My take on this is that gold points was a method to drive digital purchases over physical media.

Nintendo gets all the revenue and don’t have to share with retailers, also digital is a lot cheaper then physical media to produce and distribute.

Now in 2025 digital numbers are so high that they no longer feel the incentive is worth it’s cost.

Also I would personally reserve the term “anti-consumer” for other more sinister things then removing a free perk or bonus… Nintendo have lots of practices that fall under this term, I don’t feel this is one.

Especially since they are giving quite a lot of room for you to spend whatever gold points you have on your account. Anti consumer would be outright refusing to cash in the point right away.

I was just thinking the other day that the plot of the matrix would make a lot more sense now.

The ai is running a simulation of the 90 to keep growing because everything after that is tainted with internet memes and increasing amount of ai slop.

It’s fascinating. If you have to spend huge amounts money and effort on monitoring and scewing public opinion… Perhaps it is time for some fucking introspection…(I know the biggest bastards in this system are incapable of that… But still…)

I use a notepad in many meeting at work to not be a complete pain in the ass.

If I write it down it’s not lost, and if it’s actually a good point I can bring it up at a good time or circle back to it.

America. Trying to emulate every aspect of the game Monopoly.

I guess other chance cards are next since the “get of jail free” card is implemented…

If I own all the streets we don’t need to bother with that tedious trading of properties.

I mean, its frustrating as heck how all this is going down.

But releasing something that can be preserved and saved in archives all over the world is better then all records and documents just disappearing.

Oh absolutely, I was mainly targeting the notion that the way “legit” companies distribute the profits is somehow more fair.

If anything these markets show what the actual cost of production is, so it shows how much profit could have been distributed to those actually producing the goods. (Including designers, factory workers etc)

A lot more people could have sustainable incomes instead of CEOs getting their third yacht…

Look, it’s a funny and ironic turn of events and my comment mainly tried to expand upon why this evokes this emotional response from some people.

Also, I don’t think most Americans identify with the shady practices of corporations either, so equating a undoubtedly shady history on copyright with the stance of all Chinese people everywhere is a bit… 🤔

As others have mentioned it’s also not accidental that the outrage is at the Nintendo store specifically. There is a lot of bad blood between the Chinese and the Japanese.

Yes, because that is where all the profit goes in Western companies, and not the CEO, upper management and stockholders…

You are not wrong in assuming that exploited labor is being under compensated, but different models of labor exploitation aside, people actually making value are not the people reaping the benefits.

As if random internet outrage ever cared about getting the fundamental details correct, when there is rage to be had.

I think the cultural theme of the game is more reason for the “anger” than the gameplay formula.

Its based on the most famous Chinese mythological story / fairytale about the Monkey King Wukong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_King

I have not deep dived into it, but I think it’s a treasured and well known story in China, and I assume a lot of Chinese people are proud of their mythology being a successful story outside of China as well.

This is also due to the size of traffic these days.

Originaly (if we say, take early html as a starting point) it was mostly text, then later a few images.

These days a simple webpage needs large amounts of code and data just to load. So packets having to get to you in a roundabout way doesn’t just make the page take a little longer to load, it will most likely break the page.

But the infrastructure and ways of communication is really hard to take down and except for the few nations that have complete control over their own network, it is nearly impossible to break down communication completely. You would just need to rely on simpler data structures.

As others have stated fewer isp’s and core infrastructure providers do make the global network a bit more vulnerable today. And sites and services that lots of people consider “the internet” can be (at least for a while) taken down/offline.

I was actually prepared for the Forbes article to be the type of article it criticizes. I’d say the title is under selling the article, and I bet the downvotes are making the same assumption I was.

I also think the title of article is intentionally made to target the people that actually needs to read the Forbes being critical of yet a nother idiotic attempt by other media outlets to villify gaming.

Yea

One often overlooked strength of the E133 is actually as a Midi sequencer. It has very high amount of tracks and high recording resolution for sequencing midi tracks compared to any other midi sequencer out there.

If I could have recorded midi live during performance with it, I probably wouldn’t have bought my korg SQ-64

Most TE products are definitely extremely priced. I’m not getting pissed about it though. There is obviously a market for them and there is little in direct competition when it comes to size/form factor + feature set.

That being said, not worth it for me. Would rather buy one of my big dream synths for that price.

I have the Ep133 and while it has its quirks and limits, it’s a fun device at a lot more reasonable price.

I think the main reason is that StarCraft sprites were based on 3d models so either they can be made higher definition by working from the original assets or they simply upscale better.

Wc1 and 2 mainly uses hand drawn pixel art sprites, and it looks like they have gone with the “crude upscale + retouch” approach. Makes them look like the super scale filters lots of people used on emulators back in the day.

Honestly I think original art and a solid crt filter is the way to go with old Pixel classics. But i know this is a divisive position.

Good tip. Many devices have built inn Midi interface capabillities. This is a good hack for those who want to use a daw or computer sequencer with midi devices as well, without a dedicated midi interface.

Virtual environments are really not viable for music production. Latency and other inconsistensies makes it a no-go.

High level Music production requires very low audio and input latency in addition to consistent and 100% accurate sound reproduction.

A virtual environment is a wildcard here that I at least would not bother trying to make work. (Not saying it can’t be done, just saying it would potentially be a big headache and extremely conditioned on spesific hardware, drivers and configuration settings.)