As the article says, since his comments were run through machine translation, it’s possible they’re meant more in jest rather than seriously. I’ll keep a charitable perspective on this until we learn more.
Since last night, I’ve seen a lot of strong dissatisfaction and frustration in players’ comments - often expressed humorously or ironically, which made me laugh,"
Jest or not, this one statement is irresponsible because this will only serve to encourage bad and toxic behavior and you know that’s how immature gamers will take it, as condoning their behavior.
No the OP did not. I’m literally saying tone does not matter and even if it was a flippant remark, gamers will take that as approval of their bullshit behavior.
Let’s face it, gamers are all too often immature assholes, Westerner, Easterners, wherever.
Then that would be the gamers’ fault, not the producer’s. They’re not responsible for how their comment may not only be taken out of context but also translated in a disadvantageous way.
This is based on a shit article from the shitrag “TheGamer” that calls 500 players downvoting a game a movement. There’s 1,4B people in China, 500 votes don’t even register. TheGamer is a clickbait/ragebait shitrag that weaponises xenophobia/culture wars/ignorace to generate traffic. They are the precise example of the enshitification of the Internet. Veritable parasites.
I got heavily downvoted for pointing out “TheGamer” as a poor source of gaming journalism in a post specifically linking to that article. So I guess that tells me everything I need to know about Lemmy?
Those are usually locked away behind command lines and they don’t test with random chance or such. You trigger the things directly. Realistically what probably happened is some engineer wrote the system slightly wrong and no one caught it. Possibly maybe a designer requested the romance to be more prominent and the solution on engineering side was to tweak a value. It’s be surprised if anyone changes hard coded values for QA. It’s not the 90s anymore where qa is the engineering team.
You can't take it back. What you can do is have a trademark of sorts and sue anyone using it without your permission for damages, which if won, is a lot more than it would have cost them to just pay the sub.
Meh that sucks. There was a mod for ME3 that gave Miranda more of a role and it used the voice files from the game as source material for AI training for dialogue in the mod. Having that be hampered because of some DRM loicense so the Hollywood people can buy more mansions isn’t something I’d like to see.
The actors better start setting that shit up, because in a few short years only voice actors with work will be the ones leasing their voice. But give it 20 and they want even need them either. They have deep fakes that are just as good. Fucking sad we all love the robots taking our jobs, but we meant Fucking hard labor and factory work not the arts.
Let robots that don’t experience emotions or pain take away the dangerous, backbreaking stuff. Not the safe jobs people do because they love them. Whose idea was this in the first place? Why the arts anyways, I thought “starving artist” was a phrase for a reason, is there really that much money to be made here?
Art is incredibly valubable, other than wars most of the stuff we remember about past situations is some kind of art (statues, stories, graffiti) Artists on the other than have no percieved value whatsoever.
That’s my thinking. I can imagine a live service game needing about 10 new lines from a character every few months, and depending on the hassle of recording studios, AI could be great for that - IF it can be set up in such a way that its use is only applied with permission of the actor who created the voice. They’d also have the right to refuse AI voicing for that session, provided they give a reasonable plan for in-person recording.
My friend told me about this earlier and that’s exactly what I thought. They knew this wouldn’t be popular and would drop the value so they sold before the announcement, that’s got to be insider trading
Now the share price will drop and he will buy his share back at a discount. Then they will revert the policy and share prices will rise. Boom! Free monies!
I think the part where they had a trend of selling over the course of a year makes this not insider trading (or harder to prove if they were playing the long game).
They probably have automated sell of dates or automated sell of prices.
This is part of a consistent pattern over the last year.
He probably hasn’t bought any stocks due to receiving stock as part of his employment contract.
It could be insider trading, but considering how companies have been doing pricing structures and rapid shifts from free to subscription based and then seeing sales/profit increase I imagine it’s worth it for them to simply keep the stock long term, but an initial sell off was put in place at a certain price. Sometimes there’s smoke and there’s fire, and sometimes it’s just simply the fumes of capitalism creating a system that’s uniquely imbalanced for everyone else, but isn’t really insider trading.
I feel like a scheduled sell shouldn’t mean insider trading investigation is off the table.
Does it really matter if they decided to sell just before they devalue their company, or they devalued their company right after a sell? They knew about both before hand, and they can have the same intent either way.
I suppose, but that’s a different crime under a different statute Im guessing. (Tanking the company because gou have a scheduled sell, versus selling because you tanked the company.)
They’ve been consistently selling off stock for the last year as noted in the article. Many of these execs get paid in a combination of cash and shares. To get their full wage they sell shares.
No, as the article says they’ve been doing it all year. Many execs and important employees often get paid a big chunk of their wage in stock. To get cash they need to sell stock.
Or the people who care about it already have it. It doesn’t have archaic controls or graphics or whatnot, so the need to buy a new version is way lower than the likes of a Resident Evil remake.
Yep! I would be much more interested in a Braid 2 rather than a remake of a game I already own and enjoy. I actually didn’t realize until writing this comment that Braid Anniversary Edition even had more puzzles than the original.
He should have called it “Braid+” or “Braid 1.5” or something. “Anniversary Edition” makes it sound like I’m just going to pay to replay the same puzzles I already figured out a decade ago but with minor cosmetic changes. Forty new levels is fairly substantial.
Even with the critical slant of applies to the gameplay of these “games” this article still ultimately neglects to describe the biggest problem with the “play to earn” aspect, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t work.
The article describes the notional highs and lows of these tokens, but overlooks the fact that trading volume is far more important than a hypothetical trade price.
If one person buys one of these utterly useless tokens for 10 cents, that sets the price at 10 cents. But if I then try to cash out a thousand dollars of that same token, I’m probably not going to get a thousand dollars, because that requires there to be someone on the other side of great trade who thinks its actually worth putting a thousand dollars into this otherwise useless token.
To make matters worse, crypto prices are generally set by crypto trades. What I mean by that is that the person who bought one token for ten cents, actually didn’t. They traded fifty BLOB tokens, notionally worth ten cents. What can you do with BLOB tokens? Nothing, they’re worthless, they were made for a game that doesn’t even exist anymore. The guy who owned those fifty BLOB tokens got them by trading a bunch of POOP tokens for them. Those are from a DAO that has since collapsed, they’re worthless too. He bought those POOP tokens with a fraction of a DOGE coin, which he got from selling an airdropped Bad Monkey NFT that he was lucky enough to get one time (and even luckier to sell before the rug pull).
See the problem? It’s all people trading Monopoly dollars for Game of Life dollars and arguing over the exchange rate. At no point did a real US dollar enter this process. So when you try to sell your BLOB tokens for real US dollars, no one is buying. The notion that people in developing nations will make a lining playing these games is a complete fantasy.
At the end of every exchange, someone has to be left “holding the bag”. There’s no end state that doesn’t end up screwing over someone else so you can cash out.
While trading in general is zero sum, if you believe the product you’re trading has intrinsic value, then no one needs to be holding a bag.
If I sell you a car and you get to use the car, you wouldn’t be holding the bag, because you wanted the car. This applies to stocks, and stock derivatives, as well as commodities.
The problem arises when there isn’t an intrinsic value (or the intrinsic value is very small), such as with NFTs or many cryptos in general.
There are cryptos that have some intrinsic value like monero, since they have fungibility and a use case, but most do not.
The big problem is that it trivially easy to make new tokens, and give them the appearance of a market with fake liquidity. I know people think Smart Contracts are a real innovation, but 99.999999% of the time they are just used to make more crappy tokens.
Crypto advocates say it’s security comes from the network effect of all the nodes working on extending the blockchain, but that security is of little value if it enables scams on higher layers.
Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.
An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.
The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.
The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.
I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.
In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.
The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.
Although somewhat unrelated, I thought this excerpt from the article was interesting and sad.
Asked in an interview if he regrets Balatro’s success, he replied: "Honestly, yeah. Don’t get me wrong - this has changed my life in a lot of amazing ways. I’m so grateful. But I do miss that time before. It was just a hobby that recharged my batteries. Sometimes I think, ‘Maybe I would’ve been happier if I had never released this game to the public.’
The guy has all the resources to rekindle that flame by organizing game jams for example. I am sure he‘ll think much more positively about the whole thing a couple years from now when he realized opportunities granted by his success. Either that or he’ll go down the Notch route but I don’t think he’ll be that kind of stupid rich.
Yeah, but his way to relax and get away from stress was to code. Organizing game jams is a whole other world of stress. The different level of stress is like that Mitchell Hedburg joke, “You’re a great chef! Can you farm?”
If you remain fixated on the idea that your way to relax is gone, you’ll never be able to find a new way. Life changes, for good and bad. It’s on us to make the best of it.
Don’t feel sad for them! They have now reached a point in life where they get to ask these kind of what if questions and no longer need to work. I love the game they built, and hopefully if they still feel down they have to time and resources now to seek help (i.e. therapy).
Eh, EA can certainly be a problem, but it’s also an incredibly useful resource for devs operating in good faith, opening up the field for talent that would otherwise be priced out of making a game at all. Personally, I’m ok ignoring money grabs if it means the barrier of entry for resource starved talent is lowered.
Manor Lords is early access. At least one patch is to be expected. And of course the publisher is absolutely right. If my memory serves me well one dev developed the game all on his own so far and the challenge of meeting expectations after being a massive success is huge. Hiring more people to get developments going is likely necessary but expanding takes time. Some players have unrealistic expectations in general but even more so when it comes to small indie productions.
I just had flashbacks to Dead State. It was a AA title written by one of the guys from Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines so I was watching it closely during development.
Suddenly, it went from EA to full release. I was surprised, but picked it up without reading many reviews.
I enjoyed the game and put maybe 15 hours into it, but then I had to move and had to pack up my PC for a few weeks. By the time I got settled and booted it up, it had gotten a massive patch which fixed a ton of bugs, filled in missing content like item descriptions and a bunch of other polish that would typically be done during pre-launch.
Meanwhile, one of the devs had gotten into a high profile pissing match with the community over accusations they had rushed it out the door. I normally try to sympathize with devs over a reactive community, but I couldn’t help feel like I got punished for buying the game at launch and experiencing those relatively non-replayable opening hours in a non-optimal (Dead) state.
Hahahaha, wow, what a bunch of wet noodles. If you don’t want negative discourse, maybe don’t be misogynistic. Or don’t publish your work in countries where free speech and personal freedoms are more abundant. No one is forcing you to publish here, so please keep your demands in your pants. Pffft, I was really interested in this game, now it’s such an easy pass!
Out of curiosity, since I’m out of the loop, what is the misogynistic discourse around the game or studio? Is it based on themes of the books/mythology the game is based on? Or is it some other thing the devs went too far with eastern culture wise?
I read some articles from 2020 that touched on the culture @ Game Science, but it doesn’t even really matter. It’s just the way they single out stuff that feels really put of touch, pretty (ignorant) boomer attitude. I’ve only heard the word “feminist propaganda” from folks who are misogynistic, it’s not something I associate with caring about inequality. Can you imagine being a woman influencer that got this message? I would think 3 times before partnering up with a party that gave me this dos and don’t list.
It’s probably something that can be attributed to cultural differences, but that doesn’t mean that much to me. You move in a culture, but you are still responsible for you actions and words.
Thank you. I mainly wanted to know what the talking points are so I can have effective conversations with the people around. This one semi popped out of nowhere for me and I felt I missed something.
Agreed, the term “feminist propaganda” alone here is enough to make me question the studio/publisher leadership group.
@Chee_Koala, I’ve read your other comment on this post and I agree with you. Going to pass on the game. It’s the reality of today. If we want things to improve we have to vote with our democratic right to vote if we have it or we vote with our money. This type of topic pops up a lot in media, big tech and most other large companies that somewhat dominate an industry. There are enough options out there where we can’t always make the perfect moral decision, but we can at least try to choose on the lesser of many evils in our shopping and media consumption based on the information we have.
Thanks a lot, I can imagine! It’s moot for me, sadly. Google maps is amazing too but I’m not on board with choices they are making so, can’t use that either. There’s enough games to take my mind of of missing this title. Have fun though!
With no context, completely in isolation, yeah Overwatch 2 isn’t the worst. But for a lot of players, it’s not just about what Overwatch 2 is, but also about what it did and what it means. That factors into players’ feelings about the game.
Spot on. I dont give a single fuck about shovelware, but I absolutely care about OW and how Blizzard managed to turn me off a game I was pretty much addicted to.
It depends on what metrics do you use. In general, lowest-rated stuff on sites are not the worst by objective terms, but because of propaganda or other stuff that pisses off people.
Braid was a solid game all its own, and a remaster certainly wasn’t needed (yet or at all). The Witness was freaking phenomenal, and I hope there will be other iterations of games like it to come. Blow can go blow away though. He’s an anti-vaxxer and Covid conspiracy theorist, and that is something I can write off as anyone worth acknowledging. Plenty of other amazing games in the sea.
I appreciate letting me know about the anti-vaxxer conspiracy stuff. Makes me feel better about never finishing The Witness (not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because whatever filters were on there, it made me cripplingly motion sick for hours every time I played it).
I never finished The Witness either, but I kinda wished I would have, as the philosophical nature and puzzles were both very engrossing, such a unique take on the “walking simulator” style of game. Granted, it was much more than that, and I’d actually compare it closer to Myst and Obduction than such. The puzzles were repetitive but just incentive enough to be engaging and twisted in just the right way, though they got devilishly difficult later on. Sucks about the motion sickness though. Wonder if there was an .ini swing which could’ve turned the filter off?
Though, all in all, this was definitely a difficult “separate the art from the artist” scenario.
Yeah, I had the same reaction - The puzzles were definitely “learn how to think a new way,” my favorite kind. I ended my play on one perspective-shifting pattern puzzle that I was so close to beating, so I kept pushing myself through the motion sickness, and just ended up disabled on the bed feeling ill and unable to move for two hours (without completing the puzzle).
I tried a bunch of things - permanent reticle in center of screen, disabling walk shake, etc. I still play high-motion FPS shooters with no issue. It’s just some games (The Forest was another). I am guessing it’s a middleware-introduced visual filter that adds 15-25ms delay to screen latency, just enough to mess with inner ear visual/motion sync in sensitive people.
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