If Iranian state actors are producing videos of this quality, it may become an existential threat to US Meme Hegemony.

More like when we forced the sale of TikTok to Steven Mnuchin and Larry Ellison.

how do we break that?

I don’t think this is something you can (or should be expected to) break. I think part of any successful project is encouraged adoption. Marketing - in a benign form - is about informing people of the project’s utility and the mechanism for obtaining it. There are numerous examples of beneficial marketing campaigns - the annual flu shot campaign, union drives, public notifications for new amenities and works. We periodically have billboards across the city notifying residents of performances at Miller Outdoor Theater - a free public theater that puts on shows every couple of weeks.

I think there’s a problem with deceptive marketing. And you can address that will quality journalism, civil litigation (particularly class action lawsuits), and government regulation.

That kind of sounds like our current systems favor investment into advertisement over substance

There’s a huge yield in networking effect thanks to the size of corporate enterprises and the reach of their distribution.

I might argue a wide-scale anti-trust campaign to break up entrenched monopolies would force private businesses to return to quality of product over quantity of marketing. But Kickstarter reveals this isn’t a problem unique to bigger business ventures.

I might try regulating Kickstarter such that the platform itself faces penalties for excessive marketing of products - particularly ones that never release in full.

I might also consider public financing for local clubs and independent non-profit business ventures. Because a lot of this hype happens in a kind-of social media vacuum. People get suckered into MLM scams and other duplicitous ventures because they’re bored, alienated, and idle. Set up more public events and public areas for gathering and entertainment. Fewer people will be so terminally online that they are waiting around to get baited.

how do I get 3M on Kickstarter?

A common, solid benchmark for return on marketing investment (ROMI) is a 5:1 ratio, where $5 in revenue is generated for every $1 spent. While 4:1 to 10:1 is considered average to strong.

So, spend between $300k and $700k on advertising and - assuming you did it right - you should expect around $3M in returns.

It looks more like something you’d see on the cover of Vogue, certainly.

No sane person is going to spend that massive amount of money

I do remember a friend who dropped $1200 on linked GeForce 1040s(?) to max out the settings in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Was it worth it? Probably not. Will people with more money than sense do it? Absolutely.

And, to be fair, it is.

It’s not. The Resident Evil side-by-side is the clearest example.

You took what was supposed to be a grim, shadowy, grungy, dusty set piece and you made it brighter, cleaner, smoother, and happier. That subverts the whole mood of the game. Now imagine DLSS 5 doing this same kind of work on a shambling zombie or a Licker or William Birkin from RE2. You really want your super mutants and murder hobos to get this kind of glow-up?

This reminds me of an old mod that got rid of all the fog in Silent Hill. People posted it to joke about how it destroyed the entire vibe, making large parts of the setting trivially easy to solve.

I mean, I don’t think this current tech does anything to materially objectify the subject (any more than the original). What it does is to smooth and brighten certain artifacts.

That might genuinely be a benefit in a game with poorly rendered models or bad lighting inherent to the game. But Resident Evil doesn’t have this problem. They made an explicit choice in setting the scene as dirty, cloudy, and grim. This modeling reversed that for everything, not just the lady bits. You’re going to have zombies and Scagdead and Lickers all brightened up and polished.

• Angry at women for not doing up hair/makeup daily

• Thinks hair/makeup is a trap to trick men into treating you like a human being

You get both from the same chud online influencers

Problem with gritty post-apocalyptic grim-dark games is that not enough people have Mar-a-Lago face and stage lighting.

And “was a rapist in FL and a private island”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_N._Straus_House#Jeffrey_Epstein

Gotta wonder why the NY AG is so interested in prosecuting Steam and so blase about pursuing anyone in the Epstein Files.

Yeah, but we’re on 6

the volume of such posts surged from just under 2,000 per day to more than 6,000

I refuse to believe Twitter only had 2,000 anti-islamic posts a day.

Battlefield was already refried slop before LLM development was a thing.

Doesn’t EA do this after pretty much every major release? Bring in a ton of part-timers and consultants in the rush to release. Go live with a buggy half-assed product. Fire most of the team to save costs. Then coast on marketing and DLC for a few years, before you kick off the next dev cycle and do it again?

“I make video games for a living and have absolutely never said anything problematic or polarizing on social media. Can’t wait to cruise through airport security and immigration without a care in the world.”

~ Nobody, Ever

Anyone stupid enough to be paying more than $0 deserves to get rooked.

That’s just the marketing cycle.

Is marketing a grift? I mean, kinda. But you’ll get marketing on good games and bad alike.

Nobody seemed to mind the endless marketing for Expedition 33 or Eldin Ring or Stardew Valley or Minecraft.

The used car market imploded when vehicle production dried up after 2008

You will never own an EV for under $80k

“You’ll never own another computer cheaper than $500”

Chinese tech firms produce high end computers for less than $500

“SANCTION! TARIFF! EMBARGO!”

I think there’s a setting that’ll turn that off.

But also… Linux Mint is a pretty easy lift and shift.

Nintendo has the securist market with its portable console.

Cause they actually try to make a console that’s not just “Discount PC With Coupon For Streaming Service”.

Even then, it’s mostly an under-powered PC that makes up the difference with a few gimmicks. Which is fine. But you’re still left asking “Why would I buy a PS6 / X-Box One+One+360^Infinity when I could just get this shit on PC in another six months?” Other than tinkering with controllers, neither have done anything interesting since the Kinect flopped.

XBOX COFOUNDER SAYS MICROSOFT IS QUIETLY SUNSETTING THE PLATFORM

More seriously, the distance between the X-Box OS and the Windows OS was always measured in inches. Maybe they finally decided to give up the ghost and just admit they were selling people mid-range PCs with a console skinned GUI.

I’m assuming you mean Kalshi? Polymarket too, of course.

Games are all rigged, btw. But the spill-over has been eyebrow raising.

Valve wins against the Rothschilds

Okay, tap the breaks. Can you field a link on that one?

lootboxes being available for the past 10 or so years in Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.

In a lot more games than that. EA, Ubisoft, and Activision/Blizzard have been dolling out lootboxes for at least as long. So targeting Valve exclusively definitely raises some eyebrows.

But I’m curious to know what this has to do with “the Rothschilds” and not an actual financial, business, or government entity.

Not for the House. It’s sort of their bread and butter.

Okay, but who do you want the NY DA’s office to go after? Jamie Dimon? Bill Gates? Steve Bannon? Half of Activision/Blizzard?

Valve was the obvious choice.

car crash noise

If you take away the grunts, you lose half of Barrett’s dialogue! /s

I’ll have to keep an eye out for this in FF7R-3. But I’ll be honest, I barely noticed. Might be cause I’m a bit of a grunter myself, though…

Finish a run, excuse me

One of the nice things about Factorio is that you can finish a level and put it down and come back later. That’s harder to do with an RPG like Expedition 33 or Dragon Age.

Not a ton of plot. It’s mostly just a building sim.

I waited years for the FF7 Remake and then even more years for the FF7 Remake to come to PC and then even more years for the sequel to the FF7 Remake to come to PC and now I’m waiting for the three-quel to release, at which point I will begin waiting for it to come to PC.

You can sell consoles with advertisement and marketing. The product is a secondary concern.

And with AI + bunch of privately owned mass media, you can saturate the brains of the next generation of gamers with endless targeted ads.

Fully expect Discord to begin vomiting ad spam into random chat streams like Reddit channels are getting bombarded with Crypto Casino promotions.

Real “these kids would be very upset if they could read” situation. Who bothers to pick through the whole EULA before submitting?

Like any open source mass contribution project that’s gained too much popularity, you need extra firebreaks in between the Open Submission and Final Product.

That means adding manpower to submission review, QA, etc, which public projects don’t often have.

Sort of the Achilles Heel of the open source community. AI is just making the vulnerability extra glaring.

It has aged worse than many tank control games like Resident Evil

RE has been remastered at least twice by now.

Lots of people just wanted a nice graphical update with some quality of life improvements.

Square loves nothing more than to dust off an old game, tweak it for modern hardware, and then re-release it for $60.

Fortunately, you can pirate these updates for free.

The “can wait 6 years” is the whole point. They aren’t waiting.

You don’t need to wait to play games that came out thirty years ago.

Plenty of young people are into retro gaming.

most youths don’t like drinking wine

Then they can wait six years between sips of AAA piss, I suppose.

My friends with kids don’t seem to have any problem picking up Sonic, Pokemon, or Guantlet. One’s even picked up Eldin Ring.

They don’t have the nostalgia

You don’t need nostalgia to enjoy nice things.

How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story?

You can just play the original, though.

Same with any of these franchises. The newer titles are hit or miss, but the old games have aged like wine.