Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
This is a weird one, but there’s been a definite shift in indie game development.
Before Steam Greenlight/Direct and Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and whatever, there wasn’t a huge emphasis on trying to get money out of a game project. I’d speculate most indie (and modders) dev’s goals at the time were to make stuff and hope it was cool enough to show to a studio as a portfolio piece and get hired, as self-publishing was rather difficult at the time.
A lot of conversation and discussion about game dev at the time was just trying out new things or learning how stuff worked and so it was a generally chill environment.
But after the success of things like Braid on the Xbox or Minecraft (when it first released) on the PC, there was a huge direction change into avoiding working for a big studio altogether and getting into self-publishing to make the big bucks. Now its generally considered strange to make something just to make something and not have a community or dev logs or self-promotion.
Its somewhat made me avoid some development communities and I find that kind of frustrating.
We later saw what Mojang did with Minecraft. Soon as Microsoft opened up its billions, it was hard to resist the offer. Notch has to be some of the most undeserving individuals to have been made rich from, given from how he has acted since Mojang sold to Microsoft.
Yeah I think that being such a high number too got some looks.
The same thing happened with small time YouTubers, Pinterest, etc. As soon as there is a ‘potential’ to make millions, people started shifting gears and progressing towards what appeared to be a money making formula, which fundamentally changed the vibe and attitude of the community.