These giant corporations don’t even have to be quiet about it anymore, there’s just no consequences. They couldn’t care less about you, me, their customers, or their employees.
They care about being able to hire labor, which we provide, and they care about revenue and profit, which we also provide. Not defending any behavior, but the consequences in a healthy economy would largely come from customers, potential and current employees. Failing that, large issues would be overcome by regulations, or at least enforcing existing ones (codified rules against monopolies, for examples, are just words if not enforced).
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect. Nevermind companies are rewarded by shareholder and investor support based more on profits than.how those profits were made, especially when many of those shareholders feel forced to turn to the stock market to fund their retirement, as pensions are so increasingly a rare option.
Would voting for fresh representatives possibly increase instability in out daily lives? Is that instability a possibly necessary cost of maintaining effective regulation of the investor class that has captured our legislative system to their own benefit?
There are systemic problems at play here- not to downplay the choices this individual company made, but the focus could be on the larger forces at work. If your first reaction is that boycotts and choices by consumers and employees, no matter how organized and widespread, do not work, then I ask you, dear reader, to consider what might work to make the necessary systemic changes, and what, if anything, you can do to help make them happen.
The investor class has made it clear what their playbook is, as they have time and time again thru history: explotation, and as much of it as they can get away with. The question then becomes what us, the ever-increasingly exploited, are going to do about it.
no war but class war.
ed:I hope that didnt come off as disagreement- just trying to voice frustration with a side of “everyone who agrees with you please take a moment to think about the big picture, and what you can do about it” because I’m also tired of this slide into an increasingly boring dystopia
Without consumers willing (and able) to make sacrifices (like paying higher prices) to reward good corporate behavior, and to avoid companies with purely short-term profit motivated behavior, this is what we can and should expect.
I think consumers have spoken, at least in part. What money can be made doing this job is more easily made on YouTube.
Which sucks due to the innate near-inability of a Youtube video to carry an argument without a visual component well.
It’s why podcasts can be decent for some topics, but youtube is just someone talking a podcast into the camera for 45 minutes, and all of it would be ~5 minutes reading a single paragraph at most if it were in written form but you really really realy got to chase those ad-impressions.
Non-textual forms for textual content have really been their own destructive blight on internet content. :'(
I get my gaming news from YouTube podcasts, mostly; at least those two do employ people actually doing some of that same type of work. It doesn’t really matter how good Schreier is at his job when I’m not going pay for a Bloomberg subscription and someone else can more cheaply copy the same content and tell me what it said. The video format gives me more of a dialogue with the person who did the work. Plus ads are much more easily defeated on a web page than on YouTube, though they are still partially defeated.
I find myself immediately opening the video transcript for many videos. creating a well made video that offers more than a few paragraphs of text is often a challenge
While I still “subscribe” to Humble, I don’t recall the last time I actually unpaused a month. Maybe this is the push I needed. Their offerings have been mostly subpar after they bought Humble. Not knocking the indie devs, I think my gaming tastes have changes over the years. Also, I don’t need coupons for DLC, please and thank you.
I had been a Humble Monthly subscriber since they first started it. 6 months ago my husband and I both canceled our subscriptions. Used to be some really good bundles, but now it’s just shovelware and DLC coupons.
Has there been any good bundles in the last 10 years? According to my email history the last time I bought something from them was at the end of 2014, and even before then I’d been complaining about it’s quality.
I’ve had choice since it was monthly, I’ll probably end it this year (I pay yearly) cause eh so much filler. I’d say I get my moneys worth but 🤷♂️ I’m getting old anyway haha
At RPS we like Alices. When somebody comes along with the name “Alice” you don’t just say “oh hi” like some insolent rube. You nod with solemn respect and you say, “Alice”. An Alice is someone you should not take lightly, nor take for granted, nor leave unmonitored. For they will destroy worlds and build better ones while you are not looking. This is dangerous and exciting. Alices are a force to be reckoned with. To treat an Alice poorly is to invite shame, dishonour, and contempt. Here are some of the best Alices in video games!
But that’s it, readers. That’s literally ALL the Alices we can possibly think of. What about you? Can you think of any Alices who deserve to be celebrated?
Guys job will probably fall off a window after this, but God he probably felt awesome when publishing
I remember the TechTV days before G4 took over. AotS was fun but never really replaced Screen Savers. Then G4 did whatever the fuck it did (mostly airing ghost hunters from what I remember) and went off air so we lost that too. Then there was the terrible attempt at revival a few years ago that failed spectacularly.
TWiT is still going though. Maybe something cool will come out of this.
I hate how this is phrased as “redundancies”. IGN literally JUST bought these outlets, they haven’t had time to dig into and examine the organizations they acquired; it’s just straight into the Corpo playbook of “lay people off and let the dust settle where it may”.
These are people, not “redundancies”. They contributed in the old organization, and they could contribute in the new, but they never even got the chance.
It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.
Read the guys comment again though. They say their issue is with calling them “redundancies” in a language sense. But it’s not sugar coating it or anything, that’s the legitimate term for what happened.
You generally don’t buy a business and then figure all of that out. You figure it all out and then buy the business. IGN already would have 100% known the managerial setup at these companies.
What should happen is not always what does happen. There are tons of examples of brain dead companies and rich people buying companies they dont understand and then ruining them because of that.
Generally when companies like this are bought it isn’t to acquire the talent. That’s legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We’ll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.
Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.
Stardew Valley was released in 2016. My understanding is it took 10 years to make (Eric Barone worked at a movie theater, and when he wasn’t at work he was working on the game) and he’s been supporting and releasing new content for the game for 8 years now. The Wiki pages for the characters contain the artwork for the characters he’s drawn, and redrawn, and redrawn over the years.
He basically won the cozy farming genre, it’s time to move on, for his own health if nothing else.
He seems very happy to keep working on it and he’s bringing on help as he needs. He’s even taking breaks from other project to prevent burnout. Seems like he’s practicing good balance. Why does someone need to move on from a passion project they’re approaching with a level head and have invested their career in?
Terraria was released in 2011, and still gets free updates with similar frequency to Stardew. Minecraft alpha was released in 2010.
Sure, Eric won the cozy farming genre. He is also clearly passionate about the game. Maybe looking out for his own health is exactly why he continues to dabble with the game.
If he is enjoying his work and able to continue living as he is doing it, then why must he “move on”? Why can’t he continue to make content for Stardew? Why are you thinking he is “unhealthy”?
I wouldn’t go as far as masterpiece but indeed the music is very important. The best Final Fantasy, in my opinion, have OST composed by Nobuo Uematsu, a musical genius, for example. And they wouldn’t be as good without his work.
That’s how I feel about RuneScape! I don’t find it a particularly fun game, but the music is so great and iconic and fits the game so well, I hear it and want to play.
nail those 3 things and don’t fuck up anything else, and people will throw money at your game, because the rest of the industry seems to refuse to provide games that are simply enjoyable without trying to turn you into a dairy cow.
At this point they should just hold on to all the updates they want to add, and make it a sequel. I love all the things that they’ve added and it’s clearly a piece of passion, but at some point they’re going to need to publish something else
I never thought about it like that. If he makes an average of just $0.50 per sale after all the storefront fees and taxes and stuff, he would still have enough money to pay himself $200,000 a year for an entire lifetime, just from the sales he’s already made. No wonder he’s so chill about keeping the game updated for free. What an awesome guy
I thought $0.50 was low for this math to work out, but turns out 30 million copies of Stardew Valley have been sold, so that’s $15 million, which over 60 years is $250k/year.
Still though I have no clue if $0.50 is normal take home per copy sold for a self published game (it seems low), but I’m very happy he’s doing well for himself and hopes he makes more per copy sold. I’ve bought the game 4 times, so I’m doing my part!
Yeah, I chose $0.50 as an absurdly low assumption, because while the game nominally sells for $15, I don’t know anything about costs involved. A quick google search says his net worth is somewhere around 30-45 million dollars, which is about twice what I estimated. Which most people would use as an excuse to sell the game to Microsoft and retire forever, but Eric Barone is too good for that. I just realized I only own the game on mobile and xbox. Reckon I might buy it on PC next paycheck
Read a book that goes over the development of Stardew written by Jason Schreier and covered Eric a good bit.
The dude was was worth multi millions shortly after Stardew had launched and it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy a new car. Jason hung out with him and watched him climb over the seat to get into the drivers seat of his car because the door was broken. Then at some point Jason asked him how it felt to be a famous developer and Eric basically just said he didn’t care about the fame and actually didn’t want it. He just wanted people to enjoy what he made.
Saying Stardew Valley is a passion for Eric is an understatement. By the time he finished the game, he basically hated working on it. And ever since its launch, he’s worked on it for no reason other than to make a better game.
Eric Barone is a shining light in an industry of constant shame.
He has hired a few contractors to help build out features like co-op, (though the first few versions were entirely him on his own). That would eat into profits a bit, but even if he paid each of them $100k for their work there are few enough for it to be a drop in the bucket
This reminds me of the new game Andrew Gower and his brothers have been working on, Brighter Shores. It’s a pure passion project based on a from scratch game engine that was created to make programming (even massively) multiplayer online games much easier.
The goal isn’t profit but rather, to have fun, and make a cool enjoyable game. He’s said they’ve made more than enough money from the sale of Jagex and RuneScape back in the day (which FWIW, he regrets that sale and a lot of what has happened at Jagex/to RuneScape).
I love to see game developers (and people in general that … “make it” and then go “you know what, I do have enough”).
The cozy-game genre specifically is a relatively recent category, even if there are plenty of older games that could fit into it.
It definitely isn’t a term you would have seen back when Stardew Valley was released.
And then it says the reason that Hades 2 has resource gathering is because stardew valley influenced it…
That’s not how you should read this section of the article.
Though Stardew Valley did not invent the farming genre – and obviously took a lot of inspiration from Harvest Moon – it certainly triggered the avalanche of similar farming games that followed. On top of that, numerous games have farming and other life sim elements in them now, regardless of genre.
“On top of that” phrasing implies they are making a separate point.
Just to add support to your point, it’s literally in The Official Stardew Valley Cookbook that the inspiration comes from Harvest Moon. He’s not at all claiming to have invented anything. ConcernedApe is a humble treasure.
(I just finished reading the cookbook is why I pulled that information from there. I’m sure there’s lots of other places where he said that.)
I tried and failed to dust off Fallout 4. Got hit by bugs, and some of my mods that fix immersion breaking (for me) stuff don’t work either, so I’ll wait.
No mods, on my first clean install, all the Automaton voice lines were missing, so the robots were mute. I did a reinstall, that fixed it, so I only had the rest of the “normal” bugs.
My favourite bug someone just found is that if you build stuff in any of the indoor settlements, like Vault 88, it breaks pathing in subtle ways everywhere. If you put down something, it marks the coordinates in that indoor cell for NPCs to walk around, so that they don’t try to walk over beds and such. The problem is that it actually marks those same coordinates in all cells everywhere, so the bed shaped “no-go zone” is there in every single interior in seemingly random places. That means, the more you build in these places, the less NPCs can walk in indoor cells, and they might get randomly stuck.
BTW the immersion breaking thing for me is that I’ve always hated that unlike previous Fallout games, or like all games ever, when you holster a weapon, it just disappears into thin air instead of being holstered in some way. There is a simple mod that fixes that, but it got broken by the next gen update, which also broke F4SE. So now I wait and play sg else.
aftermath.site
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