Guy I know worked for a pretty big video game studio or two. (You’ve definitely heard of some games he worked on). Then he realized it sucked. Took a job in FinTech, made like double the money for half the work.
When I was leaving college a quarter of a century ago I briefly considered going into game dev…even back then everyone said it was low paid and gruelling work, so I passed.
20 year industry vet here. When I started, it was in a company that was hiring nothing but people that have never worked in games before (and they did not tell us this, like some bad reality show). Of the ~200+ people I worked with there when I started, I would very generously estimate maybe only 10-15 of us still in the industry. To be fair, conditions in the industry have gotten a lot better since most of those people left it. The days of doing 80+ hours a week are long gone for most of us as far as I can tell.
It's really all about loving who you are working with. Even if you hate the project or the hours, just enjoying being around the right people makes a huge difference. Writing that is making me realize just how many of my favorite people and closest friends are now elsewhere and damn, I miss them.
I think for that title to accurately reflect the overall complaint it would be something more like “I Don’t Really Understand What This New Movie Release Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It” or to use the lower level comment’s example “You Can Finally Fall for Your Favorite Character In This Dating Sim Based on a Popular Recent Release”.
Where the title is intentionally vague so that you need to read it to even understand what they are talking about. The original titles could be easily summarized as “Opinions on Five Nights At Freddy’s movie” or “Dating Sim based on character from Armored Core 6” just based on the title alone. So if you are aren’t interested in either of those topics, you can easily skip reading.
Sony would essentially own the anime and manga industry and be able to dictate monetization practices as well as trends. I find that even more concerning than the Fromsoft acquisition and that’s saying something. Nothing good can come from this whatsoever.
The article is talking about art in promo material.
Think about it: whenever you see a piece of production art featured in a social media post or a press release or a game announcement at a big televised showcase, all you ever see is the art. You never know who made it, whether it was created by an individual or a small team (or even a studio).
They're usually put in the game's credits. The promotional material is part of the game even if it isn't on the disc, it isn't some separate project that exists in a vacuum.
The author says "think about it", but clearly he didn't.
It’s more that when the writing is bad something is perceived as “political”, as the insert of whatever political messaging is being used comes out of nowhere and smacks the player like a cudgel. That’s what most gamers have a problem with, obviously there’s a loud minority that rage about stupid shit like Jesse Faden being too masculine. But that’s not what most people are talking about.
Games need to tackle these issues head on and fully integrate them into the world, not just tack on preachy dialog that doesn’t make sense within the wider game world.
FF16 is blatantly about slavery and no one really complained, it’s not exactly peak fiction, but they at least had everything contained within the world. FF7 is the same but with fossil fuels and much better writing.
New Vegas is the best example, it’s simply written well and gives the player agency.
Death Stranding did a great job of both integrating it’s themes directly into the world, and also tackling them head on without any remorse.
Helldivers is so ludicrously full on and absolutely dripping with it’s pro fascist ideology that everyone knows what they’re getting into from the intro video, and then the game starts adding texture and “are we the baddies” energy straight away.
Fucking Disco Elysium is near universally praised by the wider gaming audience, and I don’t even think I need to explain how that one is political.
It’s the same reason why most ideologically driven media is cringe as fuck. Christian media being a prime example, it’s contrived slop that doesn’t make sense within its own story. Like God’s Not Dead and it’s illogical legal system built on feels and Shapiro logic.
Who remembers the weird pro-life Doctor Who episode? That was bizarre and out of place. The characters stopped acting like themselves for the sake of whatever message it wanted to get across. It just felt really out of place.
The Last of Us Part 2, to label the most controversial example, had periods of good and bad writing, but focusing in on the “violence bad” part of it’s messaging, it completely missed the mark. Giving the characters names that they shout was just hilarious, and having Ellie repeatedly kill dogs whilst Abbie pets them was just so hamfisted. Then making the gameplay violent and fun which just divorced it further.
TLDR: Gamers People love politics in video games media, they hate hamfisted preaching in video games media. Especially when it doesn’t make sense in the crafted world
The drama with helldivers was because fascists saw the over the top campy depiction of fascism and unironically agreed with it. They had no idea they were the ones being lampooned. You should look at the reactions when they found out the devs were actually not fascists. They were distraught.
Please could you provide some examples? I’ve legitimately never seen someone upset at the devs for not literally being fascists.
If I have to go out of my way to find this, I’m assuming it falls under the “loud” minority group. I’m sure these people exist, but it’d surprise me if they made up a significant amount of the over 12 million players.
Edit: Had a further look, there seems to be more people complaining about people taking it literally than people actually taking it literally. I did find like 3 Reddit posts, but all had 0 upvotes and like 30 comments telling them they’re wrong and stupid
Specifically starship troopers, but you know what kickstarted that discussion again. Also a bunch of Twitter discourse. Reddit is generally left adjacent. You won’t find too much fash shit there.
Sorry man, but that’s a relatively milk toast YouTube video with 81k views. Definitely very right leaning, but outright fascist is a bit much. She clearly has no media literacy or is deliberately misleading people.
Her latest video got only 11k views, and most of her titles look like some right wing grifter shit like “Ben Shapiro SILENCES Candace Owens, CANCELS Debate?”.
And I’m sure that right wing grifters will use this for content, that’s what they do.
I wouldn’t say that shows anything more than a loud minority. Honestly 81k views is lower than I expected and more proves my point
I’ve never watched game awards. I don’t even know if there is even a main one. Watches speeches is boring which is why I don’t watch award shows in general.
Only goty I care about is the goty edition where the game releases with all the DLCs bundled at a discount.
Gee, I wonder why it’s all AI generated horseshit from press releases these days.
The writing was on the wall when Jeff Gerstmann was fired over a bad review back in 2007. The whole game journalism industry has been on life support since then, and realistically been shafted ever since we went from purchased magazines to online.
Even then magazines would find themselves without timely review copies if they were not sympathetic to the need for good reviews.
It’s all about the money. When they give honest bad reviews they’ll end up not being invited to play early review copies, thus missing out and falling behind on the wave.
I think true journalism hardly exists anymore. Feels like most genuine reviews come from people that aren’t paid to do the reviews by either the site/magazine publisher they’re working for or the developer/publisher offering the game for review.
So many articles on big websites feel like they read entirely like AI-generated content. Some don’t even bother to hide it, they might just as well be old school RSS-feeds at this point.
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