I’m surprised since I’d assume most people don’t care where games are from and just buy it from whatever launcher. At least that’s what people claimed throughout the years.
I don't think anyone has claimed that ever. Having all my games spread across 8 different libraries is a pain in the ass. Having Steam plus Blizzard's Battlenet launcher was already pushing it in my opinion and I dropped them too after Overwatch 2. (Which, hilariously, is also now available on steam anyway).
to disagree slightly: there were many different stores and lunchers before Epic even existed. Apart from Steam I have bought games and other digital goods on Gog, Humble and the now- extinct Desura. While totally avoiding the stores from companies as Ubi or Ea because they just suck.
Having an addititional account wasn't the big issue. There were already attemts to integrade several libs into one launcher, and if not you can at least run the start commands for that games out of steam.
What was sucking from the beginning was that arrogance of this sweeny guy, his promises of hot air, and his telling us of being the great saviour for all developers - while we as paying custemers were fed up with this bad launcher that is still missing every user interaction.
In the end not even the developers have profited from the store. Sales are not as promised, and in order to release a game on this platform sweeny blackmails you to give away older titles for free.
Frankly, YoshiP’s comments have only ever made me feel like he’s some out-of-touch edgelord, so this doesn’t surprise me.
I avoid his stuff like the plague since he feels diversity (apparently slavery as well, lol) is nothing more than window dressing as opposed to a fact of life & history.
Enjoy the disappointing sales Square! I know you lost at least one Final Fantasy fan with this clown at the helm.
I feel like the “disappointing sales” are more on SE than anything else, though. Like, they decided to only release on PS5 despite initially saying it would be PS5 and PC (and I’m just going to be charitable and ignore YoshiP telling someone asking about the PC release to just get a PS5, when PS5s were still damn near impossible to get in Japan), and even though PS5s had a really small install base (especially here in Japan - PS5s have recently become readily available, and even then, stock is limited - the electronics store near me is so completely out of stock of the digital version that they took down the display for that version and only have the disc drive version for sale).
I feel like SE has been making a lot of missteps lately.
And I’m not even going to touch the mess that is YoshiP’s reasoning for why his fantasy Europe was so dang un-melanated. That is a whole other issue. I’m just gonna say that as a non-white American living in Japan, a lot of folks in Japan have a very limited view of what an 欧米人 (European and American) is.
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.
This games been getting a lot of press for some reason, but it really doesn’t look appealing to me. But the tutorial stuff really seals the deal for me.
It just came out (on Switch no less) and it’s visually interesting. I didn’t buy it yet. I’ve bookmarked it to see if a future update removes all this.
kotaku.com
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