Don’t you guys have phones 90-series graphics cards?

Every now and again you’ll see a Tomb Raider cosplayer who has stuffed a box up her shirt and it’ll never not be funny.

I remember when 7 expansion slots was pretty normal. Of course, one would be your video card, one would be a graphics accelerator, one would be a sound card, one would be a modem, one would be an Ethernet NIC, and one would be a SCSI adapter. now a lot of that shit is either obsolete or built right into the motherboard.

The Box Bra, by Croft.

Trackpad looked wrong is why I went PS4, but yeah you’re probably right.

She should be holding a mobile phone. because that is what mobile gaming mostly looks like.

“Researchers surveyed 1,000 women of all ages across the UK who play mobile games.”

Shows a picture of a woman holding what appears to be a PS4 controller.

Poifect.

I have an S4 mini, it runs LineageOS?

Actually yes, you got any oreos?

I have to imagine that Subnautica is a difficult act to follow because underwater assets are weird. There’s a lot of models and AI for first person shooters, but first person swimmers?

I mean, I don’t. Believe it or not it isn’t mandatory.

KSP2 is a pretty apt comparison because it was fucked over by corporate acquisitions.

Someone had a vision, formed a studio called Squad, ran a very successful early access campaign and built a critically acclaimed game. Then, it was acquired by Take Two Interactive which of course has some parent company whatever, and then you start getting ideas like "We’ll make an expansion to the original game. No, we’ll make it a whole other game but it has to be based on the original code, which is a big pile of tech debt spaghetti. They put out some cool looking trailers, they show off some beautiful artwork, then the lizard people in the C suite say “Wait, we could make big profits this quarter if we shut down the whole studio, laid off all developers, and left the game as it is on sale on Steam.” Which is where the game is now.

This is the future of the Subnautica franchise under Krafton. Krafton, by causing this whole kerfluffle by being shitty dead souled businessmen, have already burned down Subnautica.

First question: Why is it okay for payment processors to conduct censorship of any kind? Why is it their place to decide what is and is not buyable?

Second question: What’s the next thing some right-wing death cult is going to pressure them into censoring? Anything addressing minority rights? Any adult content at all? What about sex toys, birth control drugs, abortion drugs, hormone treatments? What else are they going to cull from society by saying “Get rid of this or we’re not going to allow you to do any business in the world?”

Don’t the Japanese have to stab themselves in the liver with a sword if they resign from one of their soul crushing 18 hour a day office jobs?

That was my take.

Before the Krafton acquisition, Unknown Worlds Entertainment has produced Natural Selection 2 (the first was a Half Life mod, not sure it counts), which sold 300,000 copies, Subanutica sold “over five million” at a $30 price point, and I can’t find any sales numbers for Below Zero, but for back of the napkin math let’s say it sold about as well as Subnautica at ~5 million copies, again at $30.

So both Subnautica and Below Zero grossed $150 million. Subtract the 30% that Steam takes, and you’re left with $100 million, so $200 million between those two games would have been the net take.

Meanwhile, Moonbreaker happened, and I have no sales figures for that.

Everybody talks about what a massive hit Subnautica is, and while it is a successful game, Stardew Valley sold 40 million copies. Subnautica 2 stood a good chance of being a solid commercial success with tons of 2 hour Youtube video essays about how it compares to the original. It was never going to make $750 million. Even if it outsold Subnautica and Below Zero combined at double the price. Add in merch, Peeper plushies, T-shirts, ball caps, they were talking about a movie…Subnautica 2 was going to make a good chunk of that but wasn’t going to make it all.

As far as I can tell, they never intended to pay that $250 million bonus, it was probably offered in bad faith as incentive to sell the studio, and when it looked like they were actually going to pull off the conditions Krafton broke the contract in order to break the contract.

If I get my way, Krafton will never do business in the United States again, and since I’m a vengeful asshole that likes doing brain surgery with a backhoe, I’d probably ban Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Sony, Nintendo and Honda, and half of those aren’t even Korean.

Okay, they spent $750 million for a studio that has barely made $250 million in its history. I still don’t think the math mathulates here.

I mean, the publisher seems to be pretty stupid, because…how did they figure that $250 million?

There are two entries in the Subnautica series, Subnautica and Below Zero. Subnautica has sold “over 5 million copies” at a retail price point of $30. So that’s $150 million in gross revenue. For this back of the napkin math I’ll assume that the “over five million” and the number of copies sold at a discount come out in the wash. 30% of that gross revenue is going to immediatley go to Steam or whatever other platform, so the company got $100 million in net revenue before their own expenses like rent and power bills gets at it.

I cannot find sales figures for Below Zero, but it sells for the same price point and I don’t think it could have possibly sold more than Subnautica did, so let’s figure another $150 million gross, $100 million net.

Subnautica as a franchise netted its studio ~$200 million across the launch of two games selling ~10 million copies.

And Krafton had agreed to pay out a $250 million bonus for reaching a certain revenue target in 2025, which they were on track to do given the announced early access launch.

Just to put them in the black for that bonus, Subnautica 2 would have to sell better than both previous games put together at a higher price, and that doesn’t touch the purchase of the studio, operating expenses, or the dump truck of cocaine that must have been involved in these financial decisions.

See they should have done a Charlie’s Angels type thing, have them standing kind of back to back like they’re on the same team. But I guess that won’t have been as controversial.

Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.

Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.

You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.

Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.

Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.

All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.

It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.

I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.

Very, very light spoilers:

This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.

A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”

Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.

Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.

The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.

It’s worse than boomer vibes. It’s corporate vibes.

Is there a way to block literally all studios that have a parent company? Because I don’t think parent companies are good things. Nestle is a parent company, QED.

I have an unrelated headache, but the constant allcaps of KRAFTON really makes me want to nail someone’s dick shut.

pretty okay, just had a shower and I’m chilling on the couch with my cat. She is steadily purring. comfort level is around a 7.8, maybe 7.9.

I bought HL1’s GOTY edition when it came out.

writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.

Corporate fuckery is not a good smell to gamers. Smells like month old genital pus.

Just starting an article by explaining “Unknown Worlds Entertainment has been acquired by Somebody Interactive, the parent company of Hunka Chunka Studios and Rumpy Pumpy Inc” and we’re already suspicious, because corporate acquisition means the game now has more parasites to fund - layers of upper management, investors, etc.

Then we hear about major names that are the people that had the vision for the original game being replaced “immediately” in a press release full of bullshit corpowank marketing boilerplate…it means this game is almost certainly going to be cancelled, the studio shut down and the staff laid off, probably after a lot of players have purchased the game in early access.

There’s quite a bit of overlap in Subnautica and KSP’s player bases, and we’ve already had our asses burned by Take Two Interactive.

So, I’m not going to be joining any early access campaign. I’m not paying for the game before it is finished, I’m not playtesting it for free, I’m not pre-ordering anything and I’m not buying any merch, and there’s a reasonable chance I’m not buying the game at all, because it has already been smeared with the aforementioned month old genital pus.

I don’t think I want to buy games from companies that have parent companies. Parent companies make everything fucking suck.

There’s an Arduino-based CNC controller firmware called GRBL. Gurble? Gerbil? Garble? GeeArrBeeElle? GuhRuhBuhLuh?

I strongly dislike the end-around that these “live service” games are trying to do around copyright law. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.

So I don’t fucking buy them.

If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.

I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:

• The government looks at the petition and says “No we’re not going to consider that.”
• The government says “We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing.”
• The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
• The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.

But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.

I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.

Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.

I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won’t let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they’ll ignore it.

Most of the folks I’ve heard making tutorials about it pronounce it “guhDOUGH.” To get that FOSS cred the name has to be a dumpster fire.

So…here’s the thing, folks: What you’re REALLY going to have to do is stop buying live service video games.

If I understand this, it is a petition to get the EU government to look into maybe thinking about making some laws to…do something about live service games becoming unplayable when the servers shut down. Okay, here’s how that’s going to go: “We looked into it and decided not to do anything.”

Has anyone tried…not buying the damn games in the first place? If you pay for these games knowing that the soulless reptilian cloacal slits that run the AAA industry can just shut down servers whenever they want, YOU are the problem.

Rule by elderly thieves. Klepto-geri-ocracy.

It’s definitely make ends meet.

Time has been repealed. Everything took place 16 years ago earlier this afternoon.

I could probably build a gaming PC that matches the Series S for $500 with an AMD APU, some Ryzen thing with integrated graphics, no discrete GPU. The Steam Deck makes it work in a handheld format, I can do it in a PC case. Or, go buy used. There’s gonna be a lot of perfectly game capable machines being sold off because they won’t run Win 11. Slap Linux + Steam on there and you’re gaming.

Welp. That’s that for that.