I am currently ingesting a cocktail of complex chemicals that are manipulating my sensory receptors, sending electrical impulses through my neural system and altering the balance of neurotransmitters in my brain.
Woke did not exist before 2015, so everything created before that year is, in fact, absolutely based. Including all those apolitical masterpieces I grew up with, such as Metal Gear Solid and Bioshock. I wish they still made fun games instead of insisting on shoving leftist commentary down out throats. I really want to enjoy gaming again but developers are woke leftists now :(
Lucky for us, the glorious Nippon country is untouched by woke. No, I don’t know Japan and I’ve never visited it, but i play a lot of VNs, which is basically the same thing.
the massive increase of “woke” by conservative began around the time trumps 1st term, it only amplyfied just befored the pandemic, and during the pandemic. when disney shows, movies, trek made all these right wingers all uncomfortable.
CRT is also something they couldnt grasp or understanding, i felt like that dint stick too long, like woke did. crt is meant for LAW SCHOOL graduate studies. it was harder for low-brain conservatives to comprehend then woke and dei.
DEI is the new woke, but woke still is used heavily too.
The first trailer of Breath of the Wild had a lot of people literally wondering whether that Link was a girl. I didn’t see a lot of complaining about it, I wasn’t looking for some though.
Also, Gerudo town. I’m not sure what kind of mental gymnastics you’d need to shit on “wokeness” and somehow filter out BotW completely from it.
Half the things those idiots like would be ‘woke’ if they came out today. Any movie/videogame/(I would include books but these chuds don’t read) including a female lead, a non-white person, or a disabled individual is doing virtue signalling and pandering to minorities. But back then, chuds didn’t have the internet to tell them what to hate.
There are tons of things that nobody cared about years ago that wouldn’t fly today. Fairy Oddparents having a male individual become pregnant. LOTR’s Éowyn killing the witch king on her own. Avatar: TLA has a few ‘woke’ episodes as well - for example, one where the male leads learns how to fight from a woman, and another where the female lead needs to convince a male wizard to teach her magic, which was a man-only practice.
If they were released today, you’d find them in thumbnails on YT with “cringe”, “woke” or “DEI” written in CAPS all over the place.
Absolutely. Also Power Rangers for having a diverse cast that includes girls who kick ass too, and Captain Planet for having both a diverse cast and ecological consciousness. And X-Men for the same reasons they shat on X-Men '97. And Sonic the Hedgehog for being anti-authoritarian and having little PSAs about tolerance and being a good person. And Justice League Unlimited for showcasing female heroes just as much as male heroes. Powerpuff Girls for obvious reasons.
Back then they called everything they didn’t like “satanic” or “evil” anyway. Before they realised they could trick idiot kids into joining their cause by calling it “woke” and packaging it as rebellion instead of pearl clutching and puritanical nonsense.
And Sonic the Hedgehog for being anti-authoritarian and having little PSAs about tolerance and being a good person.
That would be very funny to complain about those because those PSAs were enforced on the studios by the FCC. Lots of cartoons from that era had them, including fucking G.I. Joe (that’s where “Now you know, and knowing is half the battle” comes from).
Later Animaniacs parodied the shit out of these with absurd “wheel of morality” segments.
Many diverse characters all fighting back against their unfair economic situation.
“… and that’s terrible.”
I also remember Portal 2 being on that list for “Most male characters are being depicted as incompetent compared to female characters” or something.
Dude. There are 4 characters in the whole game, counting one that’s dead but probably has the most characterization. Two are male. One guy is definitely a moron by design, but the other was definitely not incompetent. Mad, evil, sure. But he certainly achieved stuff.
I mean, if you look up “gamergate” and see the real reason why these little whiny bitches had such a shit fit. You can see that a lot of male gamers are a bunch of whiny little bitches who throw idiotic tantrums whenever anything highlights women in the gaming world.
Whose exact quote do you think you're quoting? Every time i hear this phrase it's always said the way OP said it, never the way you said it. Also please try to talk to people in a less pissy way
Piracy was never stealing, in so far as legality is concerned in the USA, at least.
Stealing requires the owner of the stolen thing to be deprived access of that thing. If someone steals your car, you cannot access it anymore, since it was removed from you by the thief.
Piracy copies your car, meaning you still can access your car but someone else can drive a copy of your car. The first example is a major inconvenience to you, the second example has absolutely no negative effect on you.
It is why instances of piracy that make it to a court of law are tried as Copyright Infringement cases, and not theft or piracy cases. When your ISP spies on you and sends you a letter after you pirate something in an insecure manner, you get sent a Notice of Copyright Infringement, not a Notice of Theft.
Big “no one understands my art” vibes coming off that dev. You made a mediocre game for an outrageous amount and released it in one of the heaviest gaming release years in recent memory. Sorry, this year a new IP with a 74% on metacritic doesn’t cut it. They say EA dropped 40mil on the advertising for it, but this is litterally the first I’ve heard about it, and frankly I’m the target audience for this game. I bet this shit was shoved down the throats of Fortnight and Valorant players via tiktok.
No one is playing it because it’s very “meh”, but it has absolutely been widely advertised and also talked about a lot (for being not so good).
I really doubt any of you who replied here saying you haven’t heard about it ever interact with gaming journalism and community. It has been just as visible as most other AAA games.
I heard about it when Skill Up, whose YouTube channel I have notifications turned on for, posted his review of it. Before that, I'd seen absolutely nothing about it, and I heard very little about it after that, too. I was shocked to find out it was an EA game - partly because it didn't look (visually) polished enough to be an EA game, and partly because of the complete lack of marketing I'd seen for a major publisher game.
Finding out it was an expensive flop and not just a smaller AA game they decided to put out on the side is a surprise, too.
I’m not really the target audience and I’ve come across it what must be hundreds of times. It has been talked about a lot on anything gaming. Most of the big gaming journalism (good and bad) websites, youtube channels etc have made articles and videos about it.
I get what you’re saying but FPS specifically are mostly played competitively, so a single player game in THAT specific genre in 2023 sounds like a very bad idea.
Every other genre than FPS needs more games where you’re allowed to only play single player and use tons of mods if you want to without risking being locked out of playing, though.
Fallout New Vegas, Baldurs Gate 3, Skyrim, The Outer Worlds and the older Bioware games are where it’s at for my favorite genre, to name a few examples.
I’m not sure that’s really true what you’re saying about single player FPS games being mostly competitive or that it’s a bad idea. See: Doom, Metro, Ghostwire, Dying Light, System Shock, people seem stoked for Space Marine, etc.
Props to you for using strikethrough instead of deleting in your edit so the context still makes sense. I think you bring up an interesting point about competitive fps games. I imagine companies structure their development similar to games-as-a-service because they are essentially two flavors of the same thing, right? I had never really considered whether the growth of the competitive scene was part of the drive towards GaaS and away from tight single player experiences.
I think underlying all of this is that publishers want a guaranteed profit margin. That doesn’t exist in art, of course, but they still want it. And if that means choosing what they think is a safe bet, they’ll choose it. I think Bungie made GaaS look way easier than it actually is, and maybe the competitive scene contributed to that too. “Look at all the money these hero shooters are making, let’s get a piece of that pie.” Formulas just never quite work out that simply in real life.
Yep, nobody enjoyed playing through Half Life 1/2, or FEAR or Deus Ex, or the early Medal of Honor or Call of Duty campaigns, or the Doom series or Battlefield Bad Company or the Wolfenstein Series.
Just because most modern popular FPSs are basically cartoony tf2/overwatch clones/derivatives and there are a lot of highly competitive multiplayer FPSs filled with screaming, racist misosynist babies and manbabies alike doesnt mean theres no market for a single player FPS.
It means that making a single player FPS game these days is apparently too hard for modern game devs to figure out how to do.
It’s an initiative to get the European parliament to discuss the matter all together, and Iirc, it already has some members that support it. (So It’s not just any ordinary petition that will go nowhere.)
We have already collected 42% of the 1 million signatures from European citizens required. But the deadline is June 2025 and if we don’t get enough signatures by then, it won’t be looked at by the European commission. So to at least get the matter to be discussed, please sign!
(ONLY FOR European Union citizens! No one else! Please do not sign if you aren’t an EU citizen. Also No Brits! there’s another initiative for the UK.)
No, please don’t sign if you are American. That can harm the petition with false signatures.
This is strictly ONLY for European union citizens!
Don’t worry, you can still help by spreading the message among your EU friends or family members(You don’t have to be a gamer to care about this or vote in this!). A lot of the exposure to this initiative is lacking when it comes to non-english speaking EU citizens. You can help there.
Yeah, as a resident Valve hater I agree it’s a weird thing to get angry over.
If there was anything to get angry over is that I bought this game in a box (stand alone because I was too broke for Orange Box!) with an understanding that it’s an online multiplayer shooter. Meaning, there are servers you join manually from a list, shoot at other guys for a bit and return to that server or not based on how good time it was. This functionality has been ripped out of the game and replaced with some weird algorithm. Before that Valve broke their own design promises of clear silhouettes which made the game less accessible. The game has been dead, riddled with bots farming in-game items that can be traded for real money that Valve added to the game because they could. If it was any other game I wouldn’t care but TF2 started out as an amazing game that was mangled beyond recognition by Valve greed.
They should have released TF2 source code this way 10 years ago. They’re probably doing this now because income from TF2 related items on Marketplace is laughably small compared to their other titles.
Yeah it was rough for a year or two there… but Valve did a massive banwave and now I’ve only seen a group of bots join my server twice in the last year, and we could kick them easily
I’m a Valve stan but it’s disgusting how they’ve abused and neglected TF2. It would unironically be significantly better if they just rolled back every change since 2016.
Jokes aside. It’s an interesting distinction to make. Even though the source code is freely available, it doesn’t mean developers have free reign to do anything they want like they could with open source software. Apart from special circumstances, everything made with the source code will still be mods.
You can’t do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can’t make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.
I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it’s not totally unrestricted.
Sort of, but those let you use the pre-existing codebase for each game as is. This lets you play with the inner workings. You could do something drastic like implant rollback netcode, add new classes, wild shit.
Just to add on to this, in those unfortunate cases where there really is only Fandom, you can use an extension like LibRedirect which will redirect any Fandom pages to a breezewiki instance, which is a stripped down, privacy respecting, no BS front end for Fandom.
Why make a Wiki when a shitty Discord server with a clunky search function is easier to set up? Of course it‘s also much less useful, more work to maintain in the long run and a never ending source of drama, but most devs don‘t think that far because they kinda only do it to build a community anyway. Being a source of information is just slapped on but enough reason for them to not set up a wiki or proper forum it seems. Ugh.
No. It’s easier to go after the “good guys” than the bad guys because they’re easier to beat. They won’t use all kinds of slimy, underhanded tactics to fuck you over.
Edit: I don’t approve of the lawsuit against valve, but that’s the way of the world. Scummy companies and people have many tools they can use to drag you down to their level.
Oh fuck off with the good guy thing, it’s a private company trying to make money, there’s no good people when profit is the goal, there’s no good billionaires and Gaben is one.
No, they’re still overcharging us if they make enough profit that the boss could become a billionaire while the employees make more than the industry average.
I don’t know what goes though people’s mind to get them to defend for profit private companies, they’re not there to be your friend, they’re there to get you to take the money you earned and spend it while gaslighting you into believing that you get your money’s worth.
I mean I get what you’re saying, but Valve is actually one of the few large tech companies that are providing an actually good service (Steam). People should be allowed to make money by providing value to their customers because that’s the motivation of building such services and products in the first place.
The hatred should go towards the companies abusing their position and violating customers and then just cashing excessive amounts of money for a crap product/service that has no real competition. If Valve had started making their competitors lives harder, by generating lots of nonsense lawsuits for example, they should absolutely be blasted down to hell by everybody. As long as they are just earning lots of bucks by providing a service people want to use without restricting using other services and playing with healthy rules otherwise as well, it’s all fine and everyone working on the great service SHOULD earn more than average.
Why do you think they’re able to make that much money? Not by using their position as the store where the majority of people buys games from?
There’s no good guys when profits are the goal. They might provide good service, the only reason they’re doing so is because they see potential profit.
There’s a major difference between making more than average and being a billionaire. You know what’s the difference between making 500k a year and making a billion a year? About a billion.
I mean Valve has a game store called Steam, but what’s the actual position they have? There are competing game stores - both digital and physical - and Valve isn’t trying to run their competition out of business with shady business tactics? Just by being good at something and therefore running a successful business shouldn’t be illegal or hated by itself - it’s the way the business is being conducted that actually matters. Gaben is free to have yacht or two as long as his company is being run with a healthy mindset, their employees are being paid a fair salary (which I guess is another discussion in it’s own who decides that) and they are not screwing their competition nor their customers up.
They don’t need to actively run out their competition because they already have enough of the market that they’re the default option. Just like Microsoft doesn’t need to try and actively stop MacOS or Linux from existing.
I don’t care how many yachts Gaben owns, he’s free to do whatever he wishes as long as he provides me a great service that I’m willing to use money towards.
And Microsoft did try really hard back in the day to make Linux go away. Luckily OSS community was already large enough that they were able to fight the legal cases and the whole thing didn’t dry up. Nowadays Microsoft endorses Linux because they decided they can squeeze value out of other people’s free work for themselves (and because pretty much the entire server industry runs on Linux anyways).
Steam didn’t get to where it is because of market abuse but because of providing a good service, or at least a service that was better than anything else at the time by far. Valve are reaping the rewards now, but are also still providing an arguably better service than it’s competitors. It’s a bit odd that you want to punish a company just for being successful.
Valve isn’t perfect and they’re profit driven, but they’re privately owned and the goals isn’t maximizing profit, which isn’t something you can say about most of their competitors.
I’m all in for punishing all billionaires and you’re very naive if you think their goal isn’t too maximize profit. If it wasn’t there’s no reason why they would accumulate enough surplus for Gaben to own six yacht, they would instead reduce their 30% cut and pass the savings to everyone and we would have cheaper games.
Yes, the profit is excessive, but it’s because they have a good product where the competition has not really been putting in much effort and letting Valve get away with it for so long.
Valve’s goal isn’t to maximize profit because they don’t have shareholders that demand it. If they really wanted to maximize profits then there’s a whole lot more to squeeze out of Steam and the games they made. And yes I agree Valve can lower their cut and still make bucket loads of money, but I highly doubt that if they did reduce their cut it would actually lead to cheaper games except for a maybe a few. Because just like Valve, the devs and publishers are profit driven and why would they turn down a potentially bigger profit?
I guess steam could have avoided making billions if they had never improved their launcher since Half Life 2. Not improving products and keeping it as crappy as possible so people stay away from it is one business strategy of ensuring people are deterred from using it.
Shame they kept improving and made something people want to use.
Running a crappy service nobody wants to use is more effective. Even better if it is so bad the company goes bankrupt. That’s how to successfully avoid money.
Okay, but is Gaben more deserving of this than white replacement supporter, anti-trans fearmonger and apartheid diamond mine baby Musk? Than makes people piss in bottles in warehouses Bezos?
Is what steam does more predatory than basically every major music publisher (the big three), than MPAA? Than OpenAI? Than Meta? Than the streaming services? Than Nintendo? Than Apple? Than Google? Uber?.. And so on and so on.
So why pick on Valve? I’d go after fucking taco bell before Valve. Make it make sense.
Shame you’re getting so downvoted. People are so determined to believe in good philanthropic billionaires that they forget the system that allows the accumulation of such ridiculous wealth doesn’t work for nice philanthropic people. It was like this with Elon musk, before he sacked his publicists (my guess) before the cave diver thing. People were saying he was going so save humanity or some shit. All he’s done is fuck up twitter. Same with this guy. I use steam and I think my steam deck is a cool little machine but that doesn’t inspire me to tongue the sweaty arsehole of an obscenely rich guy.
Even if you believe that all privately owned capital is intrinsicly evil, you still ought to go after companies from most to least problematic within a specific category, no?
That is, for digital storefronts, start with the likes of Epic or in a broader digital gaming space in general, Microsoft or Ubisoft. Go after Steam when you’ve cleaned up the rapists, backroom dealers and collusionists.
You think humanity is unable to take care of two things at once?
You think Epic is worse when Valve has 70% of the market so they’re in a position to ruin everything in a second? You realize that the PC gaming market is dependent on the goodwill of a single guy?
Fair, but not-shitty companies eventually become shitty companies in almost every circumstance. I hate making the argument that someone is fine because they only hurt a few people compared to the guy who hurts lots.
Good for her for making the right decision for her own wellbeing. Too many sad little fucks on the Internet who spend all their time harassing others. Pathetic existence.
Ubisoft cannot complain if I pirate their games, because they never actually sold them. And I’m not deceiving them with my intention of never, ever, give them a dime.
You are right you can’t steal something that is not ownable, but paying for the game is what allows you to play so playing without stealing is still breaking their rules. Instead of buy to own they made it pay to play. But that sucks so fuck them anyway
Playing devil’s advocate here: both lines are consistent with them owning the games. We just rent them for a while, and own nothing. But pirating is taking what they own without paying - i.e. stealing.
Every AAA game company’s have been for 30 years and still currently are arguing this in courts all the time.
The actual public facing employees don’t have to, but sometimes still do, though usually in an unofficial capacity these days.
AA / indie devs are more of a mixed bag. A few will openly say ‘fuck it, pirate it if you can’t afford it, idgaf’, but the majority will denounce piracy if its relevant or if prompted.
copyright infringent is commonly also referred to as IP theft, theft of intellectual property.
unauthorized use, sale, or distribution of ip is ip theft.
when it comes to software, basically , unless your software is distributed under some kind MIT or GPL or other copyleft liscense… all of the software legally is ip, and using it in an unauthorized manner is copyright infringement… which is also referred to as ip theft.
so yes, ip theft is a form of theft, and gaming companies and lawyers and other lawyers have been successfully suing other people and other companies into oblivion over this basically since the industry began.
I’ve always heard it referred to as infringement, in a legal context. I’m sure game publishers (and music, film, etc.) would like to equate it in the public mind with common theft of physical goods, but it’s all just propaganda.
We’re just playing games with words at this point. The law is pretty clear, that distributing a copyrighted work such as a copy of a video game is illegal. I don’t know why people like to repeat this line, that “if buying a game isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft.” Maybe it is a moral/ethical argument? It’s not going to help you in court.
The entire original comment chain that lead to what I replied to … was all about playing word games with slogans, progoganda, public relations.
The law may be ‘clear’, but it is clearly bullshit.
It is absurdly deferential toward the rights of megacorps and hostile to the rights of consumers.
Laws are supposed to reflect and codify morals and ethics, arise from them… not determine them.
But, as we slip more and more into a cyberpunk dystopia of hypercapitalist megacorps being able to basically just buy legislators, judges and laws, it will become more evident that the government is just entirely a facade directed by them.
This whole article is about a lawsuit in America, you know, the land of the fee, home of the early and very expensive grave?
The place with the ongoing fascist coup that’s dismantling all the government agencies that regulate corporations, after the richest man in the world just bought an election, and more recently openly tried to buy a state judge, and though he didn’t succeed, will likely face no penalty for doing that very obviously illegal thing?
Also, as far as at least acquring a pirated game?
Its not that hard.
Now hosting them? Sharing them?
Yep, you’re right, that’s a bit more difficult… but hey, be clever enough to not get caught, and thats the same as being rich enough to write your own laws.
copyright is a type of intellectual property, an area of law distinct from that which covers robbery or theft, offenses related only to tangible property.
I mean, I can be as much of a pedant as you and post an unsourced definition of ‘ip theft’ … or maybe you could just admit you’d never heard of the term ‘ip theft’, or are unaware of its use.
Its a pretty commonly used term, especially amongst government regulatory and business organizations, as well as academics who study policy, in the US.
The term itself, its phrasing, is intentionally constructed to frame copyright infringement as a form of theft, stealing something that doesn’t belong to you.
The psychological framing of the term is meant to frame losses from someone committing copyright infringement against you as equivalent to losses from being robbed.
The entire point of the usage of this term is to mold public perception.
Here’s some examples where very prominent US institutions/organizations use some construction or variation of ‘ip theft’ as an umbrella term to refer to all kinds of copyright, trademark and/or patent infringement:
And finally, literally IPTheft.org, which basically functions as an all-in-one training/resource hub that connects business people to all kinds of resources to report when they have suffered… IP theft.
Guy had Pierre Poilierve energy. Acting like the free market is perfect and that corporations will never screw people over and that by holding them accountable games will become unprofitable to make and that would the end of the game industry /s
I appreciated his take on it. Don’t trust politicians to come up with a good solution, always present the issue when you have a good solution ready. And the solution proposed by that petition was weak at best and outright dangerous for the industry at worst.
If you want to force specificity on buying v getting limited time access, that’s fine, but that’s not what the petition focused on.
If you wanna force devs to plan ahead with huge infrastructure cost to make sure servers will be online for a specific time, this might result in online games being unjustifiable for smaller studios.
If you want to shield independent people hosting unofficial servers to games, now that’s a different conversation that we first need to have to figure it out, before proposing an exact solution through a petition. Mind you this is a more complicated topic, as this gets into licensing and IP law.
And I really don’t think stop killing games is clear on those, and that makes this endeavor a lottery with the entire multiplayer games industry in limbo.
Give me another more precise initiative and I’ll join, but until then I’ll definitely not sign anything. If we change things, we should change them for the better, so let’s do our due diligence first.
I personally do not care how a policy would damage a company. I am playing the games, not developing them. If a company shuts down servers, they can at least provide players with the server binaries (difficult in the case of MMOs etc, but still better than doing nothing).
The EU can suck, but sometimes they put some pretty neat policies in place to protect consumers (e.g. the difference in USA vs EU MS Windows), so I trust them to hold publishers responsible to not cut off access to a sold product. Let’s say the EU prohibits putting Gacha mechanics in games, would you defend companies then, claiming the EU is cutting their profits (sorry, kinda strawmannish, but it feels to me this way)?
About pirate software (finally looked him up): He just seemed annoying as hell and every time YouTube pushed a short of him it was just ramblings in which huge parts were just untrue. Idk if he even codes, I only see him rambling about some shit with the voice you make when you are 14 and want to sound deeper. People on YouTube said he is a nepo baby but I don’t care too much about him to go down that rabbithole.
They’re not listening to consumers. Consumers are not complaining to the corporations, they’re complaining to the government. They’re only doing anything because the writing is clearly on the wall and passing new legislation will make shit way worse for them so they’re being proactive.
They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.
If ECIs are to become a useful tool for civil society, campaigners would benefit from a better understanding of how to craft their demands in a way that is likely to lead the Commission to actually propose a legislative initiative. There have now been 133 ECI attempts, millions of signatures collected, a significant amount of money spent, and little to show for it.
Sadly I doubt this was thanks to the petition itself. More likely ubi is trying to claw back some goodwill ( and make some cash too, by promoting the title that was full of mtx instead of the retired one ). They’ve also done this offline fix thing in the past ( with anno 2070 for one ) and also after a healthy dose of player backlash.
Valve has made an emasculatingly large amount of money this way. Following in the footsteps of Id Software, Valve has been very open with their development tools. I don’t know about the very earliest copies but the ZOMG GOTY edition of the original Half Life included its SDK on the disc. Counter Strike and Team Fortress started out as mods that Valve just…hired.
Releasing the tools to their customer base and then hiring the cream that rises to the top is a strategy I struggle to get mad at.
Thinking back, HL had a ridiculous quantity of high quality mods and TCs back in the day. Hell, Valve have even allowed HL to be remade and sold on steam.
Only a corporate officer that is fully enslaved by the lawyers of that corpo will not see how it’s good business when humans engage with your product. When gamers play and interact with your code. It’s pure folly to cite some trade war or corporate war with another corpo. No dude. Share with also other devs. Be a fucking human. You are not a corpo slave droid. I am so glad that valve is not publicly traded. Holy shit it must take a lot to be the leading company in this market and not bend to capitalist pressures
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