Curious what about this new publication makes you label it a tabloid? Based on the description so far it doesn’t sound sensationalist at all.
You’ll find reviews, criticism, and opinion stories, as well as articles about how games are made and marketed. You’ll get investigative reporting on the people who make games in an era when “DEI” is on the wane. You’ll read historical deep dives on the games and creators that paved the way, especially those that didn’t get due credit way back then.
Established by two former tabloid editor. They can prove me wrong, and i will stand corrected, but then it’s such a USA centric site, i’m not holding my breath.
Something I’d really like a group to be brave enough to address is the fallacy that “DEI” or “Diversity” initiatives stand in direct opposition to games featuring “Adult” or “Sexy” content, or that they encourage censorship.
We’ve had a wave of pretty bad games from AAA spaces recently, many of which have been uninteresting to anyone. Some people sadly latch onto these themes, and the fact that some of these developers promoted diverse spaces, to suggest that it’s a deliberate worsening of the media space.
In fact, tons of indie devs, as well as LGBT game devs, specifically hope to make adult content. They can suggest new ways of making characters attractive in ways that can still be inclusive; those devs even get harmed by censorship actions. Yet so much of the male-isolated booby-go-boing crowd has been cowed into a simple understanding of battle lines, wherein everything related to diversity and fairness stands against their fetishized hobby.
There’s this weird thing where the censorship of sexual content comes from the right and the gamers who are mad that they don’t get enough sexual content are on the right and blaming the left. Meanwhile the left generally comes to the position that sexual content is totally fine, but should ideally be humanizing rather than objectifying and should include diversity as well as less sexual options being available.
Like, both sides have a prude faction and a slut faction, but on the left our prudes generally have little say over policy demands so long as our sluts display some self control and act respectfully. The right does the inverse and lets its sluts be as boorish of pigs as they want, but the prudes decide what the rules are. As a slut, the left is a far better deal
I don’t really see the problem with sexualization in video games. Of course it shouldn’t be in every video game, but if the creator wants his characters to look a specific way then so what? If you don’t like it don’t play it, not every game is for everyone, in fact there’s a quote I’m forgetting but it’s something along the lines of “a game for everyone is a game for no one.” There’s obviously exceptions to this, like you can go too far, but generally speaking, if you’re upset that there’s an unrealistically attractive male or female in a game, respectfully, go fuck yourself. There’s millions of video games that you can also enjoy without your weird preconceived notions that video game characters need to be as attractive or less attractive than you personally are. Video games are a fantasy for a reason. This of course also doesn’t mean that you can’t have “realistic” looking people in video games, it’s just that you shouldn’t be restricted to only that, get some massive bodonhonkaroos in there, give that guy a massive bulge and a 18 pack, who fucking cares it’s a video game.
As long as people are able to stay civil, I’m definitely happy to dive into this subject, because it interests me a lot and I’m eager to see if anyone feels they learn something from it.
if the creator wants his characters to look a specific way then so what?
Valid sentiment, but it gets weird when “the creator” is not just one auteur, but a big network of interconnected developers. One may “really want a hot springs scene with detailed looks at the female lead’s boobs”, while much of the rest of the devs are uncomfortable with it, think it will hurt narrative pacing, or even think it could hurt sales.
I do think it’s hard to argue that sex un-sells, but there’s at least some slight data to suggest it. Two games come to mind. One is Xenoblade Chronicles 2, the other is Nier Automata. Both games sold well and had dedicated fans - but both also had a decently large number of players that saw what they viewed as “cringey anime hornbait” and decided to ignore it - even if the game would’ve readily contained other features they might have enjoyed - intricate JRPG mechanics and DMC combat. I don’t even view that audience as “prude” - they just generally held the sentiment that the sexiness was so out of place, it was distracting from the core themes of those games. In N:A’s case, it was a much smaller minority, but you could see in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 it kind of toned sexualization back.
if you’re upset that there’s an unrealistically attractive male or female in a game, respectfully, go fuck yourself. There’s millions of video games that you can also enjoy without your weird preconceived notions that video game characters need to be as attractive or less attractive than you personally are. Video games are a fantasy for a reason.
THIS, I think, is the biggest misconception. Although this is hard to cite with data, I feel reasonably confident in positing a theorem: Aside from an absolutely tiny, vanishingly small base, many of whom don’t even play games, I don’t think anyone * is upset at game characters being “too attractive”*. I watch quite a few female streamers, and by and large, they’re happy and eager to play games with gorgeous women in them. On many occasions, they don’t even care too much about sexualized outfits.
Where I think there’s the most silent sensitivity, and perhaps game publishers haven’t quite parsed this thought, is in objectification. captainlezbian kind of covered the thought - how sex should be humanizing and treat the sexy characters as people, with agency. When an attractive character is an “award”, or never speaks, or their decisions/actions have no effect on any story events, that can go from losing people’s attention to even making them feel uncomfortable - like their gender is “not allowed” in the medium.
Dead or Alive: Sexy, not always quite objectifying. The large-breasted characters range from master assassins on missions, to secret weapon projects, to girlboss CEOs bent on world control.
Bayonetta: Quite the opposite of objectifying. Bayonetta’s domineering personality, even when she’s stripping nude, evokes control over the characters and space around her.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: VERY objectifying - would be even if Pyra had smaller breasts. Pyra is cute, but she’s incredibly subservient, and basically relies on Rex, the male lead, to take charge as leader and protect her. She’s constantly oblivious to the more pervy characters in the cast. A lot of classic anime at least skirted the latter issue by having female leads highly aware, and beat up the lechers near them (even if the viewer benefited from their exploits). I don’t mind saying this was too much for even me. Again: Agency.
get some massive bodonhonkaroos in there, give that guy a massive bulge and a 18 pack, who fucking cares it’s a video game.
I think where this can get confusing is that, by and large, women aren’t quite seeking the same overtly excessive appearances in games as men. If you want some examples, search on Steam for what “Otome” games look like, and picture your male leads in a superhero game looking like that - complete with open button shirts and pensive, slightly-girly attitudes. Uncomfortable? Yeah - that shows what you said, about how not everything will appeal to everyone.
We’re lucky in that women generally are not sorely offended by women in games having breasts (Le Gasp!) but there’s neat ways of making them attractive for all players that don’t instantly produce an “ICK” from a sizable number of players.
The real silver bullet I’ve seen is customization, which is often a win-win. I often point to Stellar Blade as a good example; the default outfit for Eve fits the sci-fi fantasy very well. Then, you unlock a LOT of extremely sexualized, even objectifying, outfits, as well as other “cute, functional” outfits. I don’t mind saying I dived into the former, while many people less interested in sexualization enjoyed the latter. Generally, all parties involved appreciate Eve’s attractive figure and long hair.
I’m really struggling to think of if this is a bad thing, in actuality. I mean the premise, obviously yikes, but this inadvertently also might be the best thing Russia has done for their youth in years.
Galetti also espoused the benefits of AI in her message to employees, and claimed the oft-criticized technology is already allowing companies like Amazon to “innovate much faster than ever before.” She suggested it’s important for the company to reduce its headcount in order to take advantage of the perceived opportunity presented by the tech.
This screams of, we need to cut heads so we can pretend to be innovating with AI somehow
Most likely, they are just hiding all the sunken AI investment that has returned nothing in terms of revenue
I legit laughed out loud at that. That is hilarious. Of course it’ll bite them in the ass, but in the short term it’s literally more important that AI look like it’s cutting job than actually cutting jobs
Describing Bilibili as “a social media company” is like describing Google as “a search engine” or Microsoft as “the people what make the calculator app”.
Duckov seems solid from what I have seen. It also has the full might of Chinese Youtube behind it and has been doing sponsorships with basically any influencer who will take the money. Its as simple as that.
If an Internet infrastructure giant can’t make MMOs work, I don’t see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn’t getting funding.
It’s too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don’t know if it’s going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.
Dont think this has anything to do with how their game was going. Either that or this was already planned since a couple of months ago. New world recently gained a lot more players according to steam stats so it makes no sense to quit it now. Feel sorry for the devs even if the game wasn’t for me (never played it).
Seems like the only way companies can turn “AI” profitable is to do massive lay-offs to cut costs. Not because AI can actually take on those jobs that were cut, but because it’s a “good” excuse.
Awesome.
We like in the dumbest cyberpunk version of the future. Predatory capitalism but all the tech is vaporwave and it’s all just dumb dumb finance bros running the show.
If you wanna make it as a game dev, the trick is to not sign up with a major publisher (unless it’s like Larian or Devolver or something), because it’s only a matter of time before you get laid off or given some impossible demands to satiate the shareholders.
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
Its’s complicated, but basically, Amazon also spun off Lumberyard into the fully open source, O3DE engine.
I am not sure if they still hold any particular rights to anything exclusive to Lumberyard, but yeah, O3DE is basically Lumberyard from some years back, that got handed over to a non profit, and has since been developed by that non profit for… 5 ish years? More?
The other wild thing is that… somehow, Cloud Imperium / Chris Roberts of Star Citizen… also got a version of Lumberyard/Crytek, or something like that?.. Before Amazon then later spun it off as O3DE.
So… the crytek engine has very weird family tree, at this point.
The layoffs also hit Twitch which has had a notorious bot problem for years. So now they’re going to use bots to fight bots?
Honestly the best thing Amazon could do is just shut down twitch completely. It’s become a dumpster fire of its former self. It used to be about people playing games and now it’s about which streamer is sexually assaulting which other streamer and dudes putting shock collars on dogs.
Yep, frankly I am amazed Twitch still exists at this point, given how server demanding it is, and how it is s constsnt clusterfuck of incompetent messaging that regularly produces quite bad PR.
I very much would not be surprised if they went to some kind of ‘yeah you have to pay a monthly subscription to watch more than 5ish hours of streams in a month, and you also watch ads’ kind of model.
As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.
The “corporate roles” are likely a case of dwnsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.
And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.
Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.
Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.
Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.
gamedeveloper.com
Aktywne