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[sad barhah]
“The strongest protections in the Act have been designed for children,” an explainer says. “Platforms will be required to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content.”
Fuck them kids. Monitor your children’s internet access if you don’t want them seeing weird shit. Same as unsupervised access to television, books, magazines-- anything. The world is not for children.
Since the dev team is A Guy, hopefully he chooses to hand off to someone in a slightly less stupid country. Short as that list has become.
And it’d sound like they’re literally phoning it in. At that point, no, the artists and writers would just do it themselves. Like old times.
What this tech makes possible is hiring Nolan North to do everyone. Men, women, children, cats, dogs, stuffed toy dinosaurs, everyone. It’s mocap for your vocal cords. You don’t have to look like David Hayter to move like Snake, and you don’t have to sound like Michael Shapiro to talk like the G-Man. What people will hear and see is the performance.
Using AI to recreate a real person’s voice is the dumbest possible use. It’s like drawing a cartoon that can only resemble a real living actor. Just… make something up. How does this character sound, in your head? Generate that, and then use style transfer, so anyone can do that voice.
Because the text-to-speech version is only the voice… not the character. You still want real human actors performing the character. The AI part is just a costume for their throat.
Hard to argue with this. I’m going to, anyway, and give a doubly contrarian answer - the most influential video game of all time is Dungeons & Dragons.
There is not a single element of CRPGs that wasn’t nailed down by 1976, on various mainframes. All those teenage dorks were ripping off the freshly-released tabletop RPG and adding first-person dungeon crawling, random map generation, and everything else that Akalabeth popularized but did not invent. Some of them had real-time multiplayer. Because mainframes.
Rogue was only the best of an entire spate of games just like it - a popular and well-built point of reference more than a surprising innovator. The continuing explosion of CRPGs was surely less about deliberately saying “let’s make a game like Rogue” and more about other people seeing your broader-zeitgeist dungeon-crawler and saying “oh, it’s like Rogue.”
By contrast, Doom is a clear inflection point. “Doom clones” were absolutely trying to clone Doom. id themselves wound up cloning Doom. But I’m not sure Rogue, arriving in 1980, was anything more than an excellent example of the wider genre it came from.
In fact, for direct contrast, damn near every JRPG traces back to Wizardry. That game’s creators explicitly namedrop earlier mainframe titles. The Japanese did not have the same tabletop game trend. The PC-8801 port of Wizardry came out of fucking nowhere, for them, and apparently blew their dicks off.
Half-Life arguably suffers from success more than any horror game. Everybody ripped it off, to the point its innovations can feel cliche. Like Aliens. Fortunately it’s put together well enough to remain viscerally engaging, and the ridiculous aspects are mostly deliberate. And, bitrates aside, it still sounds incredible. Sound design is more than half of what conveys atmosphere.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
You have to remember that it was competing with tense-but-goofy Capcom fare like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, and then… Japan-exclusive Lovecraft patchworks like Iru! / They’re Here! Earlier and more-grounded horror titles like the Clock Tower remake were nowhere near as visually or mechanically immersive.
And for whatever reason, horror doesn’t age as well in games as it does on film. It took ages for The Exorcist to decay from being superlative and important to a historical relic you vaguely understand as frightening. Evil Dead, The Thing, Terminator 2… there’s some old-ass movies that stand up and skeeze you out. Shit, I’d still hesitate to rewatch The Ring. But interactivity demands some shock value, and that shit has a shelf life.
Two comments ago:
Their cut is so huge that they can afford to let devs sell keys elsewhere, knowing it makes no difference to their immense profit margin.
Largely because their monopoly is self-reinforcing, and the number of off-site sales is a rounding error.
Let’s try this again.
How is a 30% gross cut worse for consumers than 15%? Because that policy, that specific policy, is shared by Nintendo, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft… and Valve.
Why should we do a thing that’s completely unrelated to the question being asked?
Incorrect.
What Epic means by “for developers,” is… developers keep more of the money. Walk me through how that, specifically, is bad for you.
I am not interested in general attacks against Epic. I make no general defense of Epic. Fortnite’s business model should be illegal. But what you’re doing is bad argumentation. You’re reaching for ways to say ‘Epic bad’ as if that’s gotta be relevant. As if attacking Epic in general constitutes a defense of one specific thing Valve does. As if promoting Valve in general means this one specific thing can’t be wrong.
As for indie support - Valve doesn’t need to push big games on their store, because they have a monopoly. There is no sense telling people ‘if you’re gonna buy it on PC, buy it on Steam!,’ because of course you will. Indie games ‘don’t make Epic money’ because Alan fucking Wake barely makes them money. Their market share is garbage. Steam has the freedom and the incentive to push more game sales, of any kind, and there’s a lot more little games than big ones.
None of what Valve is doing would suddenly disappear if they took only one-quarter of gross revenue. Or a fifth. Or less. They’re shaving straight off the top for nearly the entire PC gaming market. Their war-chest is ridiculous. They have such a “petro curse” that they briefly forgot to make games. Yet they treat the studios that make them all of their money the same way Nintendo and Sony squeeze console developers.
Would criticizing this specific cut be easier, if we talked about Apple’s iron grip on the App Store? Because it’s the same damn policy. Feel free to talk shit about when Apple does it, if you insist on judging whole entities instead of what they do.
That shift was a quarter-century ago. ‘It used to suck worse’ is a bad excuse even when it’s fresh. I don’t care what Steam would cost if they were a brick-and-mortar store; they have only ever done digital distribution, and they have done it for a while.
Their cut is so huge that they can afford to let devs sell keys elsewhere, knowing it makes no difference to their immense profit margin.
Largely because their monopoly is self-reinforcing, and the number of off-site sales is a rounding error.
Meanwhile:
What Epic means by “for developers” is, developers keep more of the money. Walk me through how that’s bad for you.
Neat.
Explaining how they got the monopoly doesn’t change that they have a monopoly. Amazon or Epic could do all that - and they genuinely could, god knows they have the money - but the result would not be the same. They exist in the context of Steam already running shit. Adoption is a feature you cannot design. That’s why Valve had to force it on people via Half-Life 2.
Tim Sweeny even said EGS is made for developers, with the implication it is not for consumers.
What an absurd read. As if middlemen taking a third of revenue is pro-consumer.
‘Why didn’t they just try harder?’ is an increasingly worrying take. A company could copy Steam’s storefront and backend, verbatim, and it wouldn’t impact Steam’s monopoly on PC game sales. They’re entrenched and they’re well-liked. You can’t buy a reputation overnight.
Blaming the action without considering the environment is still a mistake. Epic tried everything, and people still scoff about UI, like that’s the billion-dollar difference. Nah: it’s attributing the difference in outcome to surface-level distinctions. And if Epic unfucked their apparently ugly storefront, these people would pick another excuse, because I guarantee you it wouldn’t change EGS’s irrelevance.
… and then they’ll recoil in horror when you mention that’s what a monopoly is.
Monopolies can be positive and functional. They’re still monopolies. Streaming was better was Netflix was the only choice, and had everything, for a reasonable price. Competition’s supposed to be what drives those qualities. Exclusivity breaks that. Exclusivity splinters the market into desperate fiefdoms.
But there’s still a word for when only one store matters.
Fuck software patents.