I don’t read my replies
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This article’s reasoning is faith based. The cornerstone assumption is that industry profits and layoffs obey the preferences of the market.
To those who follow the industry, this is demonstrably false. What follows is the lack of awareness on full display:
and even though Spider-Man 2 sold more than 11 million copies, several members of Insomniac lost their jobs when Sony announced 900 layoffs in February.
Games were better before achievements. Admit it, you’ve played a game in way that you actively don’t enjoy or long after you’ve lost interest, just to pop some worthless achievement.
I understand a few studios take the time to make achievements humorous or worthwhile to the actual game your playing, but that’s just another reminder that most studios don’t.
Buying isn’t supporting. Capitalism is not a social support network.
Companies have spent millions and taken years to convince people that going shopping is a kind of activism.
If I suggested you donate money directly to a video game company, or volunteer your time to help them you’d see right away how fucking weird that whole concept is.
When are publishers going to realize there is only a market for like 2-3 Live service games at any one time?
You cannot underestimate the stupidity of games publishers. I’d be willing to accept that sunk-cost alone is the explanation for this outrageous budget. It probably started out as “what’s $200m for the next Fortnight?” and just went in $5 or $10 million dollar increments from there.
Except… for the combat. By the end of the game, they need 50 bad guys to even pose a challenge to our Max Paine protagonist. But not in the cut scene, of course. By mid-game, you’ve killed more cowboys than cholera.
There is a beautiful quick-draw mechanic that’s only necessary in 2 (optional) side quests.
My disappointment isn’t with the enemy variety or gear drops. It’s with the dead world. My first hours in the game I saw a wolf walk through a herd of deer both ignoring each other. When you’ve just come off RDR2, seeing wildlife as decorations running 2 scripts that both depend on player interaction is lame.
Even FarCry3 had emergent game-play through enemy/wildlife AI.
They won’t stop doing it. Think of how many live service games have failed. Are the investors going to stop drooling over that Fortnight $$? AAA game are made to please investors, not players.
Boiling everything down to econ101 serves to absolve the bad behavior or games companies as “rational actors” while placing the blame for shitty games practices on “stupid” gamers.
One of the things not addressed in this interview is how the ideology of libertarianism is central to the transition from markets to fiefdoms. All the big tech bros are huge libertarians and that’s not an accident.
And I do think this is a new phenomena unlike classic capitalism. Marx thought that a post-scarcity society would mean more leisure, he didn’t anticipate that that leisure was just another source of value to exploit. Think of reddit selling it’s “content” to an AI company. That content wasn’t produced by coerced labor paid unfairly, it was produced by voluntary labor paid nothing.
So people get toxic when you advertise misleadingly?
The whole online culture around gaming has been so thoroughly infiltrated by reactionaries, incels, and plain old misanthropes any developer can expect to be abused online by toxic gamers. Whether or not the grievances are genuine is beside the point.
I’m not criticizing you or defending this game, I’m just saying how fucked it is that gamers being abusive is normalized and expected.
2013: gamer /gā′mər/ n. one who plays roleplyaing or video games.
2023: gamer /gā′mər/ n. asshole spewing hate on the internet.
I prefer games with established characters over blank-slate character creator types. The worlds in Bethesda games are so generic bc every interaction has to account for whatever the player chooses to be.
Geralt, Wolf, Aloy, and Author Morgan inspire me to think about pathos and motivation. The dragonborn and tarnished are just coat-racks to hang armor on.
Spoilers Below for Sekero and Elden Ring
By the end of Elden Ring, I go and talk to Roderika and she’ll tells me she’s decided to burn alive in solidarity with Hewg, and I’m like wow, so sad, anyway… can I get some of that spirit tuning? Meanwhile, I’ve never platinumed Sekiro despite many playthroughs because I can’t inhabit a version of Wolf that betrays Kuro.
There are no “true” libertarians. There are more libertarian denominations than their are people who identify as libertarian. And all denominations are orthodox. A group of libertarians is called an impasse.
It’s not an accident that people who identify that way are incapable of getting along: the individual is the weakest political unit. Add in the fact that libertarians will eschew government benefits for themselves just to spite those lower on the ladder, and I can’t think of a better friend to the ruling class. What can we say about people who’d rather live in a fiefdom than a democracy? That they all imagine themselves as lords I guess.
(I’m told people in Europe identify as libertarians and oppose government power to hurt people. I’m talking about US libertarians who oppose government power to help)
Because I’m not allowed to read the article to know if this is mentioned: a big reason why this would aggravate Wukong fans is that Nintendo is a Japanese company.