Encrypt-Keeper
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There’s a group with a petition to “Stop Killing Games” which seeks to legally remedy the issue of game developers making games that are later turned off and left unplayable even in the case of them being single player.
Thor of PirateSoftware owns a development outfit that makes indie games and he also does a lot of streams. He’s against Stop Killing Games, but doesn’t seem to even understand it, and has publicly spoke out against it, going so far as to spread misinformation about it.
I’ve been served PirateSoftware’s shorts long before all this controversy and it always bugged me how confidently wrong he was about systems and network things. He seems to be under the impression that he understands these things on an advanced level due to his experience as a checks notes QA tester for Blizzard, and a… indie software developer lol.
All this backlash against him is so vindicating.
I remember being the lone voice against GamePass and Microsoft buying up all these studios. These idiots kept saying “It’s pro consumer bro! The more studios they buy the better the GamePass value gets bro!” “So many games for one low monthly price! Let’s see greedy Sony do that!”
As if they didn’t live in the same world where Netflix exists. We’ve already seen this bro, it’s a classic. Yeah man it’s great deal now while they desperately need your buy-in. But a few short years later and very predictably we get nothing but layoffs, award winning studios shuttered for no reason, formerly third party games becoming exclusive etc.
I’m no corporate simp for Sony or any other corp out there by any means. But the Microsoft grift was so blatantly, obviously an unsustainable market grab that would inevitably go south and make the industry worse for all of us.
There is very obviously a language barrier issue at play here that people are ignoring just to take what he said at face value. There’s zero chance that what he meant was the game was too good and that as a result he wanted to make it worse.
He almost certainly meant something more along the lines of the plot, or something to do with the game mechanics were too streamlined, or otherwise not challenging enough in some way.
The first Death Stranding was controversial in that its gameplay was very in depth and communicated a mindset at the expense of wider appeal. Go to any social media post about the game and look at all the people who A. Dismissed it for being “boring” due to the gameplay decisions that were made and B. The other group of people who believed it to be a masterpiece, who might not have were the game more streamlined and generic, for example if it was built like an MGS-lite with package delivery mechanics.
If you took a lot of the more “tedious” but immersive features out of DS1 and added more generic combat the game would likely have a wider appeal, but those of us that really liked the little touches that were seen as “tedium” would have liked it less and that’s the kind of thing he has to be referring to DS2. Like adding a bunch of action and making the deliveries trivial to complete might make more people dig the game but nobody would truly love it the way DS1 was loved by its fans. Kojima is definitely a fart-sniffer but he does deliver and he very obviously sees himself as an artist, not a corporate exec who wants to make the line go up the fastest.
Whoever he was 17 years ago is very likely not who he is today.
Surely whatever he learned from that experience has been learned, and we can move on.
Ok well you keep all that learning and growing in mind while you take a look at this comic that the artist uploaded to his site a few short years ago on one of the anniversaries of the original comic.
You are giving the author a whole lot of benefit of the doubt that he hasn’t earned. You’re looking at this through the lens of a guy using his art to express his feelings of grief. Thats certain what he wants you to think, and if that’s what it was, it wouldn’t be so bad. But that’s not what it is. I mean for gods sake a couple comics later the female character crying on the hospital bed in the fourth panel apologizes to his self-insert for having the miscarriage. If that’s the type of guy you empathize with I don’t know what to tell you other than YIKES pal.
This is just a comic made by a notorious and blatant narcissist who dug up the traumatic experience of someone else from his past in an effort to be taken more seriously because his comics were regularly mocked as a poorly made ripoff of another popular comic at the time. If bullying a bad person is immoral then hey maybe you’re right. I’m not really prepared to have that philosophical debate at this time lol.
A genuine expression of how he felt about an event that had happened years prior? I guess that’s possible, although an odd choice. And out of character for him to boot.
As for his tools, his tools were his ability to draw. He probably could have drawn something to express his feelings that didn’t involve his funny haha web comic characters and it would have been far less weird.
Well, it was more like putting his college girlfriend’s life experience into his work, and then making the work about him. You’ll notice he’s in 3 of the four panels and she’s in one. Where he appears as the empathetic and caring boyfriend, while she is the one grieving.
Making the comic into a meme is disrespectful to him, but not the girl, since she’s such a small part of it, and we don’t even know who she is since it’s a fictional character taking her place in the comic.
Taking a traumatic, devastating, and most of all very personal health event like a miscarriage that your girlfriend went through and hand drawing it in a cartoon style to post on your public “Funny haha” gamer douche web comic is generally considered a dick move.
Some further context is that the author Tim Buckley was generally pretty despised at the time and considered a huge dick. The comic itself IIRC was full of that turn of the century gamer douche “haha women bad” type comedy. So the posting of that comic was not only like a comically huge tonal shift but almost felt like him trying to somehow appear more sensitive and likeable.
There’s an app called Active911 used by first responders like EMS and firemen to receive dispatch pages in lieu of a physical digital pager, and as far back as I can remember one of the selectable alert tones alongside various beep patterns, horns, and klaxons, was a recording of Leeroy Jenkins’ famous yell lmao
I can only guess you’re referring to the “Cornered” pursuit theme that plays when you’ve really starting catching out the current witness in all their lies. Everybody has their favorite version from whatever game but yo me, nothing surpasses the first one.
Generally speaking, algorithms on these sites don’t serve me a ton of videos with no views from creators with no followers, en masse. With AC shadows, I was suddenly inundated with these videos, on multiple sites, without ever having looked anything up about it, exclusively by streamers that nobody is watching.
That’s just not how these things work. Launch windows have a documented history of being uniquely impactful to the long term success of games, movies, even products. It would take some serious evidence to the contrary for you to claim otherwise.
Also if an (already established) company’s future is jeopardized by a single game not doing well, I’m sorry but it’s not well managed. Ask me how I know.
That’s not really here nor there. It also isn’t really true.
A good solo game might take a hit to its initial sales but should recover in the long run.
It won’t though. This feel-good theory that if a game is “good” then it’ll just make the same amount of money it always would have otherwise is not supported by any real world evidence. And even the most hypothetically high quality, ethical, game making company is still a company in the end, and companies need to money to pay living wages and keep people employed making new games. And if the games they are putting out are high quality, they probably have competent leadership. And competent leadership isn’t going to gamble the future of their company and livelihoods of their employees on an unproven feel-good fantasy espoused only by people on Reddit and Lemmy who’ve never run a business before.
It’s the exact same thing actually. Their claim was:
Good games will sell regardless of what’s out
But that’s just not true, and game studios of all sizes know that. The risk aversion of these companies exist because of the reality of the situation.
It also has nothing to do with a studios confidence in their game. The quality of a game is light years away from being the sole objective indicator of a games sales. The Outer Wilds is objectively one of the greatest games ever made and has no real peers in what it does. And yet it didn’t make nearly the sales numbers as the latest asset flipped Call of Duty game.
That’s sounds truly awful lol