MudMan
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The vast majority of people to be read as “a tiny fraction of players”. It’s just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn’t be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.
While I don’t have hard data on this, I can tell you I’ve played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.
Intuitive perception on this stuff gets weird.
Well, you do need to hire someone, get them set up with access to the text database and then you need to implement the updated lines in-game and test and then bug fix anything that breaks anything, presumably. And then make the patch, submit it and have it go live, although for China presumably that’d be Steam-specific and have no actual first party approval process?
The headline is either confusing or a touch clickbaity. It’s mixed for Chinese language reviews specifically. The overall (and the English reviews, too) are at Very Positive.
But hey, fair, they messed up with the localization and apparently some bits of the launch. It’s gonna get you on the user reviews.
When were those days again?
I whined about the FF7 localization for years. Eventually met one of the guys in charge for separate reasons and whined at him about it. We were both quite old by then.
Some local games media in the late 90s and early 2000s here had a policy that no localization or bad localization would knock 1 to 2 points off the review score automatically, regardless of how good or bad the rest of the game was.
He did address it to the single largest individual investor. Unfortunately that also happens to be the one guy he’s supposed to be trying to get fired.
Guessing he’s not going to be game, and I doubt the multiple investment groups making billions out of this thing are much more concerned, especially since despite this information beign publicly available, none of them are even mentioned in the petition itself either.
The fact that people keep linking me to this guy’s video only reinforces my suspicion that getting traffic to this guy’s Roblox-focused Youtube channel is far more of a goal here.
No, it wasn’t.
Look, I know big numbers are hard and human brains don’t want to parse them, but come on.
You’re talking about an article on Dexerto, a medium that I’m sure has done great work between its founding and my just realizing they exist right now. There are a few other articles online, most in smaller sites or in aggregators.
You are talking about a massive social-media-meets-gaming-platform the size of Twitter on a good day, orders of magnitude bigger than the reach any of this crap got. This is nothing. It’s a PR stunt from a few youtubers, which I hate that I have now focused on enough to understand.
I agree that it’s designed to drum up attention. Just not that this attention is meant to be effective at anything at all beyond, one suspects, driving viewership, because it sure as hell isn’t targeting anything that may cause any action.
Maybe this is why people don’t pay attention to Roblox despite being as large as Steam. The dissonance is just too large. It sucks, because despite the remarkable trivialization of the issue there should be way more eyeballs on this. Real eyeballs. Eyeballs attached to hands holding pens that can sign proper regulations, or at least scare some knee-jerky intermediaries.
Somehow a thousand assholes with customer support addresses managed to ban half of the smut on Steam, but these people figured out they’d gather a hundred times as many signatures and point them at the one person in the entire planet guaranteed to ignore them.
I am tired. I don’t want to think about this anymore.
By design in that, as I said above, this doesn’t seem like a serious attempt to generate any change but rather a bit of a tantrum from users that don’t necessarily want meaningful changes to the crap Roblox does.
Think more Modern Warfare 2 boycott than “EU regulators looking into loot boxes”.
Considering that the whole thing stems from drama stirred by Roblox streamers and youtubers who make a living from Roblox itself I’m not feeling particularly tinfoily.
10 million would be nice.
Try 100 million.
Roblox is a LOT bigger than people think.
The smallest game in Roblox’s top 10 as I write this would be on Steam’s top 10 by concurrent users. That’s above GTA V. The number one game on Roblox would be number 1 on Steam, ahead of CounterStrike 2 by a factor of 2.
I mean a LOT bigger.
There are 17 comments in this thread as of this writing, half of which are me ranting about it and a bunch of others being people unhelpfully telling a concerned parent to google what it’s about if they don’t know why Roblox is bad.
As far as I can tell his has increased awareness by one person. That is much, much less than 0.01%.
If you want awareness of the people that matter you want to get to the mianstream press, who have way more reach than Change.org, particularly with that demographic.
Once again, this is very ineffectual on all stated goals. Whehter that’s by design or through incompetence I can’t tell.
No.
I mean, size matters. Tiny gestures that don’t do anything are useless by definition.
This petition isn’t even to regulate the platform or addressed to any regulatory body. As far as I can tell it’s just complaining about Roblox at Roblox.
Go after British regulators. Australian regulators. They sure seem willing to overreach under the guise of “will somebody think of the children”. Asking Roblox’s CEO to remove Roblox’s CEO sure seems like somebody would like the game to run the way they like but not for it to be removed or meaningfully changed to alter the real issues with it. It sounds like pointless whining to me, and I don’t even make any money out of this thing.
In the meantime, you are trying to convince a person to quit their extremely lucrative job by asking them nicely. Assuming the founder, CEO and single largest individual shareholder of the company needs to see, what? 10-20% of its userbase actually do something before he thinks he’s in trouble you only need to do get this a hundred to two hundred times larger for it to get noticed. More, if he’s stubborn. You may as well write a sternly written letter and flush it down the toilet.
If you want Roblox to change how it operates the people who can get that done are elected officials and regulators.
TLDR, Roblox is effectively a heavily monetized game development and social media platform aimed at and run by children.
Effectively a huge treadmill of NFTs for underage users where they’re encouraged to make, buy and sell content to each other. And because millions of them log in every day also a remarkable honey pot for people wanting to interact with that audience as a bonus.
Most evidence out there is that Roblox management either actively generates this situation or is very much okay with it.
So basically if you don’t want your kids on social media unsupervised (or working for a billionaire for free) this is probably not the right place for them to be.
And granted, those are genuine “ifs”. You may not have a problem with them being in those sorts of online spaces, and learning game development via Roblox isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The lack of mainstream awareness about what’s actually in there may be the more genuinely disturbing thing about Roblox in the first place.
Oh, wow, that’s almost 0.1% of their daily users. He’s probably quaking in his boots.
I’m less confused about this happening than I am about how successfully Roblox has flown under the radar. People do not realize how big it is or how it works, and they seem not just happy to keep it that way, but actively concerned with maintaining that low profile.
Hey, I’m all for creating a public online payment processor. An international one, even.
I’m not even pulling any punches. There are no reasons to leave this in private hands.
But this reeks of people being mad at the thing they know and feel have some influence with instead of with the actual problem, and it’s a bummer because it encapsulates Internet outrage and why it’s so often ineffectual.
Valve works with the same handful of payment providers everybody else does. Literally everybody else. I don’t have a stance on how feasible it is to handle your own payment processing, but claiming that any company on the planet is negligent for not doing so is insane.
I am all on board for taking regulatory action against anticompetitive practices in this space from the oligopolistic few companies available in it.
My educated guess is that seems too remote for you to feel righteous by being angry at someone specific so we’re talking about Valve instead.
Hell, I’m all for taking regulatory action against Valve for their own monopolistic practices. I’m just not here to posture ineffectual anger.
I’m not gonna tell you this is impossible to set up for a worldwide online company because unlike the OP I have no problem acknowledging that I don’t know enough about something to understand how hard it is.
I will tell you that it’s absurd to propose that by working with the three biggest payment processors in the world, covering a huge share of all online payments, Steam has somehow been negligent.
That doesn’t follow even a little bit. It’s an absolute non-sequitur. It’s someone trying very hard to be mad at somebody they know for a thing they don’t fully understand.
And two hard boiled eggs.
Because why not.
FWIW, the piece here is remarkably light on its headline issue. The most I can see in there is:
Policymakers need to protect both players and the workers creating games. That means, among other things, rethinking release schedules, enforcing rest periods for development teams and holding companies accountable for the well-being of their staff. The overall health of the industry depends on it.
That is almost entirely meaningless. Rest periods for dev teams are already established in legislation, as they are for any other EU worker. It’s called holidays and we got to that way earlier than to live service gaming. There are also maximum caps on overtime in the labor legislation of most EU countries.
This is asking for nothing, as far as I can tell.
And whose fault is that?
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won’t let them go. Don’t see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I’m sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they’ve locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I’m just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t know if it should be a Valve thing anyway. For one thing, I am not comfortable with Valve owning all of PC gaming in the first place.
But from their perspective, it’s one thing to own compatibility in a system they don’t pay anything for and effectively can own and another to go do work for a bigger fish. If Apple wants big PC games to run on their hardware Apple can make it happen, presumably. I mean, Meta is keeping the VR market afloat single-handedly, and there’s a chance you could actually make money with this stuff on Mac.
I do think it makes more sense for them to do that if and when all their hardware is running the same OS, or at least the same software. They don’t seem to have made up their mind on whether that should be a thing, even though it’s very clear it should be a thing.
It’s genuinely more complicated than that, honestly. Apple did a great job of pretending these ARM devices were on par with desktop PC hardware when they… kind of aren’t, in absolute terms. I wonder how much of an incentive they have to keep doing this if the result is their top of the line five grand devices start to look like mid-range PCs and the bullshit way their naming conventions are designed starts getting exposed by widespread FPS counts on tentpole game releases. I genuinely don’t think Apple wants to have that conversation.
So if anything it seems weird to me that they are focusing on this. Honestly, getting triple-A releases ported to phones and tablets seems like a much safer bet. I guess it’s just hard to leave the laptop and desktop users entirely out of the loop for no good reason, but they have a lot of experience doing just that, so who knows.
It seems pretty obvious that unifying the software is the next step for them after unifying a lot of the hardware. what that means for gaming on their devices is anybody’s guess.
And of course I don’t particularly care because… I mean, macs.
I don’t think it’s particularly controversial these days to say that Linux gaming is way ahead of Mac gaming, so I’m not sure that part is suprising, beyond the notion that in other metrics the OS split for those is more like 15% to 5%.
I mean, the Mac side was celebrating this month that Cyberpunk finally runs natively on it, and it is borderline unplayable on most of the hardware out there, gets comparable to what? A 5060? on the very top end.
I read in that two missed opportunities: One, Mac gaming should get so much better. Two, somebody on the Linux side should really start taking non-gaming compatibility seriously.
So hold on they prioritize profit over quality, but the result isn’t “low quality”?
I mean, charitably I could separate design quality from technical quality and accept you were only talking about the latter, but it’s a big concession.
“Needs to die” and “needs to change” are very different things, and we’re all estabilishing that there is a lot of worthwhile stuff coming out of that side of the industry right now. If you think you’re being misunderstood I’d happily hear what the correct interpretation is supposed to be, but I’m going to politely say maybe it’s because you presented your point in an imprecise, hyperbolic way for effect, not because we’re twisting what you said.
There is a deluxe edition with some cosmetics that you can buy as a bundle or as a separate pack.
It’s not much, but hey, I don’t mind cosmetics in general, so you tell me where you draw the line. It’s mostly horse armor, but I thought that was a bad thing.
The persona games get weird, because they typically get at least one re-release and it’s hard to keep track of what is availble where. I can tell you if you google “Persona 5 DLC” there are people explicitly asking how to avoid cashing in the bundled DLC items that trivialize chunks of the game by being overpowered, though.
I am very confused about what you’re saying there. So AAA produces great games but also is bloated, exploitative and low quality for the sake of profit.
So which is it? I mean, it can be both, but then I’m not sure where the “AAA needs to die” thing comes from. Presumably AAA should make more good games and less bad games, which seems like a completely different thing to say.
Neither would Mass Effect or DA:O, those had purchaseable cosmetics and preorder bonuses. So did Dead Space, incidentally. In fact there were some cross-brand cosmetics between Dead Space and Mass Effect, IIRC. Definitely Jedi Survivor. Persona games often have small cosmetic DLC, too.
Often with this stuff, “AAA” becomes “games I didn’t like” more than anything else.
Look, I don’t think anybody has an obligation towards constructive optimism.
I do ask that those who don’t at least take care to not be destructive in their pessimism, or at least not to let those who are deliberately destructive to get in a position where they can be more destructive out of being despondent.
That’s the thing, right? It may not be your turn to make things better, but if you are mindful in how you get out of the way somebody else may take things to the place where you can be. The part that worries me is how many people in that same spiral end up doing nothing when they get the chance, or so mad that they just want to tear things down without caring about what gets put in their place.
I still have some floppies in working order, even.
But no, I don’t play them regularly. It’s just easier to make a backup that doesn’t need a disk in the drive. Even most of my retro PCs these days run out of a large-ish hard drive replacement, so keeping games outside their unreliable original media and the original media elsewhere is a better alternative.
It’s a bit different on consoles where carts are harder to duplicate and ingest, as well as being more reliable and loading faster. Floppies and optical media, particularly when you can access the files, less so.
Well, if noone cares, then your issue maybe just isn’t that important.
I don’t think that’s the case, but we have to account for the possibility that your priorities just aren’t particularly good priorities that other people care about.
I say I don’t think that’s the case because plenty of people do care about some of this stuff at least to some degree, or at least agree with it when asked.
People tend to be very down on the system or on politicians or on the ability or willingness to do anything in the common interest, and that’s mostly part of the liberal lie as well. There’s plenty to be done and plenty of people willing to do it. Those people need the power to do it, though. Sure, getting those people to where they need to be is hard, particularly with leftie types who will immediately get discouraged the moment their politicians aren’t paragons of justice with a magic wand to fix every issue, but that’s not the same as saying nobody cares.
I’d much rather have people get motivated than discouraged, and I don’t need to win every fight, especially not right away. It’d rather move in the right direction than pout about it, even if the short term practical outcome is the same.
Nah, I don’t think it’s malicious.
The term has been muddled from the beginning. There wasn’t a concept of “indies vs triple A” until Microsoft started offering digital-only games under servere restrictions for size and feature set. Because that made people assume that indie = small and because some design tropes became part of the common understanding of the term we ended up in a very weird middle ground.
Before that happened nobody really thought about indie vs triple A, it was mostly first party versus third party. Games were mostly gated by storage cost and performance rather than budget, so games from big studios and small studios mostly looked the same. You could definitely have used those terms in the PS1 era to compare massive stuff like Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear to smaller shovelware, but back then that was just the difference between good games and bad games.
I don’t know if I agree. Size has some impact. Risking the livelihoods of you and your friends working for peanuts in your bedrooms is one thing, being at the helm of a billion dollar business is a bit of a different beast.
But yeah, it does matter whether you’re public or private. A whole bunch of indie games are made by public companies, though. Definitely by corporate-owned companies and companies with big corporate investors.
By that bar a lot of the “indies” being touted here aren’t really… that.
That’s why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you’re unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that’s independent from the wider effects. If you don’t care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.
But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn’t have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.
The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.
But even in that scenario I’m afraid people don’t particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it’s Mario Kart. For some it’s branding, for some it’s because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it’s nostalgia from their childhood, for some it’s just that they don’t care or know and that’s the name they recognize.
You could fund half the gaming industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.
So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.
He then ran down a string of recent hits developed by independent devs and studios: Balatro, Baldur’s Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur—even the venerable Minecraft, an archetypal indie superhit before Mojang was sold into the Microsoft stable.
I mean, by that definition he’s not wrong.
It’s just that the way that works is indie devs become big enough to either become whatever the hell triple A means or get bought by whatever the hell triple A is.
Magicka was an indie game, I really struggle to fit Helldivers 2, a Sony-published sequel to a Sony-published game, into that same bucket. Ditto for Larian. Divinity OS? Sure. Hasbro-backed multi-studio Baldur’s Gate 3 with its hundreds of millions of budget? Myeaaaaah, I don’t know.
I think the real question is how you keep the principles that make indie games interesting in play when the big money comes in. I’m all for an indie-driven industry, but I’m a touch more queasy about a world in which major publishers use tiny devs as a million monkeys with typewriters taking on all the risk and step in at the very end (sometimes post-release) to scoop up the few moneymakers.
We won’t indeed. And that’s why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.
We won’t because our set of incentives isn’t infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn’t have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it’s the law.
We’re not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We’re not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.
That’s not the sphere where those choices belong. We’ve been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don’t want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won’t like they will “vote with their wallet” and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn’t a competitor will give people what they want and they’ll buy that instead.
But that’s a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn’t work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You’re meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.
Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn’t get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn’t get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.
So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart’s content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn’t supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn’t even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go… you know… shush.
I don’t even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
“We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we’ll be looking into performance improvements in future patches”. It’s not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
Hell, it’s even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.