1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly treasured addition to any childhood. (Because they know every dollar there will throw off a thousand in merchandising and Disney World tickets)
2. Weird creative stuff. Pixar is in this bucket, imo. Soul and Inside Out and such were amazing, amazing movies but they're obviously not going to put merchandise on the shelves. But they still sell out theaters and help build (maintain) brand prestige.
3. An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money.
So while (imo, this is subjective obviously) I think 1 and 2 are roughly as good as they ever were (and remember that Disney almost died multiple times due to not actually being very good for decade long stretches), 3 doesn't care about that and if some tactic with DVD supply or whatever will help juice sales, they'll do it because it's their job.
Disney gets a lot of flack, and rightly so! They're a big reason why copyright in the US is so fucked up, and I do hate them for that. But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.
This is the main thing I think of when I think of Disney (I think of other things as well, but none of them are positive). That's why I give them the fewest dimes I possibly can.
Counterpoint: they saturate the market with so many MCU, Star Wars and other high-profile (Avatar!) content that it is all but impossible for anyone else to get enough people into cinemas or onto streaming.
Like, people only have so much money and time to set aside for entertainment, cinema is one hell of an expense as it is [1] and now, when alone the MCU pumps out four movies a year, there is no budget left for anyone but them. Streaming? The same. There's an insane amount of high quality content on Disney+, and they got all the "cool and popular" stuff.
On top of that, Disney's treatment of, say, VFX studios is fucking up the market there as well: the more market share Disney has on the client side, the less choice studios and other suppliers have. Either they accept the sometimes disgusting behavior from Disney (especially ridiculous deadlines) or they don't have other clients and shut down.
Between the Mouse just gobbling up everything they can, Netflix pushing for a washed-down uniform standard [2] and small cinemas closing down left and right, entertainment is in for dark, dark times. Disney needs to be broken up and since the movie industry didn't get the hint from the music industry that rightsholders should take care of offering access to multiple streaming services, government has to mandate that as well. The lack of competition hurts everyone.
[1] a typical MCU movie for two people will be anything from 50-100$, including tickets, 3D surcharge, long-duration surcharge, popcorn, soda, parking/public transport
[2] https://www.vice.com/de/article/ake3j5/warum-sieht-beim-netf...
I don't know if this applies to Disney given they just launched a massive streaming service containing almost all of their back catalogue.
Google actively forgets everything in order to encourage new content and paying customers.
Not to mention, many products hit their peak of usability, and then the publishers go ahead and make it a little worse each year just so some product person can look like they did something.
Even Roald Dahl is having his works censored and rewritten.
I believe its due to reaching "Peak Content".
If things are more localized, you can build up more momentum as a home team kind of competitor and gain skills.
If you have to compete on an even playing field with everybody else in the world from the word go, it wildly distorts things and produces really weird results. It's still optimized, but it's optimized for a mass audience that is SO huge, and applies more pressure on anything that doesn't comply.
That's what the Angry Birds thing is like. The original has to compete on the grounds of 'produce more money', not just proliferate. As such it's cannibalizing stuff that produces more money.
But it does make movie selection a little easier -- if it's a remake, there's a 90% chance that it's going to be terrible.
that's because they'd rather you sign up for Disney+
Something like 70% of our revenue came from 2% of our users. Super bleak and helped contribute to my realization that there's just not reliable money to be made as a solo iOS dev anymore. Better to collect a paycheck building someone else's app.
I will admit that paying like $15 four years ago for Stardew Valley on iOS felt a bit weird, but $15 is pretty cheap considering that it's the full game. It doesn't make you buy gems every twenty minutes, or watch an ad every time you plant six crops, or spam your friend to share your status for some extra gold.
It's a full game, and you pay a nominally-high-but-ultimately-reasonable price for it.
Similarly, The Binding of Isaac is also a pretty good iOS game. I don't remember how much I paid, but it was slightly higher than average, but it doesn't spam me with any microtransaction crap.
PinOut comes to mind as an example, I'm sure there are many others: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pinout/id1108417718
In-App Purchases
PinOut Premium $2.99It just doesn't work, people don't want to buy stuff when on mobile, they just don't. The price made no difference in sales either, could be high, low, 99c, whatever, people just ignore your game and get only the free versions.
On Android this is even worse than iOS, my startup could had SOME sales on iOS, on Android we had millions of downloads and literally zero sales.
If I'm the developer who wants users to have any semblance of try-before-you-buy, the free category (with an IAP for "Premium") is the only option. Which is a real shame.
Funny enough given this article, they have Angry Birds 1 remastered.
It’s the only games I’ll let my six year old play on her iPad. It’s disgusting to me that her first experiences playing games would be one’s trying to get her to buy stuff or watch ads.
Highly recommend "Slay the Spire", "Dead Cells" and any of Trese Brothers games. Of the free games "Vampire Survivors" is really good and not intrusive with ads (I think it's some kind of altruistic business model).
No ads, no micro transactions, very high quality games.
I'm really worried since it occurred to me that going forwards the only way to really change what any computer device does/can do is through app stores. No more programming languages; specially not 'open ones' for your own computer hygiene (or safety).
heck, at this moment I'm worried about a future (I hope it stays a future plan forever) agendas against teaching people to read and write. Now that computers can engage in verbal (oral) communication is just a matter of time.
But, when the gameplay is so absurdly easy you can beat everything with one finger, all the levels are pointless, and most of screen real estate is dedicated to selling you gems or ability to resume playing level after losing it, it just does not make any sense. You have to seriously be mentally retarded to play it.
Just like that, any appearance of craft that went into the levels was shredded and they just feel AI-generated rather than a natural progression. In which case, because AI-generation is basically infinite, do I really care to beat all the levels? (Angry Birds 1 was a big game - 700 levels. Angry Birds 2? 3,080! But it still feels like they could just increase an integer in the code somewhere and get another 1,000.)
I remember playing Angry Birds with friends (not AB Friends) back in ~2012. It was so great when you knew or had figured out the best solution to a level and your friends didn't know how, or vice versa. Also, old Angry Birds was like 10 chapters of ~45 levels each, so if you were stuck in one chapter, you worked on another (and could maybe have the solution for one chapter while your buddy had another), rather than a straight-through "oh, I don't remember how to beat level 308." Randomized levels and the straight-through progression shreds that.
I haven't played Angry Birds since just after it came out, but couldn't you always beat everything with one finger? The entire control scheme was you dragged a little bird and let go, what would you use the second finger for?
That way, when a copyrighted work goes of market (or is no longer sold at a reasonable mass-market rate), there would be no penalty for redistributing it.
(Derivative works might need to be handled differently, since the above effectively invalidates the GPL, though not Apache or BSD)
Say, hypothetically, that I am the creator of a song, book, video game or whatever. One day, for purely selfish reasons that I don't need others to understand, I decide that I no longer want to offer my creation to others. Do I forfeit any and all rights over something that I personally produced; that I invented, designed, fabricated and brought into existence; just because I once offered it to others?
I know that the law takes a more social look at the issue. After a while creative works enter the public domain and copyright is no longer recognized. The timeline varies and has been extended. I think right now it is the life of the author plus 75 years or something like that because of copyrights held by corporations rather than individuals.
I don't know what the "right" length of time is. And for classics that have outlived the life of the creator and are "culturally significant" there is a broader discussion to be had.
Beyond that scenario, the principal that I come at this from is that I, as a creator, rightfully recognize and defend my own rights to the things that I pour a significant portion of myself and life into. I made it, it's mine and therefore others can GTFO even if they disagree with me.
Bill Waterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, had a similar view. In rare interviews he stated that the only audience he ever cared about was his wife. If he could make her laugh with the comics, that was all that mattered. Since retiring the comic he has held on to those rights very tightly. He has allowed a few reprints but otherwise does not license out the property much at all. He doesn't want any more Calvin & Hobbes works to be created. Agree or disagree, I recognize that as his right as the creator. You or I did not create Calvin & Hobbes, he did. It's his.
It's a business deal of sorts: we allow the copyright holder to have unusual and potent legal power for a limited time, in exchange for the work becoming public property when that time ends.
Does data deserve special rights in the first place? If I make a table and sell it I don't get to control whether the buyer sells it to someone else or lets someone else look at it and make their own identical table. Same for, say, a biscuit recipe. You might say there's a qualitative difference between those things and, for example, a book or a movie, but that difference only exists because we can't communicate our memories to each other. What if we could? I don't think what is morally right or wrong should depend on a technological inconvenience.
If you want to benefit from the temporary state-enforced monopoly on your works, you must submit to what the state/society determines are the fair conditions in exchange for said monopoly.
Nothing wrong with choosing not to engage in business. The problem arises when you want to stop people with the force of the government who want to plug the hole you've created.
It would seem like that naively, but we've seen that even stopping the copyright term from continually lengthening has been impossible. Making surface changes to copyright (that could easily be rolled back) will take as much or more effort than rebasing copyright on a clearer, more logical foundation that takes public benefit as a baseline. With a logical restructuring would come new arguments and slogans that might build up enough inertia to get it done.
Simply cutting back copyright length is hard to argue for, because the number you would be arguing to cut it back to is just as arbitrary as the number that the media industry would like to extend it to. Hell, I think that life of the author plus 70 years was chosen because it's biblical sounding: a biblical life is 70 years, so life plus 70 is a way of saying "children" without saying "children." For that reason, I don't think "one decade is plenty" is going to be an effective argument against life plus 70; the only thing a decade has going for it is that it's a round number and people are superstitiously attracted to round numbers.
It distresses me greatly that we've forgotten this so thoroughly that you see people actually saying out loud that copyright is a property right. It most certainly is not, and was never represented as such until fairly recently.
For the sake of profitability, I could imagine the gas station might choose to stop selling gas through pumps since those simply couldn't be as profitable.
So it's more like you having two gas stations next to each other - one with a price per gallon and nothing else, one with a more confusing user experience that yields more dollars per gallon of fuel than a fixed price.
I'm sure they've made significantly more money by going freemium with ads, but in doing so they also poisoned the well of mobile gaming. Everything now is Pay to Win. Despite there being genuinely impressive games on mobile (Asphalt racing for one), the mechanics of how the game actually works makes me not want to play it.
Differentiation between business models is also needlessly hard. Apps that are free with most features locked behind IAP, free with ads, and free for a limited time with subscription all look the same at first glance in the App Store and there's no way to filter on business model.
Ensuring existing AAA games run solidly on Linux, like Valve is working towards with Proton, seems to have a much greater impact.
Also, if anything I’d say the old, write-your-Xorg.conf-by-hand Linux desktop included more of these than the modern glossy one: Chromium B.S.U., Tux Racer, GNOME Robots (still in gnome-games I think), there were a ton of those. As well as xneko, xeyes and so on. Whereas on Windows you needed to look on computer magazine CDs and such to find the equivalent.
I wonder if this is simply a rebranding so that the original no longer appears for "Angry Birds" searches in the app store. Namely that subsequent versions make more $ per install, and having the original at a low price point is cannibalizing sales of the newer more profitable titles.
Higher-margin market, which means hope for up-selling.
When given the choice between working several hours at a job you don't like to pay for entertainment verses using a free option for entertainment that is just as good if not better, many people are choosing the former.
There are methods of profit maximization whose abstract functionality is basically the same, the only thing that changes are the parameters.
I sincerely believe administrative sciences tend to not make clear abstractions out of this, since that is... hard...
Here is another example:
If you asked 100 random 20 year olds in 1985 what "success" looks like. There is a high likelihood some would mention large house, BMW, pool in the back yard, large TV, executive at a large company.
If you did the same thing today you are much less likely to get that answer. Today you are much more likely to get millions of subscribers on YouTube or Instagram and no need for a full time job.
A decade later it is worse than anyone imagined, no real hits just a couple games from that earlier era because they’re the only ones you can play offline at all
if I'm missing some gems let me know!
But the new ones are just a piece of crap where the actual gameplay occupies the 5% of overall UI and the level design is boring as hell (levels look like somebody vomited them on the screen). It is basically how they put their child on altar and sacrificed it to Mammon.
I wanted my small children to get the Angry Birds experience but my youth memories were violated.
It kept working and being available through the 32 bit era. But was never updated for larger screens and was replaced with an ad ridden version.
Plants vs Zombies 2 was also much worse than the original because of ads and in app purchases.
That being said, they did “bring back” Angry Birds Classic to iOS as a one time 99 cents purchase.
I think the net effect has overall been detrimental for users and companies alike.
99p games should never have existed in the first place.
On the other hand, I find solace that we still have games like Elden Ring coming out that are a one-time purchase, finely crafted experience that manage to sell like gangbusters.
It's relatively silly that when they pull these games, there's very little way to get them back—see flappy bird, for instance. With classic game consoles, you still have the install/play media like discs and cartridges. With digital downloads, you don't—and if you do, you still need some sort of code or receipt signing to play, even if you have the binary.
That's not great—we're going to have games lost to time. Sure, maybe not Angry Birds for its cultural influence, but others? Definitely.
Guess there's little hope of their re-releasing Seasons, then? That's the only other one I'd pay money for (or, indeed, even play for free).
https://i.imgur.com/EcJugS8.png
Another loss for paying customers, another win for pirates.
"How to 'write' your first "hello world!" program"
step 1: find the "hello word!" app in the store
step 2: buy it
step 3: done! you're now 'programming' your device!!!
What a poor way to make an announcement
- low resolution image
- red flashy background full of noise
- blurry text
My eyes are still burning
