Schadrach
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Steam has also been hosting numerous outright neo-Nazi groups for many years (PDF) and never really stepped up effectively against them. User reports and media attention has limited effect.
As a general rule, steam discussion boards for a game are moderated by whoever the developer assigns that power to, and steam user groups are moderated by the group owner or whoever they delegate that power to and Steam doesn’t particularly care so long as you aren’t doxing, openly coordinating harassment, or doing something explicitly illegal in the US.
That’s also the general tilt they’ve taken with what’s allowed on the store since they opened the floodgates - if it’s not illegal and it’s not going to get them sued, it’s probably allowed if properly tagged. Which is why you can find Sex With Hitler side by side with Super Lesbian Animal RPG.
Worst they do is block it from specific regions if the local government requests it - see that game where you essentially play as Hamas fighting against the IDF that they recently blocked from the UK, the one where the largest part of the game description is arguing that the game isn’t antisemitic hate speech just because the enemy are Jewish. The call to block it came after a new patch that apparently added a scenario based on the Oct 7 attack.
Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.
Sums up how I feel about them. I have lots of games on my Epic account. I have paid for none of them, and refuse to change that. If it’s an Epic exclusive, it will eventually either release on other platforms, become an epic store free game of the week, or be an epic store freebie on amazon prime. I have enough games in my library I can wait.
Short version is that for the most part forum moderation for each game is left up to the devs or whoever they appoint, and users can create user groups and curators without much if any restrictions and they don’t particularly give a shit what content the game you want to sell has. The only real exceptions are if it’s illegal in the US, which applies to very little (for example no CSAM).
I find it interesting that the federal government threatening a private entity with legal repercussions if it doesn’t restrict the speech of it’s users isn’t such an obvious violation of the first amendment that lawyers aren’t climbing over each other to fight this one.
And if you don’t see the problem with it, imagine we agree that the federal government should be allowed to restrict what expression can go on on internet platforms content-wise, then imagine Trump and his cronies deciding where the borders lie. They already want to revive the Comstock Act.
It’s almost like people ignore men’s issues and scapegoat them at every opportunity for the sake of women.
Men will never ever get the benefit of the doubt, but when we try to demand it we are just crybabies.
Welcome to society. Frankly, it’s malagency (mis-assignment of agency, specifically in a fashion that often makes men responsible for things that happen to them even when they really aren’t and often absolves women of that responsibility when they really should have it) all the way down.
Malagency as a lens predicts reality better than a lot of other gender focused lenses. “What would happen if women are believed to be less responsible for what happens than they really are and men are believed to be more responsible for what happens than they really are?” tends to map to reality better than “What would happen if everything in society were created by men to benefit men at the expense of women and to oppress women?” Especially once you stop looking narrowly at the top few percent of men, where the two lenses give similar results.
and the cops saw a man fighting a woman and shot the man by default.
Something like 95% of people shot by police are men. This of course is not discriminatory on the grounds that men are evil, violent savages unlike every other group that are disproportionately shot by police who are innocent victims of oppression.
“Gamers” are also a group one elects to be a member of, while one is categorized into a race, sex or gender from birth. One is elective, the other is descriptive. No one chooses to be black, or white, or born with male or female genitalia, etc, etc. And a lot of negative views are often along the lines of a rare bad thing being more likely performed by a certain demographic being extrapolated to accuse that demographic of being dangerous or harmful in general (usually an out-group, though under some ideologies it’s only acceptable to have this view with a target perceived to be the in-group - as regards blame they essentially reverse the perceived in- and out-group roles).
To turn it around on you though, imagine we picked some other elective group (a hobby, a political or ideological leaning, that sort of thing) that you are likely to look positively upon (and maybe even be a member of) and did the same kind of thing. Let’s say…feminists? Would it be acceptable to accuse feminism or feminists of anything negative I can point to any group thereof doing, and if you aren’t one of the ones who actually does that then you should not take offense, right? Not feel defensive at all, not question or challenge the assertion at all, right?
That’s because there aren’t many Denuvo crackers out there (most notably Empress) and unless it’s a huge title or a new title it’s not going to be a priority for the rare few that do it. Empress has her followers vote on what to crack next.
Related to why FitGirl doesn’t generally do repacks of games using Denuvo, as FitGirl and Empress have a sort of ongoing feud that leads to FitGirl not using Empress cracks.
If that MMO was City of Heroes rather than one of their other ones, it’s got thriving community servers that have at this point even been given an official license to continue doing what they’re doing and the group running the community servers even have continued development of the game.
Apparently the private server started shortly after CoH was shut down, when a developer leaked a copy of the official software to someone at City of Titans and they ran a secret private server for years before someone broke the silence.
large corporations can decide if unaffiliated devs earn money for any reason.
Large corporations and sufficiently rich individuals can decide if you do anything for any reason. Bringing up unaffiliated devs earning money is just narrowing the scope beyond what it actually is. Again, everything you do happens only because the exceedingly wealthy and massive corps don’t consider you worth suing over it.
As far as why I might want to preemptively know what games they’ve been involved in, looking at games they’ve been involved with there are a lot with…not great writing. So either involving them has a negative effect on quality or they mostly get hired for games that are doing badly enough that their involvement brings them up to bad. Either way, it seems like something that might be a red flag, at least a conditional one.
That’s without invoking “diversity” or “woke” at all, though sometimes the two overlap like with Lex Luthor’s files in Suicide Squad, especially the one on Wonder Woman. If you asked most DC fans what Lex Luthor might mention when writings his musings about Wonder Woman, fawning over how Amazon society defeated toxic masculinity wouldn’t be in the top thousand ideas of most. His views of the other JL members are generally pretty dark (and arguably insightful), but the worst he says about Wonder Woman is that she might perhaps be the worst of her people, after writing a couple of paragraphs about how great the Amazons are.
I’m not sure invoking “diversity” or “woke” is unfair though, since diversity and inclusivity are things they explicitly advertise themselves for.
Miles Morales was probably the best thing they’ve been involved with, to date.
Even then, let’s look at what the hate entails - people noticing they keep popping up related to games they looked forward to but were disappointing to them for various reasons. So one Brazilian PoC makes a curator list on Steam listing games they were involved with and tagging them Not Recommended, which anyone can see if they opt-in to the list. This is apparently a harassment campaign against minorities.
In response, their CEO calls out the curator and it’s creator’s personal Steam account and calls for people to mass flag it and calls for Steam to ban them both. This is apparently not in any way a harassment campaign against minorities, despite targeting a Brazilian PoC for making a list of products they were involved with and labeling them Not Recommended.
Frankly, I’m all for the curator existing, for precisely the same reason I’m happy the curators that identify Denuvo and Easy Anti-Cheat exist, and why I’d love to see a curator pop up identifying works involving any other well known and/or controversial companies or figures that aren’t the listed developer or publisher. More information for the end consumer is always better, even if you have different preferences than they do.
More like anyone can sue anyone for anything, even if they have no chance of winning and sometimes corps do exactly that to force a settlement so you’ll do what they want even if you did nothing wrong.
Any action you take happens only because billionaires and massive corps don’t consider you worth suing over it. Even if there is nothing resembling legitimate grounds to do so because they can tie you up in court until you are bankrupt.
I always like pointing out the fatal mistake of Gawker - they outed that a billionaire was gay while he was in a country where being gay was punishable by death. He then spent the next several years offering to fund any lawsuit that had any chance of success against them in revenge, and eventually one stuck.
The legality of emulation absolutely hinges on whether or not the alleged infringement is monetized.
Sony lost all of their suits against Bleem!, sorry but it’s not illegal to monetize an emulator. The rampant piracy they were engaging in and essentially promoting is what fucked them. Including using leaks to test their emulator against and patch issues with games that hadn’t been released yet. There’s been talk that they also had a ROM stash on their discord.
Emulator devs deserve compensation, copyright laws are bullshit.
There’s literally nothing that legally bars emulator devs from being paid, or even releasing their emulator as a commercial product outright. Except being sued and the cost of fighting that suit burying them financially.
Bleem! eventually won, and it was a commercial emulator for a then-current gen console. The cost of winning that fight put them out of business.
Not providing encryption keys/BIOS and not directly assisting with piracy are the key things to be legally in the right. Making money on it just makes you a more likely target, even if you’re legally entirely in the right.
The thing I find most interesting about the Zoe Post is that the response would have been **radically **different had it been a woman making similar allegations against a man. That Quinn herself made much less detailed allegations against another man 5 years later that led to his career imploding the next day and his suicide 4 days later and she’s seen as being in the right for it I think demonstrates that notion pretty well.
Collecting lists related to a disenfranchised group
Didn’t know a consulting company was a disenfranchised group.
4chan lost the right to complain about anything related to D&I in gaming and be treated as anything but subhuman slime after Gamergate.
Amusingly, one of the people Quinn cheated on Gjoni with works for Sweet Baby, just to tie things together. The one that was involved in doxxing and trying to DDoS that crowdfunded game jam project thing that the Vivian James character was created for.
I actually had no idea bout this scandal until yesterday, when it was talked by a streamer while playing Cyberpunk 2077. The guy complained how other games are ruined by SweetBaby. What is golden for me is that he said he loves Cyberpunk 2077, that it’s very fun game, but in the game you have straight, gay, bi, trans NPC characters. You can even be gay, bi, trans yourself.
Notably, Cyberpunk 2077 is not to my knowledge a game Sweet Baby was involved with. So clearly it’s not simply anger at non-straight characters existing in games.
I know more people who are angry that a character in a repeated murder mystery visual novel game isn’t actually trans like they want him to be than I know people who are angry that characters in games are occasionally trans. Or people upset about Kaine from Nier Gestalt/Replicant in general.
I feel like you need to be introduced to mods. There are…a lot. Even if you keep it to just relatively high quality ones that add content (rather than mechanical overhauls or graphical overhauls), there are still a lot.
I’d suggest Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, The Hanging Gardens, The Maelstrom and vicn’s mods (Vigilant, Glenmoril and Unslaad) as a starting point.
Actually, that’s not true, I’d recommend Legacy of the Dragonborn as a starting point, then grab mods that require it and mods that require those until you have all the content mods that can have displays in the museum (which includes all the ones I mentioned before, but is not limited to them).
A lot of the games I go back to from the NES era are often too difficult for me. I find a lot of them to be unfair and I wonder if the difficulty something that was brought over from the arcade games form right before it
For the early NES era, it’s literally this - game devs were mostly coming from the arcade sector, and depending on the company the design mentality of trying to get them to spend more quarters died more slowly for some than others. It calms down a bit for later NES titles, especially ones that weren’t in common genres for arcade games.
They are a totally different ruleset
Specifically AD&D 2nd Edition. Back in the days of THAC0. To give an idea of how different it is from 3e and later editions, classes were restricted by race, there were two different ways to be multiclass (one for humans, one for everyone else and they work very differently), and lower AC is better - instead of rolling d20+attack bonus and comparing it to target AC you roll d20 - target AC and compare it to the attackers THAC0, which is the number they need to roll To Hit AC 0. AC could be negative as well, meaning that THAC0 wasn’t necessarily the highest number you might have to roll to hit. Thief skills use percentile rolls. Saving throws were weird, both in mechanics and categories.
So, for example, a second level fighter might have a THAC0 of 19 and +2 to hit from his high strength, and the thug he’s fighting might have an AC of 8 from his leather armor. So he has to roll 19-8=11 to hit, and would get a +2 on that roll, and so needs a 9 on the die.
So if it made all the good guys white and all the bad guys black we shouldn’t be concerned?
…and what if it did the reverse? Or eliminated all members of a given race or sex from the game/changed them to a different sex or race?
I’m just going to stand by my original position - someone creating and using a mod only effects themselves and others choosing to use the mod. The fact that other people are using a mod you don’t approve of has no impact on you, and if this mod existing hadn’t got a Vice article most of the folks in this thread upset about it would simply have never known it existed at all, because they’re unlikely to go looking for such a mod.
But not sex swapping characters, then? Because I’ve seen mods that do that and hang around.
Also, if the next TES game is set in Hammerfell as rumored, I suspect there will be race swapping mods and only some will be considered in violation. Because most of the characters would likely be Redguards (and thus black), and I can see people upset that the PC can be a white guy (which is how one would describe the other races of men) killing lots of black people (Hammerfell is the homeland of the Redguard, the only race of men you’d call black). So I fully expect mods to make random encounter villain groups more racially diverse, since you’d expect them to be Redguards in Hammerfell about as often as they were Nords in Skyrim (aka most of the time) and I can see that being too many black people being killed without comment for some people to be comfortable.
Either that or for Bethesda to do it themselves, and come up with some explanation why mysteriously the natives aren’t mooks very often just to avoid the bad press.
To those that are saying they don’t see a problem with this mod. Let me put it to you this way. Instead of a mod that turned one gay woman into a straight man what if it turned one black character into a white character?
There literally was a mod like that in Stardew Valley that turned Demetrius into a white character, and it was rightfully deleted from Nexus mods. If someone has that much of a problem with a character being a different race, sex, gender, or sexual identity then they’re clearly bigoted no matter what they say to the contrary.
It’s gay erasure, and it’s bigotry, plain and simple.
The best thing about mods is that they only effect the person playing with them. I really don’t get the upset over it. Oh, no, someone else might play a version of this game with less gay (or whatever else offends you). I just can’t bring myself to have the energy to be angry about how other people have modded their game when it only effects them.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperativeApart from existing in a sea of capitalist companies than can ruthlessly outcompete them. Co-operatives don’t stand a chance.
Why not? Why do workers and owners being exactly the same set of people make it impossible to successfully develop games? This is an extra-important question to answer because a lot of these indie dev companies are a dozen or so people in total.
Could it be that the upfront costs, and the delayed nature of turning any profit at all (along with no profit being assured) means that getting paid a fixed amount to do game dev labor regardless of success is a safer option for most developers, rather than actually being a stakeholder?
paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.That would only be feasible in a very small company, with sufficient profits to spread among the workforce.
Most indie game devs ARE very small companies.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.Yep, like I just said.
That’s the nature of dealing with a market economy - you make a thing or provide a service, there are costs involved in doing so, and if you earn more in revenue than your costs then you profit. If not, you don’t. Either way in a typical company it’s the owners that benefit or lose as a consequence, as paying employees to do a thing is one of those costs. In a co-op, those employees are the owners, and win or lose accordingly.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor.I’d frame it as: you need money to live. Therefore, you suck it up and let someone exploit you so they can profit from your work, and give you scraps out of that profit.
You don’t have to - you could go into business for yourself. Make a thing and sell that thing, and reap the full profits of your labor. This is an especially possible thing to do in the game development world where some of the largest games ever literally started as someone’s pet project or as soe other project that got trashed and repurposed. The Warcraft franchise (as in WoW) for example, started as an attempt at making a Warhammer RTS that Games Workshop wasn’t interested in. Sierra Online started as a couple making PC games at home. Notch sold Minecraft to Microsoft for 4 billion dollars, and it literally started as a one man project being sold on a cheesy looking website for a few bucks.
You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks.Those “business risks” only exist as a result of the same system that necessitates wage labour: capitalism. The risks generally have to do failing to increase growth and therefore going under due to lack of owner capital. A democratic economy has no owners, only a collective workforce who will together use their resources to fund the company and pay their own wages - this means there is no need for growth. That huge risk no longer exists.
Yes, yes, once there’s a communist revolution that actually results in “real” communism and thus utopia get back to me. But, umm, we’ve had several attempts at communist revolutions and they never seem to actually turn out that way, largely because of a combination of people being greedy (good luck fixing that) and communist revolutions tending to create the sort of power vacuums that lead to authoritarian takeovers in relatively short order. Although, under that system good luck creating games that don’t glorify the Party, because that is of course the purpose of all art.
Failing to increase growth is not necessarily a problem. Failing to generate revenue in excess of costs is a problem. The need for endless growth is specifically an issue for publicly traded companies, because the charter almost necessarily says the function of the company is to increase shareholder value, and shareholders are going to do whatever they have to do to increase both their dividends and hypothetical sale value of their shares as much as possible, because that is what most benefits them. The incentive model is a bit different for a co-op.
If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-opThat’s not even worth thinking about. We live in capitalism. Of course working with a capitalist model would work best - it’s the only way to ensure profits for the owners.
Of course it is worth thinking about.
You’ve got basically two scenarios - one in which a business owner assumes the risks of operating the business and pays workers an agreed upon wage regardless of the revenue that results. In this case the worker gets the same benefit for their labor no matter what, and the owner is attempting to get more value from the worker’s product than he paid for it in wages, supplies, and materials. If he does, he reaps the benefit and if he doesn’t he eats the loss.
In the other scenario, the workers and the owners are the exact same people. Meaning the workers assume the costs of operating the business and the risks that it won’t result in revenue in excess of those costs but also reaps the benefit if it does. Sometimes this occurs as a co-op, but more often as an entrepreneur in which someone starts a small business in the hopes that they can generate revenue in excess of their costs and thus profit.
(because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk)You’re still assuming an owner. A democratic workplace wouldn’t have an owner - they’d all share responsibility for the business. And pay would be agreed democratically.
I’m assuming a free market instead of a centrally controlled economy. I’m specifically talking about the reason why we trend towards wage labor over entrepreneurs or co-ops, even in fields where the barriers to entry are as low as can be. Most of the workforce is unwilling to accept the financial risk of failing to generate revenue in excess of costs, and so sell their labor at some agreed upon fixed rate that they will receive regardless of month-to-month revenue for better or worse.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative, and paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor. You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks. If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op (because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk), but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.
or maybe a mod that added say Nazi symbols or something.
You know there are WW2 games that have mods that do exactly this, right? Specifically because they don’t use Nazi imagery to refer to Nazi Germany because that imagery is illegal in Germany so they use substitute imagery that’s Germany-safe to represent Nazi Germany, because that’s cheaper than managing two editions where one is historically accurate and the other is Germany-friendly. For an example of this, see Hearts of Iron.
Then you get mods that restore the historically correct imagery.
That really applies on both sides. This is such a nothing issue - it defaults to what you’d expect for a cis character, so you can literally ignore it if you aren’t going to play a character whose pronouns and body type do not align.
But, someone modding their game doesn’t effect anyone else playing it, whether that’s removing the pronoun selector in Starfield, adding a pronoun selector to Skyrim (even supporting multiple pronouns with different frequencies for each), turning every hold banner in Skyrim into a pride flag, removing pride flags from Spiderman, turning Skyrim dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine, or adding the ability to fuck Skyrim dragons. All of those are mods that exist, BTW.
To each their own.
I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.