From my POV its much too early to determine that (I mean the "walled garden" part). "Web 3.0" efforts in the crypto space may go into other directions. And if successful many flaws of the current net (like the need to host stuff or dead links) may be effectively gone in the future version of the internet.

Wikipedia has a lot about legislation efforts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#Regulation_and_legislation

I found this quote from 2014: "Last year, freemium apps represented 92 percent of all revenue on the iOS App Store and 98 percent on Google Play, according to Distimo."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction#Data
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/14/11625616/some-gamers-fear-a-dystopian-free-to-play-future
If true the 95% figure may be correct for mobile gaming. I also looked at your links and Halfbrick company makes mostly mobile games. So my best guess at this point is that it refers not to the global video game market but to a subset of it such as maybe mobile games.

History is cycles.

The biggest issues facing the web are all to do with fakery. The best solution is to have authorized actors. Before Microsoft mail, which was eventually eclipsed by Google-Mail (remember they offered 50MB mailbox web-mail for free?) to participate one needed a (corporate or university) registered account. The routing index to the Internet was contained in six corporate servers.

Also don't forget that the Dark Web is not necessarily "over there", it's between the nodes as well. Think of Facebook. People on Facebook are minutely scrutinized, yet they can still interact with with the rest of the internet.

Think of the Integer number system. Between each real number is an infinite set of fractions, even irrational numbers, only some of which can even be represented in a computer, since they are limited to the number of digits they can represent by the number of bits deployed for each number in a word used in their registries. So there are holes between each integer, just like there are numbers that a computer cannot represent. Now consider each node of a registered file system. Between each of those nodes are grey areas that are not strictly part of the address space but are still within the confines of it. In the same way the grey(er) parts of the Dark Web are, to a lesser or greater degree, visible from the regular web.
Sounds reasonable.

The doco I saw was about their transition from what was originally a developer of games for the Gameboy, Wii, Playstation 2, & Playstation Portable. See Game Studio Identity Crisis.

What do you think then Magnitus about the current status of the net neutrality in the USA?
excerpt from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States
"net neutrality, the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate, has been an issue of contention between network users and access providers since the 1990s
...
Upon becoming FCC chairman in April 2017 as part of the Trump Administration, Ajit Pai proposed to repeal the neutrality policies, returning to the previous classification of ISPs as Title I services. The draft of the proposed repeal, published in May 2017, led to over 20 million comments to the FCC. Despite a majority of these favoring retaining the 2015 Open Internet Order, the FCC still voted in favor of repealing the Order, which went into effect in June 2018 despite efforts in Congress to stay the repeal. Several states and Internet service providers challenged this ruling, and while the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in early October 2019 that the FCC has the ability to reclassify ISPs as Title I or II and allowing the rule change to stand, the Court also ruled that the FCC cannot block state or local-level net neutrality enforcement. As part of an executive order issued in July 2021, President Joe Biden has encouraged the FCC to restore the net neutrality rules undone by the Trump administration."

So, I am sorry not sharing your enthusiasm & opinion: The internet is not controlled by nation states (private corporations are deep there), neither the cyberspace is democratic (think about free speech issues, censorship, surveillance, privacy) to say the least. Or how do you explain all this?

https://www.eff.org/issues/net-neutrality
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program[/url])

The only way to get GoG to stop selling DRM is to not buy the games that have it.

GoG, like many powers in charge, are counting on the masses to be sheep and swallow the propaganda and obey.

We all are sheep, just our sheperds differ.



No really ... did you have the impression that the majority is happy with the hitman situation? Just because not all are ranting, it doesn't mean they all think it's a good thing. And yes, some people really cross some borders with their rage. Apart from a few mistakes it's still a very good shop.

Sure, a greater proportion of the newer generations live online.

However, even among that generation, not everyone is glued to their phone 24/7 (I do roleplaying games at a youth center once a week and I can tell you that for a fact). If that was the case, we'd have cause to despair about our future.

I would actually call the lure of social media an emerging natural selection criteria: You can use it in moderation to connect, but if you live online at the expense of real life, you are less likely to produce viable successful offsprings.

So, I would say that there is a strong reality bias against social media addiction that plays against it.

This is the part that I strongly disagree with. I stress the **need** verbiage. There will be a financial motivator that will probably lure a great many (perhaps most) developers in that direction.

But ultimately, if you make a quality game, it will be successful. Some people, like you said, might bemoan that they can't post their progress automatically on Facebook, but if the game is good, they'll play.

You don't need to reel them in 10 years in a row with the same game (even though many would view this as the most desirable, least-effort outcome). You should need to make a sufficient amount of 1 times solid sales.

And this will be an important factor for those looking to maximize their profits and create a media empire ala Disney although not everyone who makes games or movies has that goal.

Some people (I would argue the most gifted) do it because they have a vision, and once that vision has run its course, they are happy to let it rest. I mean, do you see them making a "Manchester by the Sea" part 2, "Manchester by the Sea", the video game and "Lee at the police station trying to take the policeman's gun" figurines?

I would say that this analogy is flawed. There are far more people wanting an offline "leave me alone Facebook" gaming experience than there are people speaking Mongolian.

To the extent that smaller companies are for sale. Some simply aren't (especially when they are a passion project). You can buy a lot, but you can't buy everything with money.

And this is why increasingly, company with an app store are getting taken to court over their monopolistic practices. There are limits to what the world will allow in that department.

Even though that somehow flies in the US for now (with resistance I'd say and the US is the most friendly country to those practices), I guarantee you that the world will not be happy with giving a handful of American companies a slice of their profits just because they cornered the market.

Apple has gotten away with is so far, because they are small, relative to the entire ecosystem (I would call using Apple products a choice, there are other options) and because they can't control some delivery vectors like web browsers, but if Microsoft also jumps into that wagon, there will be blowback, if not from the US, then the EU, Asia and other countries around the world. Not everyone is as tolerant of corporate monopolies as the US is.

And yet, Apple still only corner a minority of the market (a significant minority, but a minority nonetheless).

Mostly. I buy either physical or drm-free digital books. I buy drm-free digital games. I buy my music at 7Digital or Basecamp in flac format.

I mostly gave up on the movie industry. They don't have anything drm-free in the digital realm and their physical offering are a pain to unlock (you tend to need specialized obscure software to do so that tends to be in a grey area legally). If there is something I truly wish to own, I'll buy it and figure out a way to rip it, but otherwise, if the movie industry is so intent on treating everything they produce like disposable garbage, I'll just oblige them and give them the least amount of money that I can get away with.

As much as it would be nice for the consumer to have that power, it is just not feasible.
For starters GOG have all sorts of customers, many not caring about DRM at all. And they might be where GOG makes most of its money.

I don't think it has anything to do with propaganda. It has more to do with desires & weaknesses & lack of care ... human nature in fact.

I think the biggest issue with the web right now is privacy and security.

I think most people don't care that much about piracy to be honest. Only big corps do.

I think what the internet really needs, for everyone, is more dependable software and an easier way to correctly operate networked software (it kills me that right now, there is no easy way for the layperson to deploy and use secure networked applications on the internet, that is still the realm of experts like me and in 2021, that should just not be the case). There are too many cracks right now for bad actors to exploit.

Also, we need stronger privacy laws, especially against big corporations.

Sure, Google exerts way too much influence. No debate there.

The Dark Web, by definition, is obscure. I would say that the internet outside of Facebook is less controlled, but certainly not obscure.

I think the issue we have here is one of verbiage, more than anything else.

From your mouth to God’s ear.
Perhaps I was injudicious with my auxiliary verb. ;)

As I said microtransactions provide a commercial advantage, and the ratio is a power law. You are correct that there is no compulsion to introduce them, but try telling the bean counters when your single-revenue asset is eight months behind schedule and the head programmers want a rise in pay.
And the amount of money to be made from casual gaming is already an order of magnitude larger than the traditional model, and increasing continuously. As you say, and I agree, this won’t end the production of games that can be bought, rather than leased, but it will affect the market significantly. Follow the money.
Yes, but that is a precarious business model, vulnerable to any unforeseen delays in the return on investment. Look at the developers and notice how many have been able to survive, even after making spectacularly popular, high quality games, e.g., Black Isle. (Atari has been reborn so many times it is almost a talisman, rather than a company.) Look at the survivors, like EA. ’Nuff said.
The biggest selling point for Apple, after bright, shiny colours is their promotion of security. They have sought to differentiate themselves from Android-based devices by suggesting they are more secure and respectful of their users’ privacy. I am not convinced, but I can avoid using their technology, whereas a lot of younger people cannot.

As for Microsoft, their plan to coöpt every customer’s PC for their own network is indicative of what Silicon Valley expects the future to look like. Sure, it will take some convincing (especially for those of us old enough to remember the early days before the internet) but, as has been done many times before, the hurdle can be overcome with incentives.

I’ll give you a non-computer allegory. In the ’80s most private dwellings had no water meters. The state government spruiked their uptake by significantly discounting the water rates for those people who had them installed (people without a meter could not be charged pro rata, so they were penalized with a large flat rate.) Later, when most people had installed them, the water rates were raised even more.

I know someone who locked out an ex- from their personal and business PCs because they had a similar off-site management process to that which M$ is attempting to foist on the world. (It was quite funny at the time. Not for the victim, obviously, but he was a dick.)

Coupled with the extremely annoying continual-update cycle, and the unending obsession with moving controls and changing processes that constitutes each major update in the Windoze product releases, and I have had enough. Even my (sizeable, admittedly) inertia will not suffice to prevent me from never buying their operating system again. (God how I am not looking forward to investing all the time necessary to create a secure, independent Linux installation.)
It isn’t just Apple.
Amazon hosts the CIA, so I’m guessing their AWS subsidiary is pretty good at profiling people. They keep stats on everyone; how long someone spends reading each page of each book, whether they finished it (or even started it) and what they read next, etcetera, etcetera. Cambridge Analytica demonstrated that it is possible to determine who people voted for at an election (and even if they actually voted) based on nothing but their own posts, and who their friends are.

Google has a new smartphone that learns; how do you think it does that?

(Google has shadow profiles of everyone who it doesn’t have a direct profile for; they have foreign keys in apps that aren’t even used by everyone. What I mean is, even if you have never used YouTube, Google has a profile key for you there.)

Even for those of us (less than 5% in Australia) who eschew Google, they have enough data from everyone else to determine without much doubt who we are and what we are doing.
FAANG is not just an anagram, it’s a descriptor.
We have a library of over 700 movies that we watch (and, occasionally, add to) and a large digital library of music (but that doesn’t get much airtime anymore, sadly) so we use a DVD player. (We have a couple of Blu-Ray movies, but the last player died, so we’re saving up to buy a new one, since some of those titles we only own on that format.)
You can’t have security and privacy without authentication, which is poleaxed by fakery.
I wasn’t talking about piracy.
Plug’n’play security was Huwei’s killer app. Just like the Japanese did to black-and-white television with their colour models, Huwei used economies of scale to dominate the CCTV market. (Today, if you want a camera that isn’t Chinese you have to pay a lot more for it.)
+1
The medium of our exchange is a limiting factor, Yes. :) This forum does have some redeeming features, though, like a connection-less sequential mode, providing a natural rhythm for conversations.

Rather than think of the web and The Dark Web™ it is more useful to think of the web as having bright spots and darker spots. Some parts of town have street lighting and are patrolled by police, other parts are less safe to venture after dark, etc.

Regular rectal examinations are unavoidable for those individuals on Facebook, since they (more specifically, their desires) are the products being sold to generate revenue, so the company has extensive stock control processes. (Cambridge Analytica was not an egregious actor; more, they were just doing what FB itself does, since that is their business model —— and has been from the beginning.)

I disconnect my PC when I am not using the internet, since I have no requirement for it. (I don’t stream entertainment.) Thus, technically, I am not on the internet (most of the time) and, especially after I reboot the router, which I do frequently, all the services require me to Captcha again, so they can link me back to my previous profile. (They day they don’t will be the day they don’t need to, and I fear that day is soon approaching.)

I've been playing PC games since the late 1980s; I've never seen customer service as bad or dishonest as GoG's. It has gotten to the point where I simply will not buy any more games from them. At least with Ubisoft/Origin/Steam I can get refunded for broken products.