Ads used to be run at the streamers' discretion, and they were beaten by adblock. Now adblock doesn't work on Twitch, because they did the smart thing and embedded them into the stream. Also, a few years back, even though streamers have an incentive to run ads, because they benefit from it too, Twitch implemented mandatory thresholds for number of ads that need to be run or else you lose access to some tier of monetization, so most streamers leave it on auto pilot now. It means that whenever the same stream is running on YouTube, I'm watching on YouTube so I don't miss anything.
I mostly watch YouTube streamers. Once in a while they’ll do a Twitch stream and holy shit it’s night and day. 0 ads on YouTube and 30 second and even sometimes 1 minute unskippable ads constantly interrupting the stream on Twitch. I honestly have no idea how people put up with it. I cancelled cable because I didn’t want to watch ads, I’m not going to a site that does the same.
My adblock blocks the ads, but I still get that stupid purple screen. What really annoys me is that it’s a minute and a half long. Twitch really wants me to disable ad block so I look at an ad on a Livestream for almost two fucking minutes.
I minimize and do something else until then but that’s asinine.
hold on, you mean to tell me a platform that exists and is known purely for LIVE streaming content has put ads OVER the livestream interrupting your view? what kind of idiot would have approved such a service killing move?
As a mod, you can postpone an ad by 5 minutes 3 times. You can’t postpone it by 1 minute, you can’t choose to play them during downtime, you can’t do shit but pray an interesting moment doesn’t happen during the 1 minute.
Citing it as “an injustice to domestic publishers”, Vietnamese studios reportedly say that local game development “will die” if Steam is able to keep releasing games without the same government scrutiny as domestic games…
Yeah! It’s so unfair that one person can put their heart and soul into making a game on their own, self publish, and be successful! No way anyone else could possibly do that!
Can the lawyers on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown take the other party to court for a frivolous suit? I thought one of the problems was that there is no recourse for those on the receiving end of a bad DMCA takedown?
What I think would happen is the modders send a DMCA takedown, and EA either does take it down, or they file a “we’re not violating copyright, promise” form and then that’s the end of the DMCA. If they file the “we’re not violating copyright” form, then from there the modders can file a normal copyright violation suit if they choose.
Right, EA would file a counter-notice. Then the modder would have to get lawyers involved and file an actual legal complaint, and EA would respond with their lawyers.
But once they file the counter-notice, you could just stop there. They could sue you for filing in bad faith, but I’ve never heard of that happening.
Nothing. Modders suddenly feeling they should be paid is really entitled and kind of crazy. Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?
Modding isn’t a job, and you can’t make money off of someone else’s game
It’s not work . I’m currently modding a game, it’s a hobby. And I’d be entitled as hell to think I should be paid for it.
This “pay the modders” thing will just lead to more micro transactions. You want to download that created wrestler in the new game? It was made by so and so, you now owe. $9.99. fuck that
It’s not about pay the modders so much as if the developer of the game took your mod, put it in the game proper, claimed it was their work, and charged people for it.
I found several definitions where this meets the definition of “work”, but I’m interested to hear your argument about how “time and effort spent doing a task” is not work.
This is the wrong comparison. If you painted a modified version of an existing painting, the original painter can’t take your work and sell it against your will.
No it’s not. The modder didn’t sell anything. Wanting to be compensated if somebody else makes a profit from your work that you put out for free is not the same thing as selling it.
No, because they weren’t even offering it for sale. But they also weren’t offering it to be taken to be sold by somebody else for a profit. Which is what the studio did anyway. So now, after the fact, they can either pay a compensation and credit the modder, or they can remove their stuff from the game.
They’re still taking something they didn’t make and selling it as though they did. I have every right to write and film a Batman movie, spend as much time I want making it professional, and then show it to people, as long as I don’t charge them for it. That doesn’t give Fox or whoever the right to take my movie and charge for it instead. Even if I did break the law by making people pay for it, the actual owners would only be entitled to that money, not to go make mroe money off of it themselves. It’s still my work even if it uses concepts invented by someone else.
There’s a reason every franchise under the sun has mountains of fanart and fanfic without the companies that own them trying to take control of it: it’s blatantly illegal.
But the rub is, under fair use you can’t profit from it though, so as soon as you accept payment, now they can sue you. So in the end, they win and get it for free regardless.
If the rights holders enter into a contract and pay you for your work, I don’t think they can turn around and sue you for making a profit off of it. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think the law is that far gone.
But how can they make a contract? Signing it would violate fair use exemption before that could be argued.
Corps are abusing a conflict within the laws, it’s not even a loophole, it’s just the unfortunate way the laws that protect each person/industry don’t agree.
Contracting someone to use an artwork they made of your character would implicitly grant a license for them to make commercial profit off of that transaction.
That isn’t what a DMCA is for. Someone being compensated for the work they’ve done is unrelated to suing a company for using your art/code/work without permission or reference. Weirdly aggressive to modders though.
Edit: for your edit, you can’t monetise a mod for someone’s else’s game directly but you can absolutely make money modding. And even if their EULA enables them to do so, taking a modders code without at least a reference is pretty dogshit. Literally a million dollar studio ripping off people who did it out of passion knowing full well they wouldn’t get compensated. I’m surprised a EULA can protect them legally for doing it tbh.
The dev has a storied past^[1] of sexism and misogyny, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The COVID stuff is amusing but unsurprising considering it’s a Chinese studio.
Reading through that made me feel gross. It does seem to be acknowledged by women in China as a cultural issue (as well as globally online).
Sexism is, and continues to be, a global problem. But the difference, as both Zhong and Monica F. pointed out, is that the Chinese government and overall cultural attitudes continue to actively discourage women and their allies from fighting back. There’s no one telling harassers “no.”
This feels like the second round of this going around as the AI articles / lazy sites pick it up.
It’s a doc ‘sent’ to one guy who had 12 followers on medium before this started blowing up. It was edited after it was sent out to be the real marketing email of the company instead of a gmail address. The doc is still owned by that gmail account, which isn’t typically how companies operate.
I guess they’re getting their viral moment so good for them for generating content?
Remember when Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and Tencent all had to come together and form a super group to develop a royalty free video codec because something as simple as compressing and decompressing video was so god damn patent encumbered by people who just existed to suck money out of everyone.
Literally, every time software is patented, it ends up being used to screw with everyone, then eventually the patent expires ten years after the software was useful, or we have to waste huge amounts of effort to sideline it.
You sound like you need a history refresher on patents in the software industry and the disastrous effect that it has had in hurting innovation and consumers and how it is dominated by trolls and squatters.
I don't know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Again, look at the history of software patents. Tell me a single time it incentivied innovation and wasn’t just used by patent trolls and wasn’t just a huge waste of time and money for the industry to spend time on.
I think you are wholey unfamiliar with software patents in general and are just going on some basic guiding principal and I can tell you right now, history has not played out in your idilic description at all and you are just coming off as ignorant on the topic.
This is literally just whataboutism. You must be degenerate if you think that there’s a correlation between the research performance of the listed countries and their patent laws. There are dozens of more useful and much more relevant indicators for why these nations are disadvantaged in this regard. But just stick to your belief that North Korea is what it is because it doesn’t have patent laws lol.
Also, for you to better understand the harm that software patents caused and are causing, consider reading Free Software, Free Society by Richard Stallman.
There is literally a 1:1 correlation between protecting IP and R&D and innovation. Start ups that patent their ideas are genuinely more successful. You’re naive if you think IP only helps protect large companies.
My mistake, you're right. We should completely remove the incentive to innovate novel ideas and no longer protect them if they are created to allow theft.
I am a hypocrite thief that uses free software in my daily life.
I don’t know how to convey to you how important it is to incentivize innovation without worrying someone else will simply steal your ideas to make millions from your hard work you did inventing something while they literally did nothing.
If I make something and someone else can simply take it and dominate the market with it and pay me nothing for the work i did, why the fuck should I even bother making anything?
Oh sorry, I was under the impression that you had at least a basic knowledge about software and software development.
I now see that that’s not the case.
Open source is an area where software patents don’t generally protect the product, and yet it’s the most innovative space out there. And in cases where patents are brought in (see the rust trademark incident) they are rejected by the community. And yet open source is still around, and powering most of the internet and present in most devices.
If what you said about patents were the case, that would not be so.
As someone who is in the field of intellectual property, Lemmy’s views on IP boil down to “I attended Marxism 101 and want to pirate games”. Most here don’t have a clue how much time, effort and money is spent on innovation. They couldn’t even begin to fathom why protecting intellectual property helps people actually helps people get paid for their work, which is ironic as they are all for people being rewarded for their actual labour.
Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.
I wish people who base their entire knowledge of intellectual property on video games would just stop attempting to have opinions on things they don’t really understand.
If you think it’s fine to have a world in which people aren’t protected for their fruits of their labour, then by all means advocate against IP. I would rather live in a world in which people are actually paid for the ideas they come up with and don’t have to excessively keep corporate secrets.
Open source software is different due to informed consent. When working on an OS project you are doing it out of altruism and/or fun, fully realising that you will never be compensated for this work. That doesn’t mean software devs should never be paid and work for free indefinitely on anything they do. Its still a skill that should be compensated for.
I cannot see how they can reasonably copyright the idea of having characters remember you which is basically all the nemesis system is. There are many ways to implement it that wouldn’t violate patent, of course it’s in WBs interest to not nose that one around too much
You can try, but WB will troll you in court for years and drown you out on legal fees to prove it isn’t a violation of a patent. So, most consider it not worth it.
You think that patent abuse is right, and that’s why everyone in this thread hates your comments. You think the system is fine. The fact that you are inside but can’t understand how corporations abuse the system and think others are wrong or misinformed when they oppose this abuse, is troubling. You think we are ignorant or misinformed, but no, we do know how intellectual property works. We disagree and find it disgusting for moral reasons that it works that way. That’s very different.
Everyone in this thread is downvoting me because they are trying to out Marxist each other. I have never once claimed the patent system is perfect, but the people in this thread clearly don’t actually understand what is required to even receive a patent.
It’s typical, people know what systems they are against but never know what they are actually for. People say patents are unfair but never propose viable alternatives. The political analysis on Lemmy is frankly juvenile and utopic. People base their opinions on what team they support rather than any sort of analysis of the problem. Populism is rife here and people gravitate toards populist narratives in lieu of thinking. I’m very glad the demography of Lemmy is not representative of society at large.
Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.
I said they’re wonderful, not that they’re perfect. Clearly you need to work on your reading comprehension. The alternative is giant corporations stealing everybody’s ideas without anybody trying to stop them in any way.
Fuck off corpo.
Cringe. One day you’ll have to grow up and get a real job. Then you’ll look back at how embarrassingly assured you were of having the answers to everything after real life smacks you in the face and makes you realise you don’t know shit.
Go on then. How do we replace the patent system whilst still acknowledging mental effort and research as being valued forms of work? Tell me all about it mate, I’m interested in your ideas as you’re so convinced it’s all a big con.
Now you’re all riled up and acting stupid. You are the oh so claimed expert who works at patents offices. No, you tell me what does your majestic and awesome field of expertise do to prevent corporate abuse and patent trolling? Tell me, evangelize to me, convince me that the patent system has safeguards to prevent theft of intellectual work, how does patent enforcing works? what do you do, that you work there, to make it a more ethical field? what are the practices and procedures in place to avoid a corporation from using patents to monopolize, bully industries and stifle creativity and innovation?
I’ve protected people who have been attempted to be bullied by a larger company into ceasing production of a product. That’s literally my job.
Patent attorneys are a highly regulated profession which have to adhere to strict ethical standards and rigorous training in the law. I serve the interests of my clients. It doesn’t matter if you’re a large or small enterprise, the law is interpreted exactly the same throughout the process.
I would suggest reducing official fees to make it easier to purchase a patent, but that just reduces the quality of examination. In reality there is a balance to be struck between affordable patents and quality of patents which isn’t always struck correctly. I would advocate for government funded organisations that provide pro bono legal support for small enterprises as a way to make the system a little fairer. In the US they have a tiered system which makes patents cheaper for smaller companies, which is also something I think that should be adopted as standard.
Overall there is no simple solution. Life is complicated and messy and anybody who claims it isn’t is and that there are simple solutions to very layered societal problems are snake oil salesmen with an agenda.
And this is not even beginning to touch content and features from other released versions of these games from 20 years ago not present, like four-screen splitscreen."
It’s so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house, and that’s when devs decided we don’t get split screen anymore. Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn’t achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.
It’s not a question of capability. It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use.
Couch coop was a thing because there was no way for you to play from your own homes. Nowadays it’s a nice-to-have, because you can jump online any time and play together, anywhere in the world, without organizing everyone to show up at one house.
It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use
Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3
Goldeneye 007. Yeah seriously. The most famous multiplayer game of its generation very nearly didn’t have multiplayer. It was tacked on when they finished the game and had a little bit of extra time and ROM storage.
4x splitscreen needs approximately 4x VRAM with modern approaches to graphics: If you’re looking at something sufficiently different than another player there’s going to be nearly zero data in common between them, and you need VRAM for both sets. You go ahead and make a game run in 1/4th of its original budget.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game. Had they simply re-released the game that they already made, it wouldn’t be an issue. Us fans of the old games didn’t stop playing because the graphics got too bad. Even if we did, this weird half step towards updating the graphics doesn’t do anything for me. Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
My flatmates and I actually played through a galactic conquest campaign on the OG battlefront 2 like 2 months ago. It holds up.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game.
How to tell me you’re not a gamedev without telling me you’re not a gamedev. You don’t just turn a knob and the game uses less VRAM, a 4x budget difference is a completely new pipeline, including assets.
Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
Speaking about redoing mesh assets. Textures are easy, especially if they already exist in a higher resolution which will be the case for a 2015 game, but producing slightly higher-res meshes from the original sculpts is manual work. Topology and weight-painting at minimum.
So, different proposal: Don’t do it yourself. Scrap together a couple of millions to have someone do it for you.
The general point still stands, though, you can’t do the same thing with a 2015 game. On the flipside you should be able to run the 2004 game in different VMs on the same box, no native support required.
Output resolution has negligible impact on VRAM use: 32M for a 4-byte buffer for 4k, 8M for 1080p. It’s texture and mesh data that eats VRAM, texture and mesh data that’s bound to be different between different cameras and thus, as I already said, can’t be shared, you need to calculate with 4x VRAM use because you need to cover the worst-case scenario.
Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
I think a lot of the blame is erroneously placed on devs, or it’s used as a colloquialism. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment as a developer knows that the developers are not the ones making the decisions. You really think that developers want to create a game that is bad, to have their name attached to something that is bad and to also know that they created something that is bad? No, developers want to make a good game, but time constraints and horrible management prioritizing the wrong things (mostly, microtransactions, monetizing the hell out of games, etc) results in bad games being created. Also, game development is more complex since games are more complex, hardware is more complex, and developers are expected to produce results in less time than ever before - it’s not exactly easy, either.
It’s an annoyance of mine and I’m sure you meant no harm by it, but as a developer (and as someone who has done game development on the side and knows a lot about the game development industry), it’s something that bothers me when people blame bad games solely on devs, and not on the management who made decisions which ended up with games in a bad state.
With that said, I agree with your sentiments about modern hardware not being able to take advantage of long-forgotten cool features like four-screen splitscreen, offline modes (mostly in online games), arcade modes, etc. I really wish these features were prioritized.
🤷♂️I’ve made multiple million-dollar titles and haven’t gotten more than a paycheck from them. I really don’t think VAs should get much if any in the way of residuals. Engineers, artists, and designers should get a huge portion of the profits. Giving VAs even a 1% residual is a slap in the face of the rest of the team who build those games. Not to mention the whole team of LA Noire was laid off later that year.
Someone else made an interesting point how a lot of people don’t get residuals. That residuals don’t make sense for some jobs. For a VA in the background of a small indie games, do you think it’s okay for them to require residuals for their work? This lawsuit focuses on large AAA studios but it will set a dangerous precedent. There any many actors who have to find loop holes to build smaller movie projects. “We technically paid ourselves then invested it into the movie” sort of thing.
That said giving everyone residuals is better than giving no one residuals.
I will just say I think everyone involved in a project should be paid a fraction of the proceeds roughly in proportion to the work and sweat they contribute
Absolutely agree. But I think if we are going to start doing that we’ll have to start with the designers, engineers, and artists. Not the voice actors that spend weeks on the project and never think about it again.
Well, it’s valve, so honestly the odds of it being genre-defining in an already established genre? Pretty high, actually. Seriously, when is the last time valve put out a shit game?
It’s been many years, maybe even decades, since I liked a straight up turn-based single player RPG. I seriously can’t think of one that has sucked me in since FFX. I even tried Divinity Original Sin 2 after so much hype and good reviews from my friends. But I just didn’t like it.
However, Baldur’s Gate 3 sucked me in. According to steam, approaching 100 hours of playtime (although I’m sure there is a good chunk of time where I just walked away with the PC with it “paused.”)
I’m not saying you’ll like the game, I have no idea. But to already be convinced that you won’t like it based on pretty much the nothing we’ve got it terribly presumptuous.
I’m not ordering pizza from a restaurant if I’ve eaten 12 pizzas before and never liked any of them.
I was very intentional with my language, and pointed out that we know pretty much nothing about the game, so claiming you know you won’t like it is h reasonable. This is nothing like having a pizza, not liking it, and then not getting that same pizza again. This is like not liking the pizza at one store, it’s much closer to saying you don’t like the pizza in one store, so you know you won’t like it in another. Still imperfect because it would be closer saying you’ve never had a pizza you like, so you won’t like the pizza in a new store, which is more reasonable because you have a lot of information about that pizza.
To be faaaaiiiiir… D:OS (both of them) make the age-old mistake of having really slow, uninteresting, prologuish RPG starts. It takes a solid 5h of powergaming or 10h+ of normal play to get past that hump. That’s the point where the story picks up and you have enough tools to start really taking advantage of the games sandbox.
With BG3 they really seemed to have learned their lessons.
This seems reasonably different than the headline implies. It’s a hero shooter, in that there are classes based on heroes (like Team Fortress 2 as well). The gameplay is more moba it sounds like. I think I’ve only played one other moba shooter, and it failed quickly, so that’s different already.
It’s not a copy of OW, and even if it were it could still innovate. Half Life might be a “Doom Clone”, but it did stuff no one had done before. There’s plenty of innovation potential without inventing a new genre. Even if you do create a new genre, it’s probably still just evolution of existing things. No one ever has an original idea. It’s always inspired by their environment.
I hate beets. HATE them. I will eat durian, thousand-year eggs, stinky tofu, and a million other things that most people won’t touch… but beets? Fuck beets. Their sweet-yet-earthy funk is like a dead animal that has just started to decompose. I don’t care if they are cooked, pickled, or stewed in borscht… hate them and won’t touch them. They ruin everything they touch.
This is like that. They are cooking with lots of beet-like ingredients. Some people will love that. But as for me…I hate it… I hate just everything about it… and I hate it because I’ve experienced all those ingredients before. Over and over and over again. What they are making is for a very particular crowd, and I am not part of said crowd.
This seems reasonably different than the headline implies. It’s a hero shooter, in that there are classes based on heroes (like Team Fortress 2 as well). The gameplay is more moba it sounds like. I think I’ve only played one other moba shooter, and it failed quickly, so that’s different already.
It’s not a copy of OW, and even if it were it could still innovate. Half Life might be a “Doom Clone”, but it did stuff no one had done before. There’s plenty of innovation potential without inventing a new genre. Even if you do create a new genre, it’s probably still just evolution of existing things. No one ever has an original idea. It’s always inspired by their environment.
All fair points, and given the way Valve operates (like a free collective) this would only happen if there were some really passionate people leading and working on it.
That said, it’s still a mix of things I just really do not have any interest in. Competitive online game, esports focused, MOBA-like, PvP, hero shooter… that’s a whole lot of hard no-thanks from me.
I’d love some new light-narrative single player and/or co-op stuff from them, though.
This headline is almost incoherent, I wish they’d stop teaching journalists about newspaper shorthand headlines. We’re not limited to broadleaf sized headlines any more, just put some fucking words in there so it makes sense.
I have a very hard time understanding these headlines, but I normally blame it on my English (English isn’t my first language), but good to know that that’s not the case. Reading them twice or more doesn’t help. I just give up and let it go.
Staff members were told of GAME’s impending change to force staff onto zero hours contracts, first reported yesterday by Eurogamer, via mass video calls held on Microsoft Teams.
Are you paid to craft distraction posts? The headline and article are clear but your post (clearly upvoted by bots) is now the point of discussion (likely some responders are also the same bot accounts).
How much do you earn in service of corporate interests?
Who do you think is paying random Lemmy users to complain about headlines on news articles? Seriously, who do you imagine is behind such a ridiculous conspiracy? Where is the value in such activity?
Also, upvotes are public. We can see who upvoted him, and it wasn't bots.
Feel free to come up with your own thesis for the behaviour then. Why do you think a bunch of discussion has formed around a falsehood where all the parties of that discussion seem to agree and yet none have discussed the subject matter at all.
Feel free to come up with your own thesis for the behaviour then.
People upvoted him because they agree with him. Not that hard to figure out.
Why do you think a bunch of discussion has formed around a falsehood where all the parties of that discussion seem to agree and yet none have discussed the subject matter at all.
Because the headline is trash, hence the conversation at hand.
I got to ask, has reading comprehension really come down that much in the recent decades?
Could the title be expanded to be more prosaic? Sure!
But at the same time, it’s intuitively and entirely understandable.
Who? GAME staff
What? Discovered something
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
How? Via a mass Microsoft Teams call
Or, written together, the title up above. And that’s a completely normal sentence structure, it’s essentially how your brain should expect a sentence conveying that information to be structured, or the final part would be at the start (“Via a mass microsoft teams call…”).
Sure, but while I understand the sentence structure I still don’t know what it’s talking about without the article itself
I think the point they are making is that we use these short titles even though we don’t need to. It might be correct, but why not make better use of the medium
I just find it weird that you felt compelled to post an explanation for something that is “intuitively and entirely understandable”. It’s almost as if you knew that lots of people couldn’t understand it.
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.
You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.
Which one? The game was rebalanced so many times it was basically several different games. If they put in a 2-2-2 mode with the weaker open-queue tanks, I’d call that close-enough to Overwatch 1. Of course, that still would mean the new expensive monetization model. Like there’s one skin in the free tier of the current battle-pass, and it’s for Torb.
When they made OW2, they replaced OW1 with it. Technically, I think OW2 is just a really big update for OW1. But now there's no way to play the old version that a lot of us liked better. :(
So many people are still playing it, and many new people every day, I want it to be the best it can be
It will never be perfect, but I feel an urge to keep improving it. Up to this point, it’s been my life’s work, and I care a lot about it.
AAA companies:
So many people are still playing it because exploiting poor impulse control and FOMO are at the core of our game design philosophy. We want it to be the most profitable it can be
It will never be enjoyable, but we will make sure people feel the urge to keep logging in to grind their dailies so their purchase of a battle pass can be justified. Ever since we started allowing pre-orders it was already profitable, and we stopped caring about quality.
Indie devs: suddenly I’m a millionaire thanks to this one-hit-wonder game that I spent 6 years making. I think I’ll keep updating it so people keep buying it.
AAA companies: We need to pay 400 people over a course of 2 years. 30 million is less than 10% of the budget
Don’t forget the mandatory apology JPEG on Xitter.
We have done our utmost to make the enjoyable experience more accessible to average user. This has in turn resulted in sub-par experience for some. As we constantly try to improve quality of our products and this was a valuable lesson from which we plan to grow into more responsible company that caters to people’s needs.
I just look at the update history on steam. I don’t necessarily go to other websites. Every update has been minor, but I still consider it. Maybe they just meant no more major updates, but even still, it’s impressive they have kept maintaining that game for over 10 years.
Seems sadly on point. Their M.O. since at least as far back as Westwood (RIP Command & Conquer) has been to acquire a name brand, sap it for short term nostalgic profit, then dismantle usable assets. I love Dragon Age: Origins… and to some extent Inquisition, but damn if she ain’t what she used to be.
Even playing through Mass Effect 1 > 2 > 3 back to back has been a challenge for me. The games just get simpler as you go along and it is so frustrating.
And I'm not talking about just the talent systems and looting etc, the fucking dialog gets to a point where sometimes 2-3 of the options will give the same result, and ugh. Ruins so much of it for me.
You make a good point. Is there a life-tree of devs that shows their companies and games? It’d love to see those art directors names we know across the different devs and publishers they worked for but also the lesser known names that really make great games what they are.
That's the story of almost all EA studios. Respawn afaik has kept their senior staff but also have expanded too much for me to believe there's a "Respawn identity" anymore.
What's funny that happened with Bioware and Criterion, too.
Respawn has only made like, five games? Two of which are licensed IP and not any good. They have one great game in TF2. There was never a “respawn identity”. Hell the company was started by old Infinity Ward people.
At least with the ship of theseus it’s an inanimate object. You could replace any board or sail and still consider it the ship in question. Is it still in fact the ship of theseus? That’s debatable but you could say that it still represents the ship.
In this case BioWare is made up of thinking human beings all that are motivated by different factors. You can’t replace one person with another and expect the same of them even if you got someone who followed the initial person’s logic as closely as possible, they’d still end up with different results to the first.
That is if EA even cares enough to replace the previous developers with like minded individuals which I highly doubt. BioWare of old, make great games while telling the best stories possible. After modern day EA’s influence? Make as much money as you can while puppeteering as the BioWare of old.
You can’t replace one person with another and expect the same of them even if you got someone who followed the initial person’s logic as closely as possible, they’d still end up with different results to the first.
but this is… how businesses work. No business is the same people ALL the time. i don 't know why people expect any different here. and the quality of writing has suffered as of late, so why not get new blood in? i really don’t understand what the issue is here.
What if you replace each piece of the original ship with an identical piece? What if you use all of the removed pieces to build an identical ship? Which one is then the “real” ship?
What if you had a time machine and sent a ship made out of original parts back in time then swapped half of the parts between the two ships?
Will the older pieces immediately rot to dust because the older ship already had those parts swapped out in its past, so the older pieces are actually trapped in a time loop, but since they keep getting older they just disappear, but it’s ok because you have the new pieces from the past so you’re left with a ship with new pieces and slightly older pieces?
… If you have 33% of the original ship left. What makes you think there are 3 original ships. It’s like you’re trying to confuse yourself. If you took 33% of the original ship to make a new one, you did just that. Being vague isn’t profound
What’s vague? You can divide the ship into 3 and replace the missing pieces for each third. You now have 3 ships with 33% of the original, all of which fit your criteria
The original ship is where the pieces are coming from, the new ship are made from those pieces. This is sooooo dumb to be arguing. Just be more specific and no issues.
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