It’s actually pretty crazy just how hard that game flopped. I would have always thought that a company like Sony could’ve just brute-forced such a big project to achieve some success (or at least break even), but 25,000 units sold is almost unheard of for a game as expensive as Concord.
What mystifies me is usually when they do this sort of thing they throw it on Plus and get a mountain of players. Fall guys, and Destruction All Stars spring to mind as examples. I guess the effect isn’t so strong with the new tiered system, but it may have saved them some face.
When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.
A lot of games media has talked on it (to varying degrees). But Concord basically had a bad beta/demo and launched at a time when EVERYONE wanted live games to fail (see: Stop Killing Games Initiative). AND it managed to piss off the gamergaters in the process.
We’ve seen this to a lesser degree in the past with… basically every Battlefield since the WW1 one? Bad demo/beta (mostly because people still haven’t learned to not play Conquest and to instead play Rush) coupled with the CoD/BF fanboy war results in outlets and Gamers actively wanting the game to fail and shitting on it every chance they get. It is just that EA understand that BF is the kind of game that still sells enough to justify keeping Dice around.
battlefields a bit different. battlefield basically nowadays is that the game always launch in a terrible state, and fixes itself a year down the line. battlefield players will play the game regardless and maintains ~6000 user playerbase active
I mean… where do you think the “this has a terrible launch” comes from?
If Influencers like a game, everyone looks past the massive performance and stability issues. If influencers don’t like a game, a single crash is enough to mark it as trash that should be ignored until a couple patches… which is a death sentence for a multiplayer game that requires a critical mass of players to be worth buying.
I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.
I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.
Its pretty tough when they release a game that took so long to develop, that was meant for an era of gaming when live service games were hot. Now that a lot of live service games are flopping due to over-saturation, I think even Sony saw it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to push the game further without either reworking it into something else, or just cutting their losses.
It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.
I don’t know how they expected to succeed without any marketing. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of this game, even on my PS5 (where they usually advertise the absolute hell out of a 1st party title like this), until the day it released.
Or how their game being just another hero shooter/moba crossover in a sea of such games would differentiate itself enough to warrant also costing $40 instead of being like its competition which is FREE.
I legit learned of it around when it released from gamingcirclejerk making fun of chuds for calling it woke or whatever. Next time I heard of it, it was the shut down announcement.
They didn’t want to pay for marketing. But all this news coverage… Didn’t they already say they’d re-release it after an overhaul? I guarantee a non-insignificant amount of people will buy it just to see what all the fuss was about…
I saw this (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBnStS9d2xg) nearly 5 minute cinematic trailer in June and was expecting some kind of action/adventure game for most of the way through. Then they said it was a hero shooter out of nowhere and I thought to myself “don’t we already have plenty of those?”
I had already resigned this movie to the shit bin just because they cast a comedian for the role of the only character in the games that was a serious straight man (as in the comedy trope) instead of someone more suitable like Idris Elba.
Then again, maybe they wanted someone else but Hart was the only one who accepted to work on this turd.
I’d honestly have been interested if Kevin Hart just did Roland instead of being Kevin Hart.
Based on that clip I can’t say he’s not, it’s not like Roland never gives any snark, but I can say Hart is a weird choice for the role by his typecasting. But, hey, maybe he’ll break free with this?
I mean Borderlands 1 Roland is pretty different from the guy allergic to smiling we all know from Borderlands 2. I guess Handsome Jack changes comedians into Idris Elba.
I’m finding it very difficult to phrase this comment. I want to share my thoughts, but I know that if I am perceived as a bigot, everything I say will be seen as something to be defeated rather than understood. But tiptoeing around the subject doesn’t convey my meaning any better. So please, give me the benefit of the doubt long enough to hear me out.
I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.
Nexus has considerable influence. For many games, particularly Bethesda games, they are seen as the default and complete source of mods. When looking for new mods to install, most people wouldn’t bother checking other sites since everything is on nexus. If players aren’t aware a mod exists, in other words they are unaware an option exists, that hinders them from making that choice. Also, their vortex mod manager makes installing mods from nexus super simple. By removing the mod from their site, they are making installing the mod at least a little bit more difficult.
I have seen multiple people posit here that removing the mod is fine because it does something so silly and pointless that no one should care about it. But we all care about silly, pointless things from time to time. I have spent days comparing all of the ways of getting unified GTK and QT themes on my desktop to try and get them just right. That was entirely pointless. But I wanted it that way, so I made it that way. I don’t have to justify it to anyone, and neither do the users of this mod. Installing the mod will only affect their game, no one else even has to know about it. Nexus’ decision does effect other people. They do have to justify themselves. Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun. If it is really so pointless, nexus shouldn’t have bothered removing the mod.
People also claim that the political implications made by the mod are dangerous, and must be suppressed. I know you’ll roll your eyes at me, but yes: I’m making the free speech argument. It really is important though. If we, as a society and as individuals, accept suppressing speech for it’s ideological contents, then we are begging the question: which ideas are ok, and which aren’t? The ability to control public discourse is powerful, and highly coveted by anyone who wants to bend society to their will. It has been done before, and we know how horrible the consequences can be. It is incredibly dangerous. Answering that question at all is only justifiable in the face of a comparable danger. Is the idea of not being asked one’s pronouns really a comparable danger? Nexus seems to think so.
Of course, free speech also protects Nexus’ right to control what they put on their platform. I am not saying they shouldn’t have that right. But nexus is a platform, not a person. They position their site not as a place for them to share their own content, but for others to share theirs. Any modification to the contents of their site is a modification to other people’s speech, not just Nexus’s. They ought to use their capability in this regard responsibly and sparingly. Their actions here are neither.
I thought that others here on Lemmy believed in the same principles I do. That people should have total control over their own software and activities with it. That neither corporations nor governments should take any action to unduly control what they do with their own property. The belief in FOSS and decentralization seemed to go hand in hand with that. But if something like this can make you all turn on those principles, then maybe the resemblance wasn’t even skin deep.
“Free speech” means you will not be captured by the cops because of your opinion. Private entities are free to enforce any restrictions they want on their site. If you disagree with them, simply stop using the site, like we did with Reddit.
It wasn’t removed because of the pronouns though. It was removed because the mod description violated their community policies.
There are plenty of mods just like it that the site keeps up. Dozens of mods even remove black characters from games, which is way worse. The difference is, those mods don’t write long rants about how much they hate minorities and liberals in their descriptions.
To be entirely fair, if it’s not the mods content itself, but the description, that got it removed, that should probably be clarified front and center. That’s a pretty big shift from the mod being removed based on it’s simple existence.
This finally explains it. I was about to write something similar as the comment you are replying to, because it did felt like a totally unnecessary PR stunt of another corporation that only exploits the issue for publicity, and I really hate that.
But if the mod description was as bad as you say, then removing it was the right move.
It wasn’t removed because of the pronouns though. It was removed because the mod description violated their community policies.
There are plenty of mods just like it that the site keeps up. Dozens of mods even remove black characters from games, which is way worse. The difference is, those mods don’t write long rants about how much they hate minorities and liberals in their descriptions.
if that’s true then it makes sense
Edit: I just found out about the spider man pride flag removal mod debacle and read the official statement by Nexus Mods: www.nexusmods.com/news/14733
In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it. The same goes for people attempting to troll other users with mods deliberately to cause a rise. For our part, we will endeavour to do a better job of moderating our website to this ethos ourselves.
We aren’t the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights.
By Nexus Mods’ own words they will take action against anti diversity/inclusivity mods and actively take a stance on what kinds of mods are allowed on Nexus Mods.
So regardless of what the mod descriptions may or may not have said, it seems Nexus Mods would’ve deleted this pronoun removal mod as well.
These aren’t mods I would’ve bothered using (and I don’t even play these games either) but Nexus Mods trying to police what mods players are allowed to use is pretty shit.
The great thing about mods is they only affect the people who choose to get them and gives everyone more choices to change games to what they want, and I don’t think anyone should try to force what kinds of mods are allowed or not.
The whole point of modding is that you find something you don’t like or think could’ve been improved in some way, so you change it to your preference.
The fact that you wrote that wall of text just to not get attacked speaks volumes of the current state of progressivism in this place, you can’t say anything and you are walking on eggshells.
And are these “progressives” in the room now? No, they’re clearly not. Nobody is attacking him and he’s not even being downvoted.
He wrote the wall of text because he has the self awareness to know that the comment he is writing is functionally identical to what a far-right reactionary “hiding their power level” would write.
He wrote the wall of text because he has the self awareness to know that the comment he is writing is functionally identical to what a far-right reactionary “hiding their power level” would write
This paragraph is the funniest shit I have read today.
if you’re having trouble comprehending what he wrote in a few sentences, perhaps your bot needs more tokens to parse what he’s putting out, for humans it’s incredibly straight forward.
Did they edit your comment too where you quoted them?
In case you edit your comment, the quote was
He wrote the wall of text because he has the self awareness to know that the comment he is writing is functionally identical to what a far-right reactionary “hiding their power level” would write
This is not a place of acceptance. This is a left wing echo chamber. You either tow the narrative or GTFO.
I think of myself as very moderate. I’m neither supportive of right wing horse shit or the lefts batshit insanity. I’ll get downvoted into oblivion every time for pointing out this place being extreme left, or for making any comment that doesn’t align strictly with the narrative taking points.
what exactly is the left’s batshit insanity in this instance? literally that the game lets you pick your pronouns?
did you know that fallout: a post-nuclear role playing game (1997) also allowed you to do this? a few other games that have let you do this are fallout 2 (1998), mass effect (2007), fallout 3 (2008), mass effect 2 (2010), skate 3 (2010), the elder scrolls 5: skyrim (2011 and also every year since), mass effect 3 (2013), fallout 4 (2015), sonic forces (2017), mass effect andromeda (2017), cyberpunk 2077 (2020), trackmania 2020 (2020), and literally every other game ever to feature a character creator. if this is batshit insanity, then i can’t wait to find out what you think of unions.
Dude I thought reddit was leftist and then I came here. Funny thing is I’m a pansy lefty European (believe in social healthcare, UBI and all that good stuff) yet this place is a bit much for me.
What narrative talking points? Gay people exist, trans people exists. There’s nothing political about that. If you think otherwise you need to adjust thinking of yourself as a moderate.
I think what nexus is doing here is inappropriate. Mods, by their very existence, give players choice. Even this one: it means players can now choose he or she or to not be asked at all. Nexus, by removing this mod, is exerting what influence they have to eliminate that choice.
I don’t think you’re a bigot, but I also think you’re off the mark.
First off, the mod has quite literally zero value. Installing it is more work than ignoring an option during character creation. I constantly ignore options I don’t care about during character creation, it really isn’t hard. It’s hard to interpret the intent of the creator of the mod, as well as its users, as anything else but being out for blood.
That alone though isn’t a reason to remove the mod – Nexus is full of useless mods. But something neat happens when you do nuke the mod: Bigots come out of the woodwork, you can ban them in one fell stroke, and thereby lessen your moderation load in the long term.
I am now totally confused as to what is even going on. After reading multiple top level comments, many responses and then reading the article (gasp I know… blasphemy) I can’t tell if conservatives are mad about pronouns being an option or not being an option. Many of the comments made it sound like they added pronouns, the way the article is written makes it sound like they removed the ability to choose pronouns.
So which is it. Who is mad, and why exactly?
Edit: Okay, maybe I understand now. Someone created a mod that removed pronouns. The place that hosts mod downloads, removed that mod from their list of downloads. Now people are mad it was removed. Do I have that right? If so, my only remaining question is if one were to use the mod, does it mean others not using the mod can’t see their pronoun(s)?
I think this is the reply that prompted me to reply at the top of the post. Does your edit mean I was of some help? You appear to have the right of it, yes.
As to your second question: what mod loadout a player has will have zero bearing on another’s experience. If one were to use the mod, others would not be affected.
Apparently it defaults to the one matching your phenotype. The game gave you the option to change it if you felt like it. The mod removed that option and may have had a rant against the existence of LGBT+ people in its description and that description was the cause for removal (I can't verify since it was removed, but that's what others have said).
Selecting the sex of the PC has been a standard feature in practically every RPG with character creator ever, and definitely in Bethesda RPGs, what they added is an option to change pronouns the PC is referred to by NPCs from the default. If you want them to match you simply don’t touch that option, done.
From a developer’s perspective it’s dead simple, similar in triviality as allowing people to mix+match any voice to any body type. Cyberpunk’s free choice of genitals needs some implementation care but if you’re planning for it from the start it’s also easy.
Where things get more complicated is things like dresses for male bodies, especially if you don’t have any shape keys in place. But if you use one body mesh for everything and simply shape key it into male and female then it’s again no issue (you also need to lerp animations then, probably, male and female bodies walk differently because hips). Basically it’s hard if your asset pipeline is simple, if the pipeline is sophisticated it’s easy.
Removing the mod is telling people they must select a pronoun.
No, it defaults to body type.
This option is literally nothing to people who don’t care - and the people who care enough to dislike it, are assholes. They have their private reasons and their private reasons are bad. Bigotry is not an OK idea. We’ve had that discussion, it went very predictably, and it has a right answer. We don’t need to endlessly litigate whether we’ve been too harsh about demonstrable bigotry.
A website saying ‘no thank you’ to an act of petty bigotry is a non-event. There is no fucking danger in moderation excluding that. That’s what moderation… is. That’s why we have human beings reviewing stuff, instead of offering an unfiltered pile of everything all the time.
In this context of moderation: game modifications must successfully and safely do something useful. This fails on two out of three points. It successfully removes a feature. But that feature is easily ignored with no side effects or consequences, and the blindingly obvious motivation behind its removal is overt sexual prejudice. While safe in the sense that it won’t brick your computer, it’s plainly a threatening message to the people who use this feature - it is dehumanizing. It is treating the possibility of their existence as something intolerable, to be excised. To be physically removed.
You can still install this stupid mod. It hasn’t been erased from reality. It’s just not approved on one website with clear rules against exactly that sort of thing. Making bad things harder to do is not some betrayal of your right to make terrible decisions. A lot of things that are possible have barriers for good reasons.
And none of you grasping at freedom as an excuse to entertain bigotry seem remember - we all have a right to freedom of association. We don’t want to deal with that shit. You can’t make us, and still pretend you care about choice.
I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are. So choose that option and play the game.
Why should Nexus devote resources to a mod that removes options from a game? There’s no point to this mod for anyone that’s of sound mind. The only reason for it’s existence is some petty bullshit from people that hate trans people so much they will install a mod in a feeble attempt to feel like they hurt people in some small way.
If the mod just totally skipped character creation and the goal was to just save time, I could see the purpose. But its clearly not there to save anyone time; its just there as an excuse to tirade against certain demographics for existing.
I’m pretty sure the vanilla game has the option to choose pronouns that conform to whatever your feelings about gender are.
If you’re a hardcore heteronormie, congrats, the default behavior of the game conforms with your worldview. Simply choose a male or female body, and don’t even touch the pronouns. They’re automatically what they’re “supposed” to be.
I’m pretty sure that if she had the power to do so she would have deathsquads going after anyone remotely suspected of being trans. I was in her telegram group just to watch the crazy unfold and she is absolutely batshit and hates trans people with a burning passion.
As someone who games solely on pc nowaday simply because having other things to do, I don’t mind waiting even more so the chance I will get it on launch day is null.
Remember fellas vote with your wallet, do not get blinded by hypetrain.
Yep. I never buy on launch. Just wait a few months and the price comes down, especially if near a holiday you’ll get a sale. Also the bitchfest about the game bEiNg LiTeRaLly UnpLaYAblE!!1!1 because of problems has died down after a few patches.
Vote with your wallet. This shit right here dawg. That saying has lost its weight for some reason. Given there are a lot of ways that can be difficult or even impossible, but it’s still our best hope next to pitch forks and torches.
This is the apparent problem that mostly not most of the victim (consumerism) aware, especially those who have large amount of expendable fund, or someone who bored enough that they dont have alternative time consuming activity other than gaming.
As someone who once was console player (ps1 - ps2), I can say console exclusive game have their own merit, however lots of thing happen, ranging from the source code is lost, to higher up management are fucking boomer (me as SMT fans waiting for PC port is miraculous, even Persona spin off released on steam is something, yet they milked it off right away).
Heck even if you had something like Hideo Kojima (starting from MGS V) or Toshiro Nagoshi (former RGG Studio head who made decision to bring some of SEGA games into PC and into the West, and the one who revived Yakuza popularity in the west), they released their game on PC too because they cared for their fans but somehow higherup may blocking those (Japanese back then did not view PC gaming as main gaming entertainment, only niche stuff fill these in for example Simracing, Self publish game, H-game VN).
Back to the topic, It depends on each of their own view, but for me I just game whatever I had and what I want to be fun. I don’t need to get pushed by someone forced opinion (e.g hype) to enjoy a game rather I just enjoy a media based on interest. (source: me who tried to enjoy NFS Payback, as much as the fanbase shunned it because its controversy and radical change, I did find some fun here and there, from my own playthrough I find the game is flawed and noticed that the Ghost Game simply did NFS by the book (or perhaps pressured by EA for profit) and thats why they could not flawlessly release NFS Heat).
Fuckers are just propagating the fury without providing a fix. Are the censored games back or not? Because right now they aren’t. Put them back and make Mastercard do something about it now that they have staged their position. Collective Shout is playing both sides.
But now I’m not. I don’t have a PSN account and I don’t care to make one just for this game.
The games industry is real crap now. There’s so much resistance to just being able to download a game and play. It’s always about downloading proprietary launchers, signing up for new accounts, wading through micro transactions, unfinished games, bad stories, and bug-ridden experiences.
yooo mobile port of Balatro would be dope. I’ve tried mobile version of Slay the Spire and it’s perfect for killing time when I don’t have access to my PC
I can’t wait… these are the sorts of games that are made for portable play… I don’t want to play Zelda and pause the game mid-swing, I want this, backpack battles, etc.
Yeah. Kinda. Sometimes if you press slightly in the wrong place you get the cursor instead, which can easily lead to misclicks. But it’s definitely playable! A mobile port would be really dope though
Also as someone subscribed to both, the games are way cheaper. So it makes sense that more people can afford a continuous gaming subscription through them.
Article gets kinda weird at the end and calls the review bombing harassment. Seems like a 180 from the beginning of the article, unless the writer thinks Sony would have changed its mind with 0 protest action.
It also calls all the customers who don’t want to be locked out of the product they paid for ‘fickle’ and brought up gamergate out of nowhere, so I’m honestly not sure what sort of agenda they’re pushing.
The whole article was poorly written honestly, but yeah, that part really felt off. If the only thing they care about is money, then by nature our only real means of protest is to affect their money.
I would imagine a bare handful of people install them.
There's some number of people who are so angry and stupid that the mere sight of something like an option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage, so for them, mods like this are essentially QOL improvements.
option to choose pronouns fills them with blind, seething rage
Yeah I was there when BATTLETECH (still dunno why its name has to be so LOUD :P ) launched. Every hatefool was raging about it, apropos of anything or nothing. Try to talk about any part of it and it's "OH YOU MEAN FUCKING PRONOUNWARRIOR?!?!" and a bunch of incoherent senseless bile. There's a sizeable group of people who deeply love being offended, and it's not us (queerfolk/LGBTQIA+/QUILTBAG/GSM/whatever). Like, I'm neck-deep in queer over here and every time I play a game with a pronoun selector at the beginning I promptly forget about it but oohhhh nooo, not these bellends. They somehow think a button at the beginning of the game that matters like three times ever has entirely DESTROYED videogames with LIES and FALLACIES 🙄
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else (say, going to MWLL/other games, ranting about "pronounwarrior," pretty sure some critters got teamkilled over it...) for no good reason.
They'd be a joke and an insignificant oddity if they didn't deliberately make messes of everything else
My opinion exactly.
In ways, I actually feel sorry for them. In the first place, it has to suck just to be that angry and spiteful, but underneath that, it must really suck to feel so powerless and desperate and insecure that something as trivial and irrelevant as pronouns can send you into a compensatory rage.
My pity is greatly diminished by the fact that they're toxic assholes who try to force the world to accommodate their own failures though.
Meanwhile, my canonically enby commander is rocking a fabulous magenta mohawk and having fun headshotting all the King Crabs so they can sell them to afford catperson surgery.
I’m not hunting them specifically, their cockpits just happen to be magnets for my Marauder’s laser and autocannon rounds. :P
The first one I saw, in an early “titan” mission, got taken out by a single alpha strike from long range and dropped three salvage. (I renamed it Queen Crab when I noticed that some parts of the mech were white after applying my blue/pink paint scheme.)
That’s amusing. I played that a couple months ago. I don’t recall ever selecting a pronoun, but I’m sure I did and then just moved on like a normal person.
Yeah, that's the one. There was so much outrage because it had the word "pronoun" in it at all 🤣It's just a little thing on the side during character creation and its effect is absolutely trivial. Actually I think the other MechWarriors 'have pronouns' too if you deliberately open the character editor for them. It's really the bare minimum, like I'm trying to come up with something sarcastic but those people were freaking out over nnnnooothing like the one word in one game is gonna ruin videogames for them forever, or some crap.
Which, like... if we could somehow trans so hard they'd go away don't they think we'd do it instead of just getting yelled at?
I’ve seen that in videos, but I always assumed it was for show to get their viewers riled up. I honestly can’t imagine an actual person doing this on their own, unless they were encouraged to do it by some influencer.
As in, how many people fire up a game, get mad that pronouns exist, and then search online for a “fix”? I think that number is pretty small.
But then again, I tend to be pretty careful about distancing myself from bigots.
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