i’m less worried about me not buying their games and more worried about the folks who buy madden every year even though the last interesting release was 08

very apt meatphor, especially when you consider the development and enjoyment of games has consistently been part of the human experience.

a lovingly crafted game is a gourmet meal, each ingredient lovingly selected based on experience and a desire to give the recipient a special experience that will stay with them emotionally long term

a big studio game is fast food combination meal, each component focus tested after optimizing the whole pipeline to reduce cost to the investor and the resulting experience leaves the recipient feeling empty and unsatisfied. sure, occasionally something innovative will come along like a first person openworld sandbox or a 4 pack of cinnamon poppers, but eventually the big firms will replicate what’s working at other firms and you’ll be left with every studio offering the equivalent to chicken nuggets, hamburgers, fried chicken sandwhiches, french fries, and soda

there’s also a troubling trend in the gaming industry for the very most right wing propaganda to be promoted and pushed alongside gaming content. steam is not the true exposure to liberating ideology that will wake the chauvinists up. far more likely to make them go, “see, this is how the world works.”

this is about steam, a proprietary program only available as a 32-bit executable

for sure. i just wanted to hit a number that someone couldn’t at all be doubted for “i could retire at 18”

once you hit $100M, you have enough to never work again. you could spend the rest of your living days spending time in a community making sure everyone there is fed, housed, and safe.

even just maintaining your personal status quo of working the way you did to get into 9 figures is inherently supportive of the global system of torture all of us are forced to live in. while i agree gabe newell, jay-z, and taylor swift shouldn’t be the main focus of our ire, i find the degree of worship they receive confusing.

mate if a badly made product makes it into your hand it’s the company that made it and sold it to you’s responsibility. “we used a subcontractor” is not an excuse. this is not random. it’s simply saying that google made a crappy product by cutting corners intientionally to boost short term profits at the cost of their consumer. if you think that’s what apple users do you haven’t met a single one

we could do something crazy like create new IPs

i also wonder if “lifetime revenue” is just “here’s what we, devolver, made on this title” because i notice the third party titles that aren’t cult of lamb are trending lower on the board, and i assume that’s because devolver as just the publisher has to give more of the money to the studio that developed the game

i see you found it already, but this reminds me of ohip’s challenge

ban elon’s characters for a guaranteed boost in ratings

i have the legal right to stand on the street corner and call everyone who walks by a stupid slut.

that does not mean i will at no point get punched

yes, if for no other reason than that they’re tricking you into thinking they’re more fun than they are. you can have more fun playing other games with actual mechanic designs

also the pinkertons

this is also what i came into the thread wanting to know

yeah i didn’t even know this happened, so i guess i’m in the unaffected half

yup. the right wing adjacent studio bosses chased off everyone who made the game special. the groups working on spiritual successors though all seem to wish each other success

it’s 7 card monti but with the gambling replaced with strategic decision making. the fact that lootboxes aren’t considered gambling, but removing gambling from poker is, it just puts on display how the big corporations are desperate to keep us locked into their entertainment machines and away from innovative art

passage of the PATRIOT ACT

we’ve been living in 1984 since 2002

i think it’s clear from this these regulatory bodies primarily function to help the industry make money. indies can sometimes get co-signs from these bodies, but only if they stay in their lane. balatro has been a huge smash hit, and it feels like this body just wants to keep it down that little bit

and the most delicious kind of money of all: dark money! ooooh it’s so good because the sources of the dark money offer you a lot of it, and they specifically ask you not to ask questions, which is so good for you because these bloatware programs make your device sell worse and provides no value as a sales platform because it turns out that billboards and radio spots are, surprisingly, the most effective form of advertising.

but! you have a sense of solidarity. you have faith that by never offering a phone without bloatware, your entire industry will ensure that all phones won’t have bloatware. you rest easy at night knowing your phone won’t sell poorly, at the end of the day, because every phone is like this. your contributions to a surveillance and propaganda machine that should punish you in the market because won’t because all your peers are your allies in this.

and it gets better! every time someone else’s phone gets more bloatware and more dark money attached, then everyone else appears comparatively better, allowing them to get worse. ooooh you love it so much when you get to take more dark money. and all it costs you are several thousand lives far away from your big mansion. you don’t even have to see the suffering

Yes. Using kids to drive engagement on YouTube is exploitative. Parents who do that are exploiting their children

Its exploiting child labor and the impulsive brain chemistry of adolescence.

Bruh the more light we can shed on media literacy in this election year the better…

Anyone who just wants content, never mind the ethical outcomes of continued presence in a billionaires plaything to amplify rightwing voices