forbidden403

gamers rise up

[forbidden403 @0xForbidden403]

a brief moment of respite

[Kaiser von Lohengramm @KaiserLoengramm]

The primary issue with this kind of localism, particularly when you're going for something like overt White Nationalism, is that should a regime come in that is disfavorable to you, they can absolutely annihilate any efforts you're undertaking. Your local enclaves, disparate and tiny pockets, crushed by a US Government occupied by those who would seek to make an example of you.

And the really sad thing is, you wont even get your beautiful last stand as they destroy your local areas. They aren't going to let you have a Waco and a martyrdom. They'll just use the IRS on you, debank you, bury you in lawsuits from aligned NGOs. Things which will disincorporate and destroy anything you make and go out with whimpers rather than a bang.

The only shot any of you have if you want freedom of association and to build anything even like this, is if you continue to win on the national and state level and at a minimum, have governments in place that are not overtly hostile to you and what you want. Without that, you have no chance and you will simply be destroyed at your enemies convenience if you ever seem to be even so much as a slight threat or if it can win them points.

And crushing what in their eyes are Nazi enclaves absolutely wins them points.

[Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @christopherrufo]

So there’s video, DNA, and a confession that implicate Tyler Robinson. This isn’t a huge mystery, and anyone who is talking about Israel or Egyptian planes should feel very embarrassed right now.

[MoshiMoshiMoan @MoshiMoshiMoan]

As this trial continues on and it becomes even more obvious what a grifting psycho Owens is more of her supporters will jump ship just like Kelly tried today. But I remember bitch.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

Candace Owens is openly trying to get a trantifa terrorist acquitted on charges of murdering the most prominent conservative operative in modern American history.

Candace Owens is scum. And anyone who still listens to her is either evil or fucking retarded, or both.

[Pericles @PerryALPHA]

The Democrats had a whole "dirtbag" strategy to attract male voters (Hunter Biden, Hasan Piker, Graham Platner), but women and AIPAC are blowing it up

[Conrad Bastable @ConradBastable]

quick thesis: "kids today aren't even playing videogames the way we were, millennial relationship to gaming is now a cultural relic, like listening to the radio or drive-in movies"

TL;DR -- Millennials are the new boomers, Halo is Woodstock, WoW is the iPod, Dad gamers are the only "gamers" left by their own definition (& they don't have time to play anymore), the kids are all cracked out on Live Service Slop platforms that they can't escape and don't want to, competition is dead, E-Sports is dead, creative content is dead, screaming down the mic is dead, couch co-op with your friends is dead, couch co-op with your Dad is dead, AAA games are dead, consoles are dead, Game Pass is dead.

And at the end of the day it's all because, if you squint, the kids don't play games anymore.

long thesis:

supporting industry stuff:
- industry publications say average gamer is now ~37, up from 29 in 2004
- they also note that kids <12 have seen the largest drop in videogame engagement post-pandemic of all age ranges (-6%)
- Pew's 2008 report says "Fully 97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games", whereas their 2024 report says "the vast majority of U.S. teens (85%) say they play them. Just 15% say they never do"
- Gen Z's favorite games are Minecraft, CoD, GTA, Fortnite, and Roblox
- PC gaming has a notably larger share of the overall market now vs. console gaming
- Console game sales were 4x-6x PC game sales back in 2004
- PC game sales were 1:1 with Console game sales last year
- Everyone being stuck at home in 2020 seemed to permanently inflect things here, with PC game sales stagnant from 2015-2019 but then becoming the dominant source of industry growth since
- Roblox (2006), Minecraft (2011), & Fortnite (2017) are top 5 gaming IPs for Gen Z....
- ....these are more live-service game-hosting platforms that actual games themselves
- Newzoo has a 2026 report saying only ~13% of gametime went to new releases!
- 2/3rds of gametime went to >6 year old games!
- That same report did an analysis comparing playtime concentration across PC/PS/Xbox platforms and their Top 20 Games vs. the long tail of their library (it's a really good report)

Note on the recent restructuring: for Xbox it was called out specifically that Game Pass caused a redistribution of playtime away from top titles and towards the long tail, without any actual expansion of the total audience/playtime.....basically, Game Pass nukes Xbox's ability to monetize it's big blow out titles without any offsetting gains from expanding the market.

oops.

supporting game stuff:
- let's call it the "Roblox" problem -- all the kids exist within a massively multiplayer online gaming ecosystem, with play, creation, socialization, and monetization all embedded in one platform
- the creation angle and the monetization angle also i think encourage parents to view these games as "educational" more so than, say, Call of Duty, and are therefore more willing to encourage their kids to play with time and/or money
- there is no clear off-ramp from this platform
- you can have totally new gameplay experiences within it, with low friction adoption
- as this platform captures a larger and larger share of player attention, it sucks the available playtime & monetization out of the rest of the industry
- this process naturally changes the incentives around making games, including what kind of games get made, for what audience, and targeted at what price point
- we got legions of "WoW killers" and "Halo/CoD clones" in the early 2000s because those games were platform beasts of their own...
- ...and so now we're years-deep into every financially motivated major game studio trying to figure out how to build a "Roblox" of their own, aka Live Service Slop 24/7, 365
- the fans might hate it but there's a giant pile of money labeled "Live Service Slop" in the middle of the room and it's clear to publishers & studios that the prize is there, if only they can be good enough to claim it
- [of course, all millennials know that WoW and Halo both killed themselves, nobody ever steals the crown by copying it]
- and so while all this is happening, it's opened up a previously under-served niche in the "lower-mid price point indie-to-double-A targeted niche game"
- Palworld, Enshrouded, Schedule I, Silksong, and so on, were all in the very top % of revenue-earners for newly released PC games in the year they dropped
- In console land, Space Marine 2 just blasted a quarter of a billion dollars in revenues of a budget way smaller than a typical AAA release
- If AAA studios had been dropping Halo/CoD/Gears-style games every other year chasing success, the niche for Space Marine 2 wouldn't have really been there, not at the same scale
- I think there's a similar effect even with BG3, whose awesome success likely would've been a little lower (though still great) if fans had gotten genre-adjacent Skyrim & Witcher sequels already
- but instead, we have the "Roblox problem" (Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, GTA), where cross-platform self-contained game-related live service platforms have monopolized huge chunks of (younger) gamer time and money......and warped the kinds of content big studios try to make in the process

supporting adjacent stuff:
- there's also a whole cloud of adjacent areas that are impacted as a result of the above
- picture everything as a big web and these nodes as farther out on the web
- but you see a related decline of "E Sports" and the rise instead of "Influencers", as community figures with large audiences they can monetize become higher status than ultra sweaty competitive pros
- the decline of competitive online culture has also coupled with intentional pushes by studios and their hardware platform partners to reduce online toxicity, changing the culture of online spaces
- the decline of forums & reddit and the rise of ig/tiktok/youtube has turned third-party game-content-ecosystems into more pyramidal "one mega influencer" structures
- chasing the Live Service dragon has led to a massive decline in couch co-op ("local splitscreen") titles, which reduces a certain KIND of gaming experience that, while not the norm from a playtime POV, was nonetheless an integral part of millennial gaming
- the above also makes Family Gaming a lot harder with kids, as what was once an expected default across most games has moved into a separate genre reserved for "Girlfriend Games"
- game-related content has been nearly totally evaporated by Twitch (which is itself in the process of being evaporated), short form video, and "creator talks at the camera" long form video
- "Machinima" and "Parody Game Songs" and "Montages" are both bizarre millennial cultural content that seems egregiously lacking in disaffected irony to the younger audience
- it's covered extensively elsewhere so wasn't worth jamming in here too much, but the explosion of MTX means in-game "status" derived from earned rewards & achievement, such as it is, has been nearly totally replaced with purchased status...and in so doing, game studios have *totally* devalued the actual status that playing their game used to convey
- we're already dealing with a young generation who is hyper-cynical, hyper-financially oriented, ""crypto-native"" and spammed with ""prediction"" markets 24/7...so to have yet another part of their lives see its earned status replaced with dollar-signs and a casino logo likely seems totally normal to them

[Shaman, PSD @DarkwebShaman]

“The world you grew up in no longer exists”

[Bulk Vanderhuge @flatearthjape]

Every person Caleb Hammer interviews is load bearing to the economy in ways that hurt to think about

[memetic_sisyphus @memeticsisyphus]

Teens taking liberal talking points seriously. The world is about to end, your race is evil, a fulfilling life is working a career alone, men are evil, pregnancy is discussed along with STIs, abortion it THE woman’s right… imagine if you actually believed all of that?

[Scott Greer 6’2” IQ 187 @ScottMGreer]

Less than a year later, the Left now feels safe to celebrate Charlie Kirk's murder without worrying about "optics."

It's not hard to see why. On TikTok, Kirk is a meme alongside Epstein and Diddy. Among the right-wing media space, his death is seen as the work of TPUSA rather than the Left.

The murder was trivialized for many. Now leftist freaks can openly gloat about it.

[Patrick Casey @restoreorderusa]

Tyler Robinson, a deranged leftist, murdered Charlie Kirk because he was the most effective conservative youth activist in decades.

Anyone proposing alternate theories – or even entertaining them at this point – is doing the left's work for them.

[Patrick Casey @restoreorderusa]

Isn't it crazy that after a left-wing maniac assassinated Charlie Kirk, a bunch of the biggest conservative media figures suddenly started talking about teaming up with the left against Israel?

[forbidden403 @0xForbidden403]

people have already been giving their data to these companies for decades now. you’re already past the point of surveillance and people are more brazen than ever about posting shit online with their faces attached

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Theo Von: “Nobody wants a data center dude. And the people that want them to me, they seem kind of evil. Nobody wants this shit. One of these companies is gonna own all of this information. There’s gonna become this social or emotional credit score and then AI is gonna try to become our new God”

[Shrimp Billionaire @fentanylbrownie]

“Foid” really is the word we needed for this moment. They’re not girls anymore and they’re fighting tooth and nail to avoid becoming women. They’re the secret third category. They’re foids, and the world revolves around their whims so we do need a word for them.

[Shrimp Billionaire @fentanylbrownie]

The easiest way to transition from The Raped to The Rapist at a job is to aggressively follow up on emails. This is the behavior of the 4HL apex predator, and you should figure out which way your eyes are facing.

[LayoffHedge @LayoffAI]

AMERICAN MEN IN WORKFORCE AT RECORD LOWS

The share of American men in the labor force peaked in 1949. It has been falling ever since.

In 78 years of data, only two months have ever been lower than today, and both were during COVID.

[USA Reject @sadreturns]

when younger zoomers reference Trump’s first term like it’s ancient history

[Shrimp Billionaire @fentanylbrownie]

For millennia, the wisdom has been passed down from mother to daughter that a woman’s one job on this Earth is to sucker a man into marriage. Zoomettes are fucking it up so bad that men are stepping in, saying “Hey sweetheart, you’re supposed to be suckering us into marriage.”

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

There's an interesting story about how Victorian mansions, and particularly the Second Empire style, became synonymous with haunted houses.

They were extremely popular in the US from the 1870s through the 1890s, but were hard to maintain because of their large size and opulent style. Many of the families that constructed these homes lost much of their fortunes in the Panic of 1893 and the crash of 1929. Others remained wealthy but didn't have the means or desire to maintain large staffs of maids and servants to keep them running.

So, one by one, Second Empire homes across the US were sold off and continued to change hands rapidly until, by the time the 30s rolled around, thousands of them were left vacant because no one could afford to maintain them.

And not just maintain, but preserve them. The typical Second Empire house was around 50 or 60 years old by the 1930s. They needed upkeep just as much as a house built in 1970 would need repairs today if no one had lived in it for 10 years.

As a result, many of them were bulldozed or burned down to make way for newer homes in the 40s and 50s after World War II. And the entire point of Second Empire style was for them to be grouped together like a bunch of trophies, so tearing down a whole bunch of abandoned and decaying mansions but keeping the ones that were in relatively better condition only made them stand out more.

By the time the late 40s and early 50s rolled around, they had almost universally gone from being considered the crowning architectural achievement of the Gilded Age to being synonymous with urban decay.

The artists and writers of the 60s were growing up as kids in the 40s and 50s, thinking to themselves, "that old house down the lane that has been sitting empty since I was born." So when they got jobs in Hollywood writing scripts for TV shows, they carried those memories with them, and the Second Empire style entered the collective consciousness of pop culture as the default "haunted house" for the next 60 years.

The sad thing is, these homes are priceless. You can see it when you find a rare one that has been well-preserved or restored. But we've degraded ourselves so much that it would be nearly unthinkable to construct a home like this today.

[Alex Griswold @HashtagGriswold]

It’s a gag lost to time. Acme is a Greek word for “pinnacle” that became ubiquitous for a time because it gave companies better placement in the phonebook. The Great Depression version of SEO.