Right? Overwatch has the fat dwarf engineer, the chubby ice girl, the scrungly paraplegic pyromaniac, six distinct lesbians, and a gorilla. Wild variety of costume design and body type. It is almost impressive how every single character in Concord is… askew. They look like cheap cosplays of themselves.

Spend less money.

It’s genuinely that simple. Don’t expect 3x ROI on whatever you budget, and then pour eight hojillion dollars into a seven-year gamble. If all you have to work with is fifteen salaries for a year, I guaranfuckingtee you that’s enough to make a game, with drastically lower stakes for success or failure.

But of course these vultures actually mean, crunch crunch crunch, push out a real-money siphon, gamble on cloning last year’s hits. What do the kids like these days? Horse girls? Sure, let’s built a house opposite that moving ship.

There’s probably an angle where that pose looks dynamic.

It’s not this one.

Cosmetics are the same abuse.

I mean, the cult of MBAs expecting miracles from the hot new thing is a pattern we’ve seen before. The functionality of LLMs does not match Sam Altman’s fantasies - but it does function. People are getting use out of this tech. But they’re vastly outnumbered by some mixture of optimistic experimenters and trend-chasing dipshits.

Paragraph one says things getting better is bad because what if we stop.

Paragraph two is bemoaning the abacus for ruining mental math.

Paragraph three blames a new gizmo for the system as it exists.

This year they stopped fucking trying. You search three words and it ignores two of them. “We didn’t find many results for that.” Yeah! That’s why I wrote it that way! I didn’t type “colossus of argyle” because I wanted a thousand generic pages about a statue. Gimme some damn prog.

Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.

Every time ‘new tool makes old skills rusty’ is treated as novel, I’m reminded of The Gentleman’s Magazine:

Instead of simply reproducing the operations of man’s intelligence, the arithmometer relieves that intelligence from the necessity of making the operations. Instead of repeating responses dictated to it, this instrument instantaneously dictates the proper answer to the man who asks it a question. It is not matter producing material effects, but matter which thinks, reflects, reasons, calculates, and executes all the most difficult and complicated arithmetical operations with a rapidity and infallibility which defies all the calculators in the world. The arithmometer is, moreover, a simple instrument, of very little volume and easily portable. It is already used in many great financial establishments, where considerable economy is realized by its employment.

It will soon be considered as indispensable, and be as generally used as a clock, which was formerly only to be seen in palaces, and is now in every cottage.

This was a crank-powered adding machine. Numbers used levers instead of buttons because buttons hadn’t been invented yet. There were already people who expected it the next version would do everything for us - and people who thought that would be bad, somehow.

AI helped health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, but when the assistance was removed,

AI improved doctors’ ability to spot cancer.

The problem was not exercising a skill for several months, and then taking away the tool which was better than that skill.

Shit, I’ll take sequels over as-a-service any day. Let continuing revenue be the result of making new things and games being good.

Microsoft is in way too deep with the US government for ‘it’s us or Israel’ to ever favor ‘us.’

There’s a nonzero chance they close the studio for this. They’ve been on a streak, lately.

Seems like loss of context. By the end it’s seeing a list of US states, alphabetically, and it’d usually be weird to skip one.

The question is not kept at the forefront for each state named.

Always amused when leftist instances treat intellectual property like it’s real.

I’m curious how that subscription value is gonna look in a few years now that Microsoft has cancelled basically everything and fired a ton of talent.

That’s the best argument against trusting they have any idea what they’re doing. I’ve been saying for like a decade now, they could just not do another Xbox, and call it job-done for turning consoles into PCs. Every game’s on every system because they’re all the same. The goddamn Switch 2 has raytracing cores.

Part of any moustache-twirling capitalist scheme is, like… caring when things make money? Sony going “oops, nevermind” on a failed shooter that took eight years to make is a cutthroat decision. Microsoft killing a studio for releasing a beloved and successful game is just bastardry. Especially if they just bought them, specifically to make that game. Microsoft effectively bribed your publisher to shut you down. You come into work one day, with all the equipment and people still there, and it’s like, nope, the studio doesn’t exist anymore. Somehow.

I’m left wondering if Microsoft even needed to do anything, for the console market to go this way. They correctly spotted what GTA3’s multiplatform releases meant for the industry. But beyond forcing the inclusion of hard drives… did they contribute to that process?

Never give Nintendo money.

Yes, I am aware they exist. I am asking if you expect Steam’s entire business model to hinge on cards you have to buy at gas stations and grocery stores.

The term specifically exists to describe material from the abuse of children.

You cannot abuse children who do not exist.

The entire point is distinguishing the kind of JPGs you go to prison for, versus a drawing of Bart Simpson’s dick. There’s a reason that only one of those things is readily available on popular websites. The other one’s a lot worse. Separating them is kind of important.

The inclusion of Yes still makes me sad that no RTS or 4X ever adapted Olias Of Sunhillow.

Unreal 1 music was fucking incredible, across the board. Forgone Destruction is a tasp against thousands of unwitting millennials.

Mega Man 5’s OST is what Mega Man nerds like most about it.

Cash-only? Off the rack, at CVS?

No porn game is CSAM. The entire point of that acronym is that it stands for “photographic evidence of child rape.”

This is the sensible part of Microsoft’s strategy. The blood sacrifice of profitable studios, nah, that has no upside. That’s just burning money and scattering talent. But everything related to DirectX, from the beginning, was about PC-ifying the console market. Job done. They fumbled the part where they assumed they’d still control the PC market, but hey, close enough for empty suits.

The question for Sony is: do consoles still matter? The war ending does not grant them a monopoly. They’re now just another platform for most games. Which people jokingly insist means “Playstation has no games,” three generations in a row, because Playstation has very few exclusive games.

Nintendo makes that shit work by being incomparable. They sold the only tablet with buttons. Somehow. And even with the Steam Deck doing well, the Switch outsold it by approximately five zillion. If that changes, Nintendo can fall back on the goofy shit the Joycons can do. That’s how they pull genres and mechanics out of their ass, while Sony spends seven years crafting yet another Ubisoft knockoff. Y’know, one of those games where you fuck a map.

Hardware experimentation is not viable, outside of goofy shit.

When Sony entered the market, every console got unique games because nobody knew what they were doing. The only 90s machine to do 3D sensibly was the Dreamcast, and it did not help. But once several engines worked identically on PS2, Windows, and sometimes even Mac, the writing was on the wall. Software has won. Hardware has been forced into such lock-step that even phones have raytracing cores. So what’s the difference? It’s only a numbers game, a race to the bottom.

And the company most responsible might be too dysfunctional to even gloat properly.

2012, 2005, 2011, 2009, 2015, 2023, 2011.

He did nothing wrong.

Heard good things about Pokemon.

Did that help?

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Everything decays into Fortnite.

Hey, publishers? Stop demanding multiplayer-only shooters. They’re either the biggest thing in months or stone dead. It’s a stupid gamble you will reliably lose.

And the one cocksure nose-candy addict who does back the biggest thing in months still won’t make Fortnite kinds of money.

… making the lesser increase seem less gouge-y.

Door in the face technique.

What do you mean “actually?” Religious creeps are most of that category.

Read: bigoted crybullies got the credit card duopoly to fuck us, and nothing on the internet is safe until they’re stopped.

Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

They don’t actually care about that. Stop humoring their excuses. They’re just prudes.

Door in the face technique.

Game dev is an industry where labor can look at capital and ask, “What would you say you do, here?” There’s no factory. There’s no raw materials. It’s just people and computers, and people have computers.

Crybullies and rich bastards censoring mention of censorship.

This far into the 21st century, paying people for art should have no barriers.

Let’s not give them ideas.