Some things never end. For example, CEOs’ propensity towards dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Or my disdain towards straw men, I hope it outlives me, like a meme.

EDIT: my point is, that those CEOs are consistently distorting what SKG is about: from “don’t design games to be unplayable once support ends” (fairly reasonable) into “u think gaems shuld live 4ever lol but ackshyually nuffin does lmao XD”. This is a fucking straw man; it’s the bottom of the barrel when it comes to irrationality.

And they’re doing it to discourage people from supporting SKG. And in this specific case what the article is calling “vibing” is just part of a diversion tactic - to avoid having people calling him out for his dishonesty / idiocy / disingenuousness. Say something filthy, then distract the audience with mental masturbation, it works!

Good marketing and luck do play their roles, but aren’t enough by themselves. With those two but without pulling your emotional strings, SV wouldn’t be seen nowadays as a “spiritual successor” to Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons, but rather as a “cheap knock-off”.

Doubly so for an indie game - indie devs don’t have enough money to make shit look like ambrosia, unlike AAA studios.

Also note HM/SoS did not start as a corporate-run series. The formula was already there in the SNES game, developed by a rather unknown studio (Amccus). Apparently Yasuhiro Wada came up with the idea because he wanted to try something different, and he’s from a rural background.

Corporate is kind of lucky the formula is enough - to make someone feel proud of their farm (like in Ech’s answer) or relate to the characters (interacting with them often, giving them gifts, seeing cutscenes etc.), otherwise it would’ve ruined it with “more graphics! 9001 love interests! 9001 crops! …what do you mean, the characters aren’t relatable?”.

You can save scum and she’ll be back, but one of the characters highlights it:

Clever. Verrrryyy clever. You think you’re really smart, don’t you? In this world, it’s kill or be killed. So you were able to play by your own rules. You spared the life of a single person. Hee hee hee…

But don’t act so cocky. I know what you did. You murdered her. And then you went back, because you regretted it. Ha ha ha ha…

And the whole game is full of situations like this. Highlighting that your actions actually have some impact, even if you can reload or start a new game.

Even in your case, it’s still about feelings—although different ones: you’re expressing yourself through your farm, instead of focusing on the romance. “See, myself, this is what I built! Good job, me.” and the likes.

Neither is the “right” or “wrong” emotion, mind you. But a game needs to trigger at least some within you, to be a good game. And that’s what corporations don’t get: they’re chasing mensurable things. More graphics, presence/absence of a mechanic, even gameplay length can be measured; but you can’t really measure someone’s emotional experience.

They also miss really bad why those games become popular on first place.

For example, the text mentions Minecraft, and all that “crafting” trend. What made Minecraft great was not crafting - it was the feeling that you’re free to express yourself, the way you want, through interactions with the ingame world. If you want to build a huge castle, recreate a wonder you love, or a clever contraption to bend the world’s rules to do your bidding, you can.

Or, let’s pick Undertale. It’s all about the mood, the game pulls strings with your emotions. Right at the start the game shows you Toriel, she’s a really nice lady, taking care of you as if she was your child. And being overprotective. Then the game tries to make you kill her, and your first playthrough you’ll probably do it. And you’ll feel like shit. Then you load the save back, and… the game still remembers. You’re still feeling like shit because you killed Toriel.

Stardew Valley? At a certain point of the game, you start to genuinely care about the characters. Not just as in-game characters, but as virtual people with their own backstories, goals, dreams. You relate to them.

It’s all about feelings. But corporations are as soulless as their “art”; and game corporations are no exception. Individual humans get it.

Can I post a potentially controversial opinion?

NO, YOU CAN’T. (just kidding.)

Serious now: if I got it right, this game bar is an overlay showing FPS, CPU/GPU usage, screenshots/recording, stuff like this. It doesn’t look too hard to implement in Linux, and apparently there’s a GNOME extension in the makes for that. (If it’s compatible with Cinnamon I’ll be a happy camper. I’d rather not touch GNOME directly with a 3m pole, but the tools for GNOME are sometimes OK.)

The catch is that Intel will pay the tariffs either way.

Currently they can’t simply rely on the local industry for the semiconductors used in the hardware they sell, so they’re paying tariffs for them.

And, even if they eventually are able to rely solely on the local industry, the tariffs are inducing a supply shock - so even the price of locally produced alternatives will raise as a consequence.

Others are also paying the tariffs, but unlike Intel, they have a bit more wiggling room to deal with lower profits.

(I’m watching the video now, I swear! I know I shouldn’t comment on the topic before watching it, but…)

I did not watch the full video, so this might be potentially mentioned somewhere, but: Trump’s tariffs are definitively not helping Intel at all.

Intel needs things produced in countries that were heavily tariffed, like Taiwan. It can’t produce them at home, those chips aren’t maize tortilla chips dammit. This additional cost needs to be paid by someone - whom? If Intel (price stays the same), now their margin of profit is smaller. If the customer (price is raised accordingly), now the demand drops, and Intel is selling less CPUs. Either way Intel loses money.

I’ll go further: AMD and nVidia are not safe. Once the AI bubble bursts, nVidia will crash really bad. And AMD is also paying the same tariffs as Intel, so while it might feast on Intel’s carcass - much like a vulture - eventually it’ll kick the bucket too.

No load of hard cash is large enough to allow a company to systematically screw things up; specially not under an economic system that equates “stable profits” with “failure to grow”.

And Nintendo’s actions aren’t the result of [metaphorical] brain damage; there’s a consistent pattern here of exploiting brand value for short-term profit.

I worded it in a dumb/certain/silly way but, unless drastic changes happen, I do find it likely to happen.

Look at how often Nintendo is surfacing negatively on the news:

• harassing a small dev studio over patents,
• trying to kill emulation while profiting off it,
• bricking hardware already sold to customers,
• demanding unreasonable prices for new games,
• dictating if you shall be allowed to feature one of its games in a speedrunning event…

Nintendo stopped being seen as a company that enables your fun, to become one that gatekeeps it. That’s brand damage - and really bad for Nintendo’s console sales; people are only willing to invest in a console if they’re reasonably certain they can have fun with it.

And at the same time, there are voices within and around Nintendo pushing the company towards the mobile market. Remember Pokémon Go? Or Ishihara saying the Switch 1 would flop, because of smartphones? If Nintendo console sales decline meaningfully, those voices will become louder and louder. Eventually Nintendo will focus primarily on the mobile market.

However people don’t typically buy mobile games; the monetisation strategy is completely different - microtransactions, gacha, lootboxes, all that crap. Most players (the “minnows”) won’t drop a penny on the game, but huge spenders (the “whales”) compensate for that, so it works.

The minnows aren’t just freeloaders, mind you; they’re required to keep the game alive. So mobile game companies need to fine-tune the pressure in their games - it should be just enough to encourage people to spend some money on the game, but not enough to shoo the minnows away.

But we’re talking about Nintendo here. A company willing to damage its own brand for a few additional pennies. Nintendo would not be able to see all those minnows and say “hey, that’s cool”, it would go full “ARE THOSE FREELOADERS STUPID? DON’T THEY KNOW THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BUY STUFF?”. It would tune the pressure way up, and ruin its mobile market, after it ruined its console market.

…perhaps it should go back to selling playing cards.

Two decades from now, people will talk about how Nintendo managed to ruin itself, from a gaming behemoth to some gacha subsidiary bought for a single yen.

Yeah, it backfired really bad - suddenly people weren’t just talking just about adults games, but also the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, corporations LARPing as lawmakers, and all of that.

Microsoft is already responding to the potential shift. The upcoming ROG Xbox Ally X handheld from Microsoft and ASUS will reportedly ship with a gaming-optimized version of Windows 11 with a dedicated Xbox UI and interface that aims to streamline the experience while boosting in-game performance and overall handheld efficiency.

Given how much Microsoft wants to shove AI tools every where in Windows, I don’t think this optimisation will make much of a difference.

GOG is making some amazing advertisement for itself, for the cause, and for the games. Genius move.

(I don’t know a single one of those games, but I’m redeeming the code anyway. Just to show support.)

Ditto.

Did they even have the option not to go nuclear?

Yes: hide only the games tagged “adult” (subset tag), instead of all games tagged “nsfw” (superset tag), to reduce the disruption. And then work swiftly to relist the adult games with content not being targeted by the payment mafia. Even if itch.io showed one or two false negatives, it would already be a clear sign of good will towards the mafia.

I’m glad the people working there did not do this though. I hope itch io lets the disruption stays on, for as long as possible; preferably affecting as many non-adult games as possible.

Yay!

I wish it had a Linux version, but nowadays Proton works rather well, so not going to complain about it. I played a bit the earlier versions, and so far it looks like a genuine improvement over SR1 - a fun game already.

I criticised how apologetic itch.io’s statement was towards the payment mafia, but credits where it’s due:

Going nuclear was the smart move. I seriously doubt this censorship wave would’ve gathered so much attention if itch.io only delisted games with the content the mafia is currently going against. It helps to avoid that slippery slope, where people turn a blind eye to small violations of their agency until it’s on something that personally matters to them.

It’s also sensible to look for alternatives, so it doesn’t need to rely on the mafia on first place. A bit too late, but better late than never.

To add to that: my ship-of-Theseus computer is probably older than quite a few adult Lemmy users.

All current pieces are relatively new, as last year I felt like splurging and had money to do so. Except the hard disk - it’s a few years old, I think.

I remember when I installed the predecessor of my current GPU. I put the computer on the floor, and my nephew was crawling in the way, curious. Nowadays my nephew has a stubby beard, and he’s taller than me.

My old case was even older. It had a hole, where I glued cardboard. That hole used to hold a 3½ floppy disk drive. It saw the predecessor of that GPU I mentioned above, that I bought in 2004.

I had to websearch this so might as well share it here: 6DOF = six degrees of freedom. You can move and rotate in all three dimensions.

Accurate for Descent. I played this game as a kid. At the start I hated it, because unlike Doom you need to aim vertically (Doom has three degrees of freedom: X axis, Y axis, rotation). But eventually it grew on me, it’s like going from stale bread to a buttered toast - harder but nicer.

What’s profitable about losing sales of adult games?

From Visa/MC’s PoV the situation looks like this:

1. force itch.io - lose sales associated with that content
2. leave itch.io alone - lose sales associated with anyone who takes Collective Shout’s noise seriously, while Collective Shout starts smearing shit on Visa/MC by saying “they finance rape!”

Visa/MC likely determined #2 to be more than #1. In other words it’s more profitable to do #1 instead.

Also, what leverage do these groups have over banks and payment processors? […] I just don’t get it. Some random group in Australia has leverage over Visa and MasterCard - American companies - is that what we’re saying here?

It’s mostly their ability to cause brand damage (reasons people avoid your brand because they see it negatively - like #2).

Visa and MC know that, when it comes to sex, people become really irrational. They take insane troll logic seriously, even if they wouldn’t otherwise; and those religious groups like Collective Shout are really good at weaponising that irrationality. The way those alt right groups work is that you don’t even need to know about the group to repeat their talking points, and spread support to those talking points.

I think you might have too much faith in government.

I don’t. I’m picking the lesser of two evils here: a government is less worse than those megacorporations.

But ironically, I think YouTube and many other platforms quietly accept that if we want to live in a somewhat harmonious society, we can’t leave it to the government to make all the rules. (eg. YouTube banning vaccine misinformation and disinformation during a public health emergency.)

They didn’t ban vaccine misinformation “because it’s misinformation” or “because society would be better without it” (even if both things are true). Truth and morality doesn’t matter for those platforms; what matters is brand damage.

but there’s a lot of lawful content that is really undesirable (scams, spam, deepfakes, hate speech, etc.)

• scam - AFAIK already illegal in most of the world.
• spam - should be illegal, at least in the most egregious forms.
• deepfakes - it depends a lot on what is being done with the deepfake in question; plenty of them (like non-consensual sexualisation of someone) are either illegal or should be.
• hate speech - it targets the dignity, well-being and often the lives of marginalised groups. Should be illegal.

Are you noticing the pattern? Those are things that should be handled by a government in defence of the public interest of everyone, not by a platform in defence of private interest of its shareholders. Even if a population has weak control over its government, it’s more than it has over a corporation.

The law isn’t fast or flexible enough to keep up and every country has different (or laughable) definitions of some of these things.

This problem is not a good reason to create an even bigger problem. Like the one we’re seeing - private interest dictating what should be allowed or not in the public sphere.

And, seriously, if the problem was just porn who would give a fuck. (Okay, some people would, some wouldn’t.) The problem is that those corporations will happily target any group, any interest, any person, as soon as they deem profitable; because they have the power to do so, so porn is in this context only the canary of the mine. And this power needs to be curtailed.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that implementing such a wide law would be unviable. Well, focus on financial service providers then - banks, payment processors, and the likes. Problem solved.

Sorry for the double reply.

In the short-ish term, I think a good way to address this would be if governments across the globe had laws like “a service provider cannot refuse to provide services to a platform based on the nature of the lawful content within that platform”.

Odds are Visa/MC/PP wouldn’t even try to fight against such a law - they don’t really mind servicing itch.io, from their PoV it would be yet another customer; the problem is pressure exerted by those Protestant nutjobs in Australia, but once a law is present they can’t exert that pressure.

Right, that’s why they CAN do it, but I’m talking about why they WANT to do it.

The reason why PP/MC/Visa “want” to do this has zero to do with “porn saturation” or whatever. It’s basically “brand management”; they’re seeing servicing sites with specific types of adult content as “brand damage”, so they pressure those sites to not do it. That’s it; if they believed the opposite they’d gladly force itch io to show a dick in the front page.

In turn, the reason Collective Shout is pressuring PP/MC/Visa through “brand damage” mostly boils down to conservative babble. Check this, regarding the group’s founder and take your own conclusions.

I don’t think it’s just a matter of personal responsibility; it’s part of the socio-economic system, whoever controls the capital can force others depending on it to do things they don’t want to. In this case PP/MC/Visa forcing itch.io.

I don’t care about porn games, but:

The fact MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal can censor lawful content is problematic, to say the least.

Not surprised with the lobbying group.

Ross did an amazing job addressing the babble in the statement. Specially because he’s being extra careful on saying things to the best of his knowledge - note how he doesn’t say “it’s false”, or “it’s a lie”, but rather “a German lawyer thinks this is false” and “this sounds like a lie”; gotta respect that.

Some additional comments:

The first paragraph of the lobbying group’s statement might sound like an introduction, but it’s already a straw man - it’s clearly misleading the reader on what Stop Killing Games is about.

as the protections we put in place

Excuse me?

1. Sod off with this “THINK ON PROTEKSHUN!” idiotic argument;
2. let us not forget the main concern when it comes to data protection are companies harvesting data so they can sell it to their “affiliate partners” (i.e. data vultures eager who’ll use it for targetted spam).

Note #1 is a cancer way more widespread than just the gaming industry. Every fucking bloody time some megacorpo wants to fight against some sane customer protection law, they babble shite like this. And it always sounds like “a user/customer is not a rational human being, it’s irrational trash, and if you let it do what it wants it’ll cause itself harm, so We need to protect those filthy things. And how convenient, the way to protect this filth against itself magically aligns with our financial interests!”

these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

This is not even a fallacy. Not even bullshit. It’s simply to be a lying bastard, and to call the readers bloody muppets by proxy.

1M+ sign European Citizen’s Initiative “Stop Destroying Videogames”: Help us protect gamers’ consumer rights!

I think it would be sensible if the word “gamer” was replaced with “citizen” here. Because it’s what politicians care about.

As I mentioned in another thread, São Paulo state’s customer protection organ is basically telling people to not buy Nintendo. Indirectly, with pretty words, but that’s what it’s doing.

[IANAL] Also, note some stuff in the Switch 2 user agreement is legally invalid in Brazil. Nintendo is shielding itself with an “ackshyually we don’t sell it in Brazil lol lmao”, that’s why Procon - SP is calling it out.

Agreed. It’s the best of both worlds: retro-inspired games can pick what the retro games did right, and still add modern improvements.

So do I, but plenty people want MP.

However adding MP to a game is never as simple as those people claim it is. Now your game has to handle the connection, data sharing, making sure all MP players are seeing the exact same thing. And it needs to do it with good performance, because laggy MP is hell. It’ll probably need a server too, either external or one of the players - the later having performance costs. Balance is often thrown out of the window and needs adjustments, because as soon as you add another player into the game they gather resources 2x faster together.

“just add multyplaier lol how hard is that lmao” - spammed in every bloody community about every SP game ever.

Mewgenics is actually going to be released? I thought it was vaporware!

…I’m actually glad. I was quite interested on the game when announced back then. The video makes me feel that it’s completely different from what I expected, but still fun. (I like this sort of X-COM-like game.)

The Minecraft modding scene was always insane.

Forge in special has always been a hotbed for drama, since inception - Eloraam (RedPower) and FlowerChild (Better than Wolves) were both founding members, they started fighting because Eloraam was copying BTW features, FC left, booom. Eventually Eloraam and Spacetoad left, and LexManos - not a founding member, but someone invited into Forge by Eloraam - became the head developer, and he makes Arthmoor look nice in comparison.

Still more civilised than the Minecraft modding scene! *cough Forge drama cough cough*

I’m not into Bethesda games so saying this based on the article: Arthmoor sounds like a piece of shit. It’s fine if you have a “vision” for the game, and your mod is about that vision, but you shouldn’t pretend that your vision is something else, like simple bug-fixing patches.

Be prepared to welcome Discordfugees in the same fashion as the Redditfugees.

Props for the dev. In fact because of these news I went to check their games out and find a good free one, Viridi; you build a succulents pot. Basically small version of my succulents/cactuses garden.

Bad connection, eh? Either Starlink is crap and prone to bad connections… or not even its owner uses it.

Survive-em-up?

Seriously I fucking loved the name.

Normal bullet hell (Touhou): the enemies shoot a hell of bullets at you. And your job is to avoid it. Reverse bullet hell (Vampire Survivors): you shoot a hell of bullets at the enemies. And your job is to shoot even more, bigger, stronger bullets.

Pew Pew Woosh.
Epilepsy-vania
GPU Fryer.
S3: Survive and Shoot the Swarm.