The headline makes it seem like it’s just gamers but it’s more about the overall gender divide in South Korea. It’s a very interesting read. Men in South Korea feel like they’re struggling to get by and women wanting fairer treatment is being seen as wanting to make things even more difficult for men. It seems like it’s heading towards a tipping point.

I am always reminded how precise and verbose one must be in text since it’s so easy to intend one meaning but have people interpret another.

I said I wondered why, my dude. Past tense. As in “I initially wondered why Samsung wasn’t on the list, so I looked up the list, and saw it’s only for Chinese companies.”

I’ll play journalist and link the actual list (PDF). I wondered why Samsung, a company that literally produces military weapons, wasnt on the list. The list is specifically just for Chinese companies. There is apparently a law requiring the Department of Defence maintain and publish this list.

I just think that if the dev doesn’t care if they get paid or not then they should offer people back their money. I would assume few people would ask for their money back, but it just seems like the right thing to do. I’m not sure why I’m getting downvoting for suggesting the dev offer refunds. Is offering consumers a choice bad?

if you bought something that went on sale next month, does that mean you are entitled to a refund?

Steam literally gives refunds if you buy something and then it goes on sale.

Interesting that the dev decided to make the game free after a month. They announced that they’d rather have more people play the game even if it doesn’t make money. While that’s nice, some people actually did pay for the game. I hope they get the option of receiving a refund if they’d like.

It’s a Japanese patent. I’m not sure how it would hold up internationally, but Pocketpair is also a Japanese company and this lawsuit is entirely within the Japanese legal system. That probably gives Nintendo a bit of an advantage since they’re such a large and iconic Japanese corporation.

The “update” is from a month ago. Pocketpair shared the patents they are accused of infringing and the payments Nintendo wants.

The patents are for “throwing an object in 3D space to capture a target” (throwing a pokeball) and “moving characters to a virtual field when an event is triggered” (entering a battle) the payment requested is 10 million yen or 64,000 USD. A paltry sum for a billion dollar company suing over a game that made tens of millions.

The patents were awarded to Nintendo after Palword had already released a trailer for their game showing gameplay. Pocketpair also released an earlier game called Craftopia which is Palworld but the pals are just straight up animals. It has the same systems Palworld does but didn’t sell very well.

A newer update is that Palworld has since released a patch that modified how their capture and summon system works, likely in an attempt to make Nintendo happy.

Palworld Update v0.3.11 Notes:

Player: Changed the behaviour of summoning player-owned Pals so that they are always summoned near the player

UI: The reticle will now only be displayed when aiming

Edit: there are actually 3 patents. The third one is for the player character being able to ride on another character.

Anyone who gives steam $100 can upload as many “games” any “game” they want. There is no quality control.

It’s a common scam to throw some free assets together to make “collect coin” and then swap the coin asset out with a stick and call it “collect stick” and then swap out the stick with a brick and call it “collect brick” then upload all of them to Steam and bundle them into a 50 game pack with a sale price of $100 (95% off!) and hope someone buys the collection thinking they’re getting 50 real games at a steep discount.

Here’s an example. It’s a 33 game bundle for 99% off its original price of $8,579! They’re all the same “game” with different free assets made by the same dev who uploaded 167 versions of this “game” to steam on March 28, 2024 and priced each around $200.

What about Japan?

That’s the joke

I would ask for a refund.

No they specifically only target companies that cannot defend themselves. World of Warcraft has battle pets that you can capture by throwing cages at them and then train and fight them against other battle pets. Nintendo isn’t about to file a lawsuit against Microsoft.

It seems like it was a DMCA takedown request. Anyone can submit these to content hosters and the hoster has to follow the process, which typically means removing the content until it can be proven that it isnt violating copyright. The problem isn’t the takedown request, but that it was given to itch.io’s registrar instead of itch.io itself. It’d be like asking to takedown youtube from the web because someone reposted your video on it.

New report claims people with hobby spend more time watching videos about hobby than doing hobby

It might not be the engine. Some companies just don’t care much about optimization when they can just tell their players to buy better hardware.

Take GTA5 for example. It had a notoriously long load screen when starting up. Ranging from 2 minutes to 10 minutes depending on the read speeds of your storage drive. A modder ended up finding the problem. The code to load up the items in the game opened and read a file, but there was a bug that caused it to read through the entire file for each item loaded. The file was being read thousand of times. The modder changed one line of code and the loading time was reduced significantly. This was a bug that plagued GTA5 for years, caused by a single line of code, that the company didn’t fix because their fix was to buy better hardware.

Oh good, I thought it was just me! I have an older card and can barely keep 30fps with everything set to low. Good to know even top of the line $1,000+ cards can’t keep 60fps on max settings.

I wonder if they’ll be able to patch that. I remember Starfield had framerate issues on launch but a patch fixed it.

Valve wrote literal research papers on player experience and level design. The stuff they came up with have just become the norm in other games. For example, Valve found that players never look up without a reason to. They came up with ways to get the player to look up without directly telling them to with level design choices. Things like rays of light coming in from above, or ropes hanging from the ceiling.

It wouldn’t be a STALKER game if it wasn’t filled with bugs on release

I’m interested to see where this goes, but it’s a class action lawsuit. Most of the times these are just a law firm looking for money. I’d assume Ubisoft will negotiate a settlement where the lawfirm gets $1 million and anyone who bought The Crew will get a $5 credit towards another Ubisoft game.

Palworld had trailers featuring gameplay in 2021. Besides that, there are lots of games where you throw an object to add a character to your party. Including another earlier game by PocketPair called Craftopia. World of Warcraft added “battle pets” where you can throw a cage to catch animals and add them to your battle pets roster to fight against other trainers in 2012.

These headlines keep saying $90 mount but it’s basically “$90 access the mailbox and auction house from anywhere, and also get a mount”.

It sucks that you have to buy a subscription and pay for the expansions.

That’s what got me. I was paying $20 a month and after a year or so and then they ask for $60 to play the new content. What did you do with my $240 in subscription fees? Is that not to pay for new content?

*cranking the brightness up*

Hehehe

Yes, and the most outspoken Gamers™ represent a minority. There’s a reason studios don’t pander to them.

Asmondgold is a co-founder of the media company One True King. Another co-founder is “TipsOut”, who is also a Muslim. He posted a very long message on Twitter about the hatred he and his family have dealt with simply because of their race and religion and called out Asmondgold for perpetuating that same hatred.

I don’t think he changed his mind because of Twitch. He changed his mind because his Muslim business partner sat him down and educated him.

The context is irrelevant because nobody wants Ubisoft to fail because they don’t make content that caters to them. It’s a strawman argument. Does this Director of Monetization want to uplift his competitors? Absolutely not. He would love if all his competitors failed. Yet he gets on his high horse saying we must uplift his corporate venture to extract as much money as possible because we’re all in this together??

How can you wish a company to fail

Very easily, actually.

Unfortunately, my friends play it and I’m often roped into playing it with them. My advice: The game is greatly improved if you disable all forms of interaction with other players. Chat is muted by default now, but I’d also recommend muting pings and emotes. No form of interaction is ever positive in that game.

Even then, their matchmaking algorithm seems to be designed to hand an easy win to one team and just switches up which side you’re on enough times that you won’t quit.

My friends are addicted to League of Legends. I often ask them how they can put up with such a toxic culture and they said they like being toxic themselves. Just reminded me of Monty Python’s “I’d like to have an argument, please”.

You don’t own anything you purchase on Steam

Games sold on Steam are not required to use Steam’s DRM. There are lots of DRM free games on Steam. Steam is only required to be installed to purchase/download them but not to run them. After download, the game files can be copied and ran on any computer without any verification.

…on what?

I mean…you can. All lawsuits start with an application at a courthouse and that application can say whatever the plaintiff wants.

Here’s youtube lawyer LegalEagle reviewing some crazy ones. Like a man who sued David Copperfield for stealing magical powers granted to him by God. Lawsuits can say literally anything in their initial application.

It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.

It’s a patent lawsuit which might have a better chance than a copyright lawsuit but Nintendo didn’t disclose which patent(s) and Pocketpair also doesn’t know yet either.

You’re right though that any patent Pocketpair is infringing upon would also have likely been infringed by dozens of other games. Nintendo is just upset Pocketpair made millions with a game that appealed to Pokemon fans and want to ensure nobody else does it again.

In the “other references” they link to the bulbapedia article for Pokemon box so I figured thats what the whole thing was about, but yeah it does read like accessing data on a server

My guess is the “Pokemon Box Storage” system since palworld stores pals in a palbox.

They seem to have a patent for “Pokemon Box Storage” and palworld also has a “Palbox” so maybe that?

I’m glad Microsoft realized allowing any company to push kernel-level code to consumers was a terrible idea. A bug at that level can brick a PC and needs to be thoroughly scrutinized before being pushed out to end users. If a company dedicated to computer security wasn’t doing proper code reviews I really doubt game studios were either.