I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.
I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.
strictly in the context of the title alone, video games.
Video games are at an all time enshitified state. What are you going on about?! You must not be following the whole market.
i was referring to atari in the 80s
anway…
Yeah, video games went through an early enshitification cycle. Atari came out and was all the rage as people made games exploring what could be done, which attracted money, which attracted grifters as well as impatient executives. Between them, a lot of garbage got released to the point where the video games industry pretty much died. Nintendo revived it with the NES and their licensing program that meant someone there had to agree a game was at a certain level before they could even publish it.
Over time, the video games industry grew to the point where it is large enough to survive a wave of shitty games, even if those games are released by the ones normally expected to know what they are doing but don’t because MBAs come in with “optimizations” that ruin things, plus sometimes brag (or are otherwise obvious enough) about what thet are doing to the point where people turn against them.
So even though the video games industry has come up with new ways of enshitification that the 80s grifters would have creamed their pants over, there’s enough competition that understands that enough people don’t really want or like that to thrive without doing it.
What are you talking about? There are hundreds of great games being released, the gaming industry is a lot more than a couple of big corps.
they turned into slop for most of them.
Everyone and their dog is making games these days, so it’s very easy, if you’re choosy, to never have firsthand experience of a bad game anymore. The only thing holding us back is listening to adverts that over-promise and ever pre-ordering anything. We don’t need them anymore.
The indie game scene is thriving and while there’s a lot of crap out there, it’s not really what I’d consider enshitified.
On the other hand, AAA games and anything mobile is absolutely enshitified.
No Man’s sky and cyberpunk definitely fall into this
No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk offered a great service to entice users, then got advertisers on board as clients, then sucked the value out of what the users and clients received in order to extract maximum value?
Promoted something amazing, fell way short on launch, but instead of disappearing with the money, fixed the game, offered free dlc/updates and redeemed themselves.
Maybe not the definition of enshittification, but at least the games are well worth playing now. My kid and I have paid licenses for each game.
These comments don’t leave room for much hope…
That’s because no one’s actually answering OP’s question lol
Lemmy’s slowly approaching peak reddit Q&A format: “Where can I find X?” “X is stupid, use Y.”
I’ll see if I can invoke Cunningham’s Law, here -
No, I don’t think it happens. There’s not enough financial incentive to un-enshittify, and often the companies that turn their products to crap were bought/sold to investors. To un-enshittify the product, the new owners would have to care about a long term investment and actually spend time & energy to learn whatever business they just bought up. Just doesn’t make sense when their end goal is to quickly sell it for a profit, even if it means stripping the otherwise-healthy business for parts.
It happens, but it generally takes financial failure to drive off the people with pure money motives and yet still be alive enough for interested parties to keep it going out of actual interest and passion.
Video games
Had a huge crash around the Atari era due to an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published. Games were also extremely expensive then
Nintendo famously reversed this crisis with the introduction of the NES and their “Nintendo seal of quality”. Consumers were able to access a curated collection of quality games, and it really turned things around and basically launched the modern gaming industry
NES also introduced verification so you couldn’t just manufacture random games and take them to market without approval.
Walled gardens - sucky but sometimes genuinely useful to clean up messes and keep them from happening (aka Grandma on her iPhone)
Steam, too. It was originally unpopular DRM for Half-Life 2. It had a broken offline mode that could only be selected when already online. It had no meaningful customer service and people permanently lost their accounts with no avenue for appeal (and probably no human even involved).
It was originally unpopular DRM and a launcher for Counterstrike. I think Valve was trying to take a page out of Battle.net’s book. The Half Life 2 thing came afterwards, and if it weren’t for that Steam probably would have just been yet another failed footnote in gaming history.
Can someone make this happen with mobile games please?
We’re at the point where you can play all sorts of emulated games on mobile. There are near infinite bangers to play right now.
And best of all, even iOS has emulators now! For a while they were banned on the app store IIRC. Now there are pretty good emulators there.
I did not get very far with my first ever playthrough of Ocarina of Time personally. But I’ve played plenty of Pokemon Emerald over the years.
And I THINK there was a company out there trying to revive old mobile games that were actually good (think original Angry Birds) so they’d work on modern phones. I dunno if that took off sadly, though…
Apple did make an effort with Apple Arcade. The idea is it’s a curated list of decent indie games, none of which have monetization. But, you pay a monthly fee for them.
Not all of them Indie tbh, there are plenty of Arcade versions of popular games that normally have MTX or ads.
But yes, you also get some indie gems that normally are a one time purchase, and I believe some games specially developed for the Arcade.
Hilariously, Civ 7 is on there, but my phone has an A16 and it requires A17. And I stopped my sub a while ago
I remember the seal as a kid, I had no idea why they were doing that though. Thats a cool piece of history.
an overwhelming amount of shovelware being published
Who will save us now?
Indie games
The shovelware filling the stores by indie developers will save us? Ps Store always had some cheap mid, but they had effort put in, like ssarpbc (supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars) for 1$ on sale always later became rocket league.
No? The innumerable indie games that are actually good like the Outer Wilds, Stormworks, Hades, Eco, Highfleet, Beam.NG, Avorion, 7 Days to Die, Factorio, Dinkum, Deep Rock Galactic (is that one indie?), Derail Valley, Risk of Rain, and Barotrauma just to name a few.
If anybody wants to know just how bad the crash was, Atari buried about 700,000 game cartridges and consoles in a landfill in New Mexico after the release of the infamously bad ET game for the Atari. A game that supposedly had more cartridges manufactured than there were existing consoles for them to be played on at the time.
It was so bad that the home console effectively disappeared from the US market as investors and customers believed that the fad had run its course and companies went back to focusing exclusively on arcade cabinets until Nintendo came in about 3 years later and proved that there was still a market for home consoles. It was so bad that Nintendo changed the name of the NES for the Japanese market to the Famicom - advertising it as a “family computer” system, not a game console.
I have a copy of ET my dad got for my older brother when he was a kid. Dunno if it or the Atari even still work.
You should hang onto it. They dug up some of the ones that were buried a few years back as part of a documentary and sold some of them at auction while the rest were donated to museums for preservation.
I used to have an old shareware floppy of wolf3d as well.
Cable TV was replaced by early streaming, although that is now well on its way to enshitification too
That’s not the same thing.
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but cable didn’t improve which is what the question asks for
“How people watch media at home” improved
Domino’s pizza turned itself around.
I am pleasantly surprised by the quality shift. Managed to unseat my local pizza joint
I mean if you’re talking about in a case as limited as RAM, SSDs and HDDs have gone through supply shortages and price increases, then come back down again in the last 10 years.
Yeah that’s not really the same thing as enshittification imo. That’s just classic supply/ demand disruption in a product that is difficult to scale up production on. It usually balances back out in the end.
Very briefly, after the CEO of United Health was killed, insurance companies were accepting claims they otherwise would have rejected.
And some of those were literally life-saving claims.
Luigi saved more lives than he (allegedly) ended.
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Don’t do that. Don’t give me hope.
I went to pick up a prescription the next morning. It was mysteriously free.
Fuckin awesome
Is that verifiable? Claims are all PHI and kind of a black box. To be fair, there has been a shift in prior auth rules which could be influenced by the killing.
I’ve seen a few anecdotal claims that people with severe conditions got okayed after the killing.
Unfortunately, the ultimate fallout is less accountability, as they’re now unwilling to release any information about the “doctors” supposedly reviewing cases.
Shouldn’t that be prosecutable as practicing medicine without a license? They have to prove they have licensed practicing doctors making these calls.
Sure, lawyers are cheap
Apple products. They were considered junk until Jobs came back and revived their style. They are currently in the round 2 of the enshitification process.
I’m not usually an apple fanboy, but it’s hard to hate on the M1 MBP. I have one used (around $800) and it’s still insane after all these years. Just a great laptop even today. Really hard to find anything better at that price.
Snagged an M4 air for 600USD new last year and it’s a monster. I have a bunch of Linux machines and Windows computers for games, but for general “everything use” like editing videos and images for shitposts and just doing computer stuff, it’s perfect.
It was that interval after they’d merged with NeXT but before iOS became a thing.
Jobs and the ipod started the entire enshittification paradigm.
Don’t @ me.
Yeah, you’re right, we’re in round 3.
I got curious and did a bit of searching since I couldn’t really think of anything. Apparently Fender (guitars) was originally amazing, was sold to another company and really degraded in overall quality, and then was purchased back by some of its engineers and returned to a better quality. Pretty nice to see that people who were actually passionate about something regaining control and saving something they loved.
https://www.soundunlimited.co.uk/blogs/articles/fender_timeline
Newman’s own seemed on track to go through the same thing, but the original family bought it back before things got too far.
Ironically, they are now sending cease-and-desist letters to guitar manufacturers that build guitars with the s-style that their stratocasters have, and they are public enemy number one in the guitar community right now.
https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/electric-guitars/fender-cease-and-desist-lsl-instruments
Sadly though with the recent cease and desist stuff they’ve been involved with it seems like they’ve turned scummy.
Disappointing :( It seemed like their overall production quality is what made them popular and revered, so going after someone who won’t be able to source the same materials and match the same production scale does seem super low.
Could be that they don’t want people selling knock off shit as real and tanking their reputation. Or it could be assholery.
Their Stratocaster shape is public domain in the US. They won a court case in Germany for copyright of it and immediately went after any builder selling to Germany.
It was a total asshole scumbag move. No silver lining, just finance bros destroying a brand.
I could so understand that! I’m not super familiar with their products beyond looking into things for this post, but I feel like their branding would be on their official products 🤔 If another company is making something similar and using their branding, that would be pretty disastrous.
That was a nice read, thanks for sharing
This is similar to how many of the big names in the video game industry were built. Disgruntled designers leaving companies like Atari to start their own company. It’s how Blizzard got their start, and I believe Ubisoft, EA, and at least a couple of the other big names were founded the same way.
Then, of course, the bean counters started taking over and it all went downhill from there once they went from keeping the designers on task with realistic goals to maximizing profits.
They then proceeded to not innovate at all for a couple decades and now they’re serving cease and desists to any builders making guitars remotely similar to the Stratocaster with demands to recall and destroy sold guitars.
Fender is dogshit ass like Gibson. Both companies have behaved like entitled nepo-babies for decades. These companies deserve to die as punishment for their hubris.
Not as long as the owner or anything is an investment fund. And they tend to be.
That’s why in most of the examples, the goodness returns after something like a market collapse that scares off the investors leaving only the people with instrinsic interest in doing it right.
Bowling Alleys, at least some of the ones I’ve seen lately. There was a period in the late 00s where bowling alleys thought they were the shit and started charging upwards of $20/player/lane, plus $30+ dollar pizzas. Not to mention the arcade jumping from quarters to dollar-credits.
The last couple I’ve found have all but dropped that, basically back down to the $15/lane/2 hour model with however many players and complimentary shoe rental. One even had $5 personal pizzas (that yes were just Totinos or similar heated up, but hey it’s better than $30 for a red baron).
I guess the ones that survived covid realized no one was willing to spend a nice dinner’s worth of cash on a night at what should be the second cheapest type of third space available to people.
I would love $15/lane/2 hours. Bowling here is $285 for a lane for 2 hours
Shit, good thing I suck at bowling
There was an article on here about some sort of antitrust suit against Bowlero just a few days ago, with a bunch of people in the comments complaining that bowlibg is more enshittified now than ever before.
Yeah, they do sometimes and in some situations, usually when you have some major disruption, but the problem is that the disruptor often ends up becoming the enshittifier eventually.
Case in point, look at Google. On a technical level Google genuinely cracked search in a way that no other company did, and made it so good that it became the dominant way to find information online.
They then ambitiously decided to use those resources to try and break into / disrupt several other markets like web browsers, email, office software, mapping software, operating systems, video broadcasting, etc.
During those early years we got a bunch of genuine improvements. Chrome was way better then Internet Explorer, and substantially cleaner and faster then Firefox, and still open source and not developed by ad-focused people.
Maps was way better then MapQuest, Google docs at least gave you an easy and accessible alternative to Word, Gmail was way better then Hotmail with way more storage, the original Chromecast and Chromecast audios were amazing value.
But then companies get entrenched, they start tying every product together, building walls around the garden, and start pulling up the ladder behind them. Then when everyone is thoroughly walled in they start extracting every possible opportunity for money and we’re back to enshittification.
Isn’t that just the standard enshittification arc?
Google hasn’t un-enshittified and is IMO highly unlikely to ever do so. All those things (perhaps excluding the original search) were new high water marks in privacy invasion and data mining.
Chrome was always The DoubleClick Browser, since Day 1. Google Docs spied on you to create an AdSense profile. Google Maps & Earth were creating local business advertising profiles.
Firefox. Zoho Docs. MapQuest.
That is just the normally enshittifcation process. Many enshittified companies started as genuinely innovative or decent companies. I mean, they went into ads quite early on and tacking, but other than that…
They definitely haven’t unenshittified.
Cash. Currency exchange. Used to be a tourist trap, intransparent and bad rates, commission on top; take only mint banknotes. Now often we see: No commission, rates with low spread (same as the best bank rates available to consumers). Takes bank notes and coins at no surcharge, no discussion.
This is for countries where cash is still king and practically required. It’s competition at work; there are multiple local shops and they advertise their rates publicly. With internet in everyone’s pocket, there’s little room for cheating. Just enough spread for this to be a profitable business without robbing the customer.
Compare to ATM operators, which are usually a oligopoly charging growing fees to foreigners. Because they can.
3d printing kinda. I remember in the days before reprap when stratasys had a virtual monopoly
