• 11 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • It goes back to province and then where? If it benefits everyone, say upgrade the library to be more energy efficient, provide rebates if you upgrade your heat/aircon system to modern standard of your buildings, like those I’d say that’s good use of carbon tax money. But if dumped to some big oil RnD branch for green energy tech that we won’t see in another 10/20 years, cause they do not have any motivation to actually pull it. (since their balance sheet is neutral once they get the tax money back from one of their branch/subsidiary. ) I might be biased cause I lived in a old tower building, I really wish our building can start the window/etc remodeling but I only have 1 vote. (my winter base board heating is 200+ on coldest weeks, cause the entire building’s windows are over 25+ years old and already leaking and not up to par. )

    I do wish there are more locally own/operated grocery stores or farmer’s markets. But they are usually located at the out skirts of the city and then you have to drive to get them. The web operated aren’t exactly benefiting those farmers nor consumers nor the carbon goals and more expensive/less choice. (because quantity and delivery vehicles etc. )




  • so they embeded a separate launcher?? welp, it’s also not necessary, the EOS backend does not need the Epic launcher. As far as I know, the only cross platform/cross play back end is EOS. Sony have their own PC/PSN cross play in example of Helldivers 2. Capcom have their backend and the up coming Monster Hunter Wild is their first title to support cross play. (it was always separated in their past games.) Some big Chinese/Korean dev have their proprietary cross platform backend to support their mobile/console/PC games. (like Genshin)

    If you do know any 3rd party cross play back end service please let me know.









  • “Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games,” said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

    Good for Epic.

    “And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it’s so much that often developers, when they’re about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That’s been an awesome thing. And it’s been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store.”

    Good for developers, that have decent enough games.

    “We spent a lot of money on exclusives,” said Sweeney. “A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical.”

    Exclusives, of course this is the expected result, because that how game publishing/marketing works. People in this thread talking like publishers make a lot of money on 80% of their released games. (<-- it’s not, in case you did not get it. ) I think it’s just Tim Sweeney’s way of saying, we will adjust our approach in the future, like what any publicly traded CEO would do.


  • okay, so let me try explain a little bit why this is very likely not going to happen.

    1. it’s a “public” transportation service that’s pay per use, first come first serve, there are different fee depending on time/distance/etc.
    2. in order to “restrict access” say, use the commercial/residential parking lot as example, you carve out certain part of the capacity that only BC resident can use and BC tax payer have to foot the bill. The parking lot example, commercial side and residential side strata foot the bill for the maintenance and design which area/zone etc for the residential one and it’s gates/etc.
    3. practically, 80% of BC don’t even use that service, source: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/data/statistics/people-population-community/population/pop_subprovincial_population_highlights.pdf 2021 about 5.2m in BC http://viea.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2021SOTI-Report-WEB.pdf 2021 report says +1.2% population for 10,272, so 100% of population is around 856k. which compare to 5.2m is 16% So I lump in another 4% that are not counted to Vancouver Island region but closely tied to the region which should be pretty fair estimate.

    That means, if the people that won’t use the service has to pay and reserve for the people that do use the service that would be unfair thus usually, a “toll” would be put in place to cover the cost of transportation deficit. You might ask, what deficit? To have reserved space for resident to use ferry, they have risk of running the ferries with empty space reserved for resident use. Those would have to be “over reserved” for service guarantee. If they under reserve, then you simply have 2 choice, either queue with tourist or queue for the next for resident.

    1. we have not even talk about the environment impact of reserving those spots just for residents instead of doing as much full ferry each time. That cost is footed by the whole BC as a province. (assuming we do have a carbon budget)

    In the end, it’s all about running cost and tourism scheduling. Let me run a very simple situation. Say, a tourist group booked a trip to run a bus with everything scheduled properly. Now, if resident have priority queue, means the whole tourist bus’s schedule is NOT guaranteed. If the fluctuation of local traffic suddenly spike, the tourist group might face 2 hours+ delay. Which is simply not acceptable for a tourism company to run such risk, the tourism industry might simply opt for other first come first serve transportation service. Which would have a big impact to Vancouver Island. And if you remove tourism traffic from ferry, then you foot more cost per trip or face reduced scheduling.

    The fact that for all 17+ years I lived in BC I only take the ferry round trip 3 times, and yet the tax is budgeted for subsidize it for more affordable traveling for the Van Island residents I think first come first serve is a fair compromise. Cause the people the visit Vancouver Island for tourism will most likely also visit other part of province, lower cost of transportation benefits everyone.