Other than being in existence longer than pretty much any other game review platform, ign still isn’t that great, or accurate. Reviews have been meh for the last decade or more.
I still have most of my old next Gen issues, with the demo CD roms. I think I have the entire run of PC Accel, which unfortunately was just way too ahead of it’s time. Look up the story if your can find it, it was pulling in more and more subscribers every month but the publisher scrapped it because basically, it was subversive, it was 18+, it was viciously critical of games and the industry when warranted but also gave the best praise to those that earned it. It was the non-douche precursor to Maxim(if you can believe such a thing exists).
It’s a sad story, after they got shuttered, the lead editor and several others put most of their own money on the line to try and restart the company publish new issues, but this was long before the Internet had any social immediacy. Subscribers mostly didn’t hear about them trying to restart, there was no real forum or community where people could keep up on the topic and join the cause. I found out like 4 months after they tried to restart and was devastated, I had no idea and would have resubscribed in a heart beat.
It’s also really shady how the publisher discontinued it. I had already subscribed for the next two years and I think they canceled it with like a year and a few months left and so then I just started to get PC gamer, not even a refund.
I’m not going to pretend that I read many of the zombie outlets.
But understand that games media (and most other news media) has been getting gutted for closer to 20 years than not. The only reason so many outlets are even SLIGHTLY good is because of people like John Davison working their ass off to fight for every single inch.
So maybe, just maybe, we could avoid “Whatever, they suck so fuck 'em” levels of posts? Focus more on what got games media to this state rather than self-righteous apathy.
IGN and Gamespot were basically the legacy (text) web media in the US. And they definitely both tried to rely on ad revenue for a lot longer than The Internet would tolerate it.
So basically every single youtuber trying to make a name for themselves attacked it. Because old media are corrupt and you can only trust this new channel who would never try to sell you anything so let’s play some Raid Shadow Legends". Which then ballooned when we had folk like totalbiscuit and gamergate both actively arguing that all these old game journos are corrupt because they… speak to the people they interact with on a daily basis or whatever that nonsense was.
We saw similar with the rise of twitch streamers where they would be really quick to paint all the youtubers as corrupt shills because they take sponsor deals and totally only say positive things about games because they are getting money under the table. Now time for twelve ads in a row before grinding to take part in the twitch rivals event next month!
Whoa, what the hell. How are you throwing Totalbiscuit and the entirety of GamerGate’s scandals and social furor into the same, offhand pile?
John was strongly opinionated and enjoyed being a bit of a smug ass as his online persona, but he was mainly about making games more accessible by advocating for more, and more inclusive, settings for all the games he played.
“Ethics in games journalism”: Bain 100% spearheaded the “All of old media is corrupt and lying to you because of sponsorships” and the gamergate crowd used him to legitimize them. Plenty of webcomics of the era did a “I am not a bad person and I don’t condone what all these angry people saying the exact same thing are doing but… maybe you should listen to us. Err, me” style joke with the mouthpiece looking a LOT like Bain
He would pretty regularly do “I am gonna get cancelled” level jokes on his podcast with Cox and Dodger and would go off on wild ass tangents about how it is “okay for women to look pretty” and so forth any time someone complained about oversexualized male gaze wank fantasies.
“Let’s look at the options menu”: On the surface this is really good. In practice it was yet another case of “Those evil devs are trying to fuck us” because he was active in an era where PC games were very much third class citizens for all of what we would now consider “third parties”. Like, we were genuinely lucky to even GET a Sands of Time PC release and much of the “lazy devs” rhetoric goes back to people like him
His legacy is a complex one. I’ll fully admit to loving his videos because he was speaking as a PC Gamer at a time when it felt like all the major publishers were abandoning us. That said, even as a young’n in the software development world (and a hobbyist gamedev) most of his rhetoric felt unnecessarily meanspirited and like it was focused on the people coding the games and not the people paying them and setting deliverables (one of the early hints that I leaned a hell of a lot more left than right…). And I mostly dropped his podcast because it increasingly felt like he was doing the same shit whichever dipshit at Penny Arcade was doing where the slightest pushback led to “I AM THE GREATEST VICTIM THIS WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN!!!”. And… he was very much a well to do British man when it came to his stances on LGBTQ and there was a LOT of transphobia that we’ll just pretend was ignorance.
But Bain wasn’t the only influencer I enjoyed content from. And as gamergate increasingly kicked off, it became painfully obvious that the guy who still insisted “ethics in games journalism” was the true divider was saying almost the exact same talking points as the people who literally put someone I semi-regularly chatted with on IRC into hiding. Not to mention some of the biggest targets of the hate movement were people he had “feuded with” for years. And when he finally DID address things, it was very much a “They have some good points but I don’t agree with how they are going about it”. Its unclear exactly when he knew about his cancer but many people (self included) suspect the reason he never really spoke out against gamergate is because he didn’t want to risk his money train and… I get it but also he was still profiting off the suffering of others to an obscene degree.
Skimming through it, forbes.com/…/totalbiscuits-legacy-and-the-collate… is a pretty good summary of a lot of the controversies of Bain’s career written shortly after his death. And I vaguely recall Eordogh being a regular contributor during the good years of Vice/Motherboard for what that is worth.
But yeah. I think the general take is that, at best, Bain was a useful idiot. At worst… he was the asmongold of his time right down to constantly framing things as people trying to steal your gu—err games. But there is very much a reason he is often considered the face of gamergate.
We totally didn’t do that! Valve and other merchants obviously kept receipts.
I almost love how normalized flagrant lying has become in the corpo-political sphere. They’ve become so emboldened by just telling whatever unbelievable lie they want and expecting to get away with it. If it’s not catastrophically illegal to do so, they just lie. I don’t take anything not said under oath seriously anymore, and even then, I take it with a grain of salt.
Upset about conservatives and their puritanical practices. Votes for puritanical conservatives. What, do you think because he fucks kids he will allow your gooner game?
My brother in Christ they are a self proclaimed anti queer conservative organization. Do you want to be right? Do you care if you’re correct or not? Or do you want to blame everything on the ghosts in your head?
Ah yes, because the left wing is famous for the proliferation of requiring a government issued ID to use the internet in ways that make them uncomfortable.
You know that American conservatives have been banning books from libraries, and banning topics like racism and homophobia from being talked about in schools, right? American conservatives love censoring anything they don’t agree with. They are the original snowflakes.
I suspect your butt is just chapped because you can’t drop a hard “r” on BlueSky.
Hi. Texas conservatives in Houston took over the city schools and removed libraries to create a prison inside the school itself. Fuck you and your talks of censorship. You don’t know censorship and think the conservacucks don’t do it because they ain’t targeting your white cis heterosexual ass. You have no opinion worth censoring because your just that white bread bland.
Well that’s why I didn’t say “leftists.” But if we’re continuing to be honest, leftist governments also censor. I don’t think you can find any ideology that doesn’t censor, actually.
I’m sorry. Did you just say you want to vote Trump because you think they’re against censorship? The guy that threatens journalists, and politicians that report or say bad things about them. Do you not think that’s censorship?
I don’t even have a bone in this fight. I just want to understand the thought process.
Censorship means different things to different people. For those on the left censorship means suppression of liberal ideas, suppression of journalism exposing corruption and brutality, suppression of peoples history. For those on the right censorship means they can’t say the n word anymore.
Would you care to guess what censorship means to haloduder?
You mean the guy that is president right now, while this is happening, that is doing nothing about it because he’s too busy dealing with his pedophile rape escapades becoming public knowledge?
Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network.
As Valve correctly points out, this is a blatant & outright lie. They have cut off any number of legal entities over pressure from politicians or groups. Now they have to own it.
You will find such language pretty much everywhere. And there are reasons for it. A good example are certain drugs that are technically not illegal. Because they have not been officially classified yet.
That used to be a thing here in Sweden some time ago, where they’d just change some little compound and could technically, legally sell it online until it was deemed otherwise. Because it’s now technically a new formula. Once it was classified, they just repeated the proceas.
MasterCard might not want to be seen as an enabler in the drug trade. So while it’s technically legal. They don’t want anything to do with it. And would like the option to take action.
And according to the articles. It’s not MasterCard pointing to that regulation, but the processors. As MasterCard notes. They’re not a bank, they’re not processing your payment. They just provide the technology to do so.
Furthermore. I’m quite amazed that people seem to think Valve is this really good company that we can all trust and take their word on. Valve says one thing. MasterCard says another. I wouldn’t take either one of them on just their word. Better to take a step back, and see how it develops so you don’t make yourself a useful idiot.
Monero, a decentralized censorship proof cryptocurrency, has no real utility with regard to solving MasterCard’s censorship and only depends on a pyramid of investors to function at all? That is not my understanding.
Yes, most cryptos are treated like pump and dump scams. 99% of usage is like that. Absolutely does not change the underlying utility nor would I recommend “investing” in them.
Monero, a decentralized censorship proof cryptocurrency, has no real utility with regard to solving MasterCard’s censorship and only depends on a pyramid of investors to function at all?
Monero - the digital token with no real world value, yes. You don’t need crypto to fix this issue. Brazilians can use Pix and would not depend on MasterCard and Visa, and this includes everything from physical purchases to digital storefronts to paying in installments and more. All attached to currency that actually means something and zero crypto bros trying to pump the value up or down on their delusional subreddits.
Pix sounds trivially easy to censor, freeze, or control from the government’s perspective. Unless I’m missing something that makes it easier for the government to censor innocuous NSFW content. And we don’t have anything like it in the US so it’s useless to me.
Monero can be used immediately without storing a balance for longer than a few minutes, although a correlation attack would be trivial like that. But at best it is not subject to market whims any longer than you decide is necessary for your anonymity needs. It’s the perfect case for purchasing NSFW software, where you want the purchase private and uncensored even when it’s perfectly legal. That sounds like an incredible real world value, even after the crypto bros are long gone and the value dumps (imo) 99%. But it’s a tool that needs no real world value.
Pix sounds trivially easy to censor, freeze, or control from the government’s perspective
If the Brazilian government decided to go against the constitution to censor my online purchases like that, buying hentai games would be the least of my concerns. And then it wouldn’t matter if I’m using your fake crypto bro tokens or not.
And we don’t have anything like it in the US
Of course not. You live in a weird techno feudalism where the government can’t do anything because that’s socialism and the only solutions you trust are some random tech bro dependent crap like CashApp.
Nope, I’d rather use seashells than something like Monero. Crypto is got negative value, the time wasted hearing people like you preach about it is never going to be returned to my life.
especially in countries like the US?
Seashells would be an upgrade in a country like the US, but failures of your payment systems do not change anything for the inherent value of random online tokens.
Seashells require face to face interaction, they weigh a lot and they are not convenient to obtain. Nor are they fungible or even anonymous. I am not convinced they are better than Monero, or that Monero has no value.
Seashells require face to face interaction, they weigh a lot and they are not convenient to obtain. Nor are they fungible or even anonymous
That’s all true, which is why seashells are terrible. But even being terrible, they beat the imaginary crypto bro token. That’s how bad the crypto bro token is.
Again Monero is immediately useful to many people, and so are other cryptos. You don’t have to use them and they may not be useful to you. But they are useful to others.
We have seen the same behavior out of the credit card companies before. Its pretty clear that they do pressure companies to remove content they don’t approve of. Its censorship and its legal since the companies are not the government. They are just tied in at a high level to the banking industry. Its a good example of how lack of regulation harms both creators and consumers.
It lets a bunch of poorly adjusted individuals force their personal mental problems on us all.
Taking away our freedom of speech is something to go to war over.
If this trend of giving all the government power to companies continues, well, let’s just say I’m glad we have the 2nd amendment to fight back against tyranny.
I’m not going to live in a reddit cuck-world without a fight.
So obviously somebody is lying. I really don’t understand why Valve or Itch would be the ones lying about this. My money is on the group of self righteous censorship soldiers with too much time on their hands, and the payment companies. I could always be wrong I though.
Not necessarily. Valve says they haven’t heard from Mastercard directly. Is there evidence of Itch.io having been approached at all? It seems to me that they just made the move to delist and investigate to be safe in the wake of Valve’s rule changes.
MasterCard is so big they don’t even know what all their departments are doing. The PR department probably asked a couple of the top level execs if they were pushing for this and they said no so they claimed it didn’t happen.
In a statement to Kotaku, a spokesperson for Valve said that while Mastercard did not communicate with it directly, concerns did come through payment processor and banking intermediaries.
kotaku.com
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