Noted, I didn’t even know she existed. What are some good articles she wrote for IGN that you’d recommend?

I don’t expect IGN to keep anyone on the writing team but it’s good to know good authors.

My bet is: you can’t reliably fire unionised workers, so you make them want to quit instead.

The IGN newsroom is a joke, name one reputable journalist you are SURE works there without checking first, and I’ll be genuinely surprised, the only value is in the brandname, their coverage can probably be replaced by some LLM horseshit with nobody really noticing.

The higher ups know it, the journos know it (hence why they unionised) and thus they’re at an impasse.

Once they inevitably lose this standoff they’ll be replaced by third-worlder english speakers with chatgpt, mark my words.

People aren’t exactly ranting about how Winston (a Gorilla) isn’t sexually attractive

Well that’s for 2 reasons:

1. He’s a single character, the vast majority of characters in any successful piece of media are at least somewhat appealing, and this stands true for OW.
2. Winston is a stud

demonizing queer repsentation as ugly.

They’re not, they’re specifically saying Concord’s character design is ugly for a lot of very practical and valid reasons, and also it’s only representing a very specific minority of people who are a spit in the bucket of the total audience numbers necessary to support a paid live service title.

So it’s both doing a disservice to itself by just being incompetently made AND playing into the stereotype that minority rep always ends up ugly (an already very common sentiment due to how often cases of it sucking are spotlit) because it has basically nothing but that.

Ironically had Concord had a more actually diverse cast, and not overwhelmingly represented a handful of pet groups the designers seemed to overwhelmingly favour, it would have not been possible to attack it as “they’re all lame fat and/or gay.”

It still would have tanked, so on balance not much of an issue, but still.

You absolutely can. Something bad and uninteresting is not an improvement on something mediocre and uninteresting.

You don’t get points for the jump if you shatter both your knees on the landing and the kneecaps fly out into the stands killing one of the hotdog vendors.

There’s something deeply funny to me that the same political side that demands representation for everyone in everything is then stunned to know that if EVERY character doesn’t represent something the typical audience likes/wants to see that audience will go elsewhere.

This is not rocket science, and it’s such a deeply american problem it’s honestly hilarious and frustrating at the same time with your culture’s obsession with moralizing media consumption and production only somehow ever registering one way.

If your game’s characters look lame, uninteresting, and nothing like most people would want to be, nobody’s gonna buy it. It’s that simple.

Progressives keep banging on about how people need to be represented to want to partake in a piece of media,* then when a piece of media that represents exclusively stereotypical members of a portland polycule shows up people are surprised if it’s played exclusively by some polyamorous portlanders (not even all of them if you look at the stats).

* which is yet more horseshit america-centrism, the rest of the world is used to not being represented in most media we see since americans make most of it, and i’d rather laminate my own testicles than subject myself at an earnest attempt from an american at representing my demo.

Furthermore:

Overwatch is super diverse, but all their characters (yes, even the fucking gorilla, Winston is handsome as fuck and he passes the harkness test) look appealing.

Their bodies look well proportioned, even Roadhog who is a morbidly obese alcoholic with visible cirrhosis looks more visually appealing than any concord character, because even he looks like an idealised and larger than life (pun very intended) version of a morbidly obese alcoholic.

Meanwhile concord characters look like frumpy cosplayers that wouldn’t qualify for 3rd place at a backwater anime con somewhere in whatever US state has the worst inbreeding rates.

Your example with DRG is very fitting as well because I don’t think most people would call those characters sexually attractive (but trust me, some absolutely do), but they are extremely visually appealing. Bold recognizable shapes that fit their roles, good color combinations, fun presentations.

Concord looks like it’s about to scold you for microaggressing someone, DRG looks like it’s about to attempt to burp another country’s national anthem it hasn’t even heard before.

DRG oozes goliardic fun, while Concord looks and feels like the used dishrag at the bar where that team’s art director will end up working if there is any justice in the world.

ETA: two words, punctuation

Baldur’s Gate got them all, sorry.

I’m sure the fact that Ghibli movies and BotW are best-in-class examples of their respective mediums has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Looking forward to the metric shittons of open world ghibli knock-off garbage being currently greenlit by frothing execs hoping they have at last found the blueprints to the dopamine machine.

Stop Killing Games can focus on other industry problems later when it has established more of a presence.

Or just not? SKG is a consumer rights and art preservation movement, not a labor rights movement.

None of the people who signed up for SKG should expect it to pivot to something else once the stated goal is achieved, and especially not to legitimise itself as an organisation beyond its stated mission off the back of the support for it.

I guarantee you without a shadow of a doubt that a “Stop firing devs” would not have gone anywhere close to this level of support.

Moreover, it’s basically impossible to unionize any kind of digital asset production work, because with modern internet connections locations are a non-issue, and you can’t unionize across vastly different countries and economies.

Too many people are willing to work in games while being paid breadcrumbs to even make a union possible, even without the outsourcing issue, and frankly if you are that willing to get fucked why should anyone stand in your way?

Lol no.

If you want workers’ rights get your own movement started, you don’t get to come shit up the initiative others have set up for an entirely different purpose.

Dragon age 2, Mass effect 3

ME3 is particularly bad cause most of the game is exactly as it should have been, and then the ending is pure unadulterated trash.

MC and Visa are not technically payment processors, that would be stuff like stripe or ayden.

The problem is that cc companies have rules that put the onus of ensuring nothing illegal is purchased with their issued cards on the ones actually meditating the transaction, so it becomes a chilling effect because the intermediaries don’t want to risk burning a bridge with the largest cc networks in the world, and overcorrect as a result.

I love communism

And I’m sure you live on one of the many successful communist countries in the world today.

Oh, wait.

and circus performers

Well at least you have high self esteem.

they both bring joy to the masses

The masses*

* the portion of them that is not in a gulag, is not disappeared, doesn’t have its rights curtailed due to social credit decline for disagreeing with the regime, wasn’t purposefully starved to death during the holodomor, and so forth.

And don’t get me started on the evils of the circus performers who propagandise for them from the comfort of their liberal democracies.

There is a reason communism is treated with equal acrimony to nazism in every former soviet satellite state, m8.

How’s the bile, you seething commie clown?

valve and steam are not the friendly aw shucks corporation they’ve been whitewashed into.

And the goalposts go flying.

Who the fuck cares if valve is cute and cuddly? Who even wants that in a marketplace other than morons who think they can take advantage of someone else’s kindness?

Valve is a company, their job is to make money for the people who own it.

• You the customer want the most out of your transaction with them, they know it make it a priority.
• They understand that devs working there making fucktons of money is good because they’ll stay and be motivated to work, so they are selective on who they hire and then pay them an insane amount.
• They want to avoid microsoft cutting their nuts off so they pushed linux as a viable alternative.
• They want devs to sell on their platform so they refined a business deal that works well enough that they get several new games on their storefront a day and still make back their operating costs, despite servers that can literally be used to benchmark several gigabit download connections.
• They are the most economically effective company in the world and they achieved it by not enshittifying their platform and not going public.

Selflessness would literally be a downgrade, I want Valve to have every damn cent they earned.

They’re not the only game in town, they are the best game in town, and at every turn they make an effort not to become a monopoly, either, because they know the good will of their customer base is more important than attempts at short term spikes in company revenue, which is only possible because they are a privately held company.

So yeah, are they cuddly and nice? No, fuck no, but they are extremely effective while providing a service that puts every other provider in their field to shame, so why the fuck would I want them to change?

They could, but why would they when 30% is fair still? You are not entitled to setting other people’s asking price, and they are entitled to setting the cost of their own labour.

If anyone is greedy here it’s you, demanding to have a say in how much is a fair rate for someone else’s time and skill.

If you’re a game dev, then you should also know how valuable every service steam gives is, if you’re just “a dev” then it’s not really relevant beyond understanding how much setting up all of that infrastructure would cost in terms of time, effort, marketing to actually get discoverability, and actual server costs once you need to scale.

Either way you should know enough to get that 30% is absolutely worth it.

taking 30% from devs by doing nothing.

LMAO tell me you are not a dev without telling me.

Steam does a shitton for devs, the 30% is literally only for sales through their storefront, I can get any amount of keys and resell them wherever I want and give valve nothing, and they’ll still host all my shit, check ownership, handle copy sharing in family libraries, handle patching and beta tests, all for a one time fee that is even refunded if you ever get past a certain amount of copies sold.

You have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.

I’d argue that’s precisely when you need 6 yachts, possibly more.

If the coasts are gonna flood you should porbably own things that float.

Gabe Newell owns 6 yachts worth an estimated US$1 billion

Unfathomably based, let the man scuba dive in peace.

Nintendo products have their union sale sticker on so I think they met and our guys won.

The exact specifics change country by country, in Italy there are a lot of horseshit rules around it because one of the most powerful unions lobbies (our equivalent of the RIAA) for more exclusive control over media at every chance they get, to the point that you’re not allowed to distribute even your own media through physical sales without paying a cut.

Legend of Grimrock seems pretty close, i haven’t played it in years though so I might be misremembering.

On Steam you can report review bombing events to have the reviews struck from the list so…

And the working at blizzard line is mocking Thor for literally never shutting the fuck up about his nepobaby job.

whether or not this was intentional or misinformed is up for debate

It’s not, in his response to the initial controversy he cut out the part of Ross’ video that directly contradicted his misrepresentation, he’s a lying piece of shit.

I don’t know if he genuinely didn’t understand or if he was too embarrassed to admit to a mistake

Worse, he actively lied. In his edited video about the petition he actively misrepresents the initiative, then goes on to edit out the the part of Ross’ video that would have contradicted his misrepresentation.

This is not an innocent or negligent mistake on Thor’s part, it’s an active attempt at burial.

Both Arkham Knight and Witcher 3 exist on steam so the comparison is possible either way

I stopped caring about the American dub as soon as they recast Chie for P4G anyway, what’s one more change at this point

Oh, that’s actually nice to hear, makes me re-evaluate gog somewhat.

I don’t use heroic much but it’s never too late to start.

Kinda, unfortunately.

It was great when it had its niche, and I still buy games there occasionally, but it has poorer integration with pretty much anything, Galaxy is bloated as hell, and it has explicitly no linux/deck support.

Eta: apparently GOG actively funds Heroic launcher, didn’t know that, thanks for pointing it out to me.

Sorry, I meant that most companies do fixes to comply with local legislations/sentences and then ignore them everywhere else, Pocketpair can’t do that because they are being sentenced in their home jurisdiction, so their infractions in other jurisdictions could and would still be brought to court.

Most companies do stuff like that but pocketpair is based in Japan so they can’t, they’d be held accountable.

Add one to the list. Really enjoyable, even fun to cheese, not very fond of the ending but otherwise stellar.

I see no mention of Starsector, there should be mention of Starsector.

Try Starsector.

That’s very neat then, you’d probably get sued anyway cause companies don’t care, but it does make me want to make a game like that and see what happens.

My dude, the world isn’t only about you.

It’s not about you and your inferiority complex, either.

You’re much closer to ending up on the street than you are from any billionaire that exists.

I’m also much closer to the center of the earth than the sun, I’m still quite far from either, and I’m not very worried about being near either anytime soon.

Short of world war 3 or some other world-shaking catastrophe that won’t be my problem alone, I’m pretty sure my biggest worries are my health and not getting hit by a car, rather than sudden bankruptcy, and I don’t live in the US so the former can’t lead to the latter.

Now off to the block list you go, people like you don’t deserve anyone’s attention.

You’re not a plane, you don’t need to announce your departure.

That seems to be wrong at least according to the ESA.

The software itself is copyrighted, the invention is patented, either way the Nemesis system seems to be protected in europe.

Implying I care LMAO

I’m more than economically comfortable, by no means a billionaire but I’m not hurting like, at all. I own my own home, I am set to inherit like 2 more houses, I make good money at a stable job, I have time for my hobbies and a family I love.

I want for nothing that I can’t have, with some patience.

Gaben having a Yacht collection makes no difference to me, Steam existing and Valve doing what they do does, so I am happy to see them thrive.

Not everyone is an envious crab in a bucket who feels the constant need to compare themselves to others and ensure nobody is more well off than they are.

What a sad life you must lead that you get this angry over something that doesn’t affect you in the least, or did Gabe outbid you on your dream yacht?

You realize that the cut they’re taking ends up being used to pay for a yacht collection, right?

God forbid a man spend his money however he wants. Get that commie bullshit out of here.

Money changes hands consensually and Gaben/Valve have more than earned mine. Treating your customers like they are your priority in running a service will do that.

There’s nothing great about Valve at this point

Except their massive contributions to the Open Source/Linux ecosystems with Vulkan and Proton, SteamVR being the only properly supported agnostic VR library, and them basically being the one thing between us and Microsoft becoming a walled garden when it comes to gaming, and more recently the Steam Deck?

If you gotta be a hater, at least be correct.

Anyone who would complain about game design has already stopped buying or caring about Ubisoft products years ago.