you could repurpose this headline to literally any creative or journalistic industry these days. “x industry is being propped up by underpaid freelancers” is just a fact of life now. it’s just so much cheaper when you don’t owe them any benefits or dignity or anything at all in fact.
It’s also possible that he did say all of those things and they’re only changing the story due to the negative reception. It’s a Sony site/interview after all.
Technically it’s possible, but the article includes the transcript that Druckmann himself posted, so that would mean he is faking a transcript to call out Sony’s edits to what he said.
It’s funny that Aftermath is writing about bad game journalism practices when they themselves have an initial “you must register to read our articles,” but then after registration, hit you with an actual hard paywall after a couple of articles.
If they want to paywall their content, that is their prerogative, but they could at least be up-front about it, instead of only telling me about it after I went through the trouble of creating an account.
Honestly, I hadn’t realized there was a paywall on the article after having signed up a couple weeks ago.
I’ll actually avoid posting their articles here then. Thanks for the callout.
Edit: Though I’m still interested in hearing about where they are hypocritical. People keep saying Aftermath writers say paywalls are bad, but I haven’t seen that anywhere that I’ve noticed.
I quite enjoy this site. On my journey to replace a lot of my content consumption with RSS feeds, Aftermath found a home in my RSS reader. We are human and humans can be hypocrites but there’s no need to dismiss an entire publication because of a single author’s hypocritical stance.
As a person that has grown up in a poorer country I never have played any nintendo games as a child so I don’t have that nostalgia factor. The recent nintendo games I’ve tried were just okay, nothing to write home about in my opinion. I really cannot grasp why these people with hundreds of nintendo merch do what they do, is the feeling of nostalgia really such a great factor?
Same, old NES and SNES were pretty good for its era but for the last 30 years nintendo managed to produce exactly one game series i mildly wanted to play, Fire Emblem, and ever since i played it on emulator recently that want disappeared, it wasn’t even very fun.
They have a lot of perfectly fine games. If they were priced appropriately.
Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid are all pretty good 2D platformers (with Metroid obviously being one of the original sources of metroidvania as a genre). But tech has advanced to the point that one person, or a small team, can make 2D games every bit as good as theirs, many small teams have (with better art in some cases), and there are many better options that start at lower prices than their “huge discount mega-sale” price of $40-45, and discount even further beyond that.
Their games sell well enough, so clearly it works on some level, but it’s just generally doesn’t make a lot of sense to get a game like Metroid Dread over a game like Ori or Hollow Knight. Games aren’t fungible, and I get that, but I genuinely think a lot of indie games are better, better looking, and much more substantial than a lot of their 2D offerings.
For those who’ve been paying attention, this has been known a long time. Remember when Nintendo would falsely claim gaming videos on YT and take all of the earnings just because one of their games made an appearance?
It’s wildly underpaid and the developers are highly highly skilled devs. They work in game dev because they want to, but the money isn’t there. Most game developers are working at tiny studios hoping for a break.
The shame of it is this kinda the way she goes for passion jobs like game dev. Similarly, EMS is a chronically underpaid career. Not for lack of difficulty or skills required, but because people want to do it. That desire to help others only translates into an ability to underpay people for the privilege. There’s a nobility to wanting to dedicate your life to helping people despite the lack of pay. A nobility that is happily exploited by private equity.
A new Mario, Zelda, metroid is what ninten does? Well, I suppose the article is technically correct. Shame the company is a dinosaur with draconian beliefs.
Indeed. I own a Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild but Nintendo says I’m not allowed to play it on my Steam Deck. I guess that’s the last time I buy something from them. Their games really are amazing though so it’s a shame.
After the emulation debacle I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t spend money with Nintendo anymore. As you say, a shame, because I was considering getting Botw but…
This is something I've noticed for a while now, but haven't been able to really describe. This shift away from clickbait headlines towards cryptic headlines that just refuse to tell you what they're talking about. Like The Best Part of Alan Wake Is Now On Youtube or The Best Soulslike Of 2023 Just Got Easier. And those are just a few that I've seen today. Maybe it will fade away like the worst clickbait headlines did or they'll just keep getting so cryptic and opaque that one day the headlines will be: Something Just Happened.
I’ve literally taken to pasting the articles into GPT and asking it to summarize the articles. I imagine they will be the next causality in the coming AI wars.
I would honestly be inclined to pay for a non bs news service, no clickbait titles, no SEO bs in the article which makes it 30 times as long for no reason. Just facts
I mean, they are literally clickbait. They want you to wonder what the best part of Alan Wake is or what the best soullike of 2023 is. It’s just an evolution of clickbait, but it’s still very much clickbait.
I thought they were more interesting than average, even when I disagreed with a take. The kind of site there should be a ton of, with varying takes for people to despise to a baffling degree. Sad to see it gone, or "gone" and turned intp a slop factory with known terrible working conditions for the people left.
Regardless of feelings about the people themselves, it's awful that they fired the union members probably deliberately at this point in the sale so they wouldn't have to go along with their contracts.
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