porting shops will be easier/cheaper to hire
But it’s more complicated today than “fact debunked, Godot can ship to consoles”
"Godot can't do consoles because it's open source" is a very widespread myth. Here is a 🧵of
#GodotEngine
games that have been launched on
#NintendoSwitch
and/or
#Xbox
👇
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Woah. The Fearless Girl statue issue is (like most things) far more complex and nuanced that I thought:
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