This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.
It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.
I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).
I agree with the rest but it’s not just modern gaming it was happening back in the 90s on consoles and earlier in arcades. One of the first games I played was an obvious cash grab by Marvel, Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge for the Gameboy. It was barely playable.
Ive commented on this before, as sad as it is if we want innovative, expansive, beautiful AAA titles we have to accept that investors arent going to keep backing the money truck up on maybes. Microtransactions, subscriptions, dlcs… there has to be an ongoing income stream or an absolutely eyewatering launch price OR we get used to safer and safer bets or games with very narrow scopes.
Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.
I think you have to ask yourself if the company is behaving ethically.
If a game is F2P but has microtransactions that arent P2W and the devs are continuing to maintain the game then its hard to be mad that they want to make some money off the basic game you get for free. (Mechwarrior online is a pretty good example of this)
If its a subscription, are you getting regular additional content for the money or is the subscription just allowing you to play the game you paid for? Do you still have to buy DLCs and pay subscription?
If its DLC, is it meaningful storylines/maps/characters? Does it make the prospect of another playthrough different or more interesting? Is it a reasonable price for what it gives you?
You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.
Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.
I personally like to think this trend of enshittification in the gaming industry is geared more towards the triple AAA side of things because a lot of the actual indie devs (not the people putting out low effort mobile games or shovelware or scams or straight up large corporatios masquerading their games as indie titles) are putting out some of the best games I’ve seen in years for single player experiences.
Though I absolutely agree with your assessment of the situation in general.
This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).
I don’t think I can recall something truly novel since I think we’ve pretty much gone past the point of novel concepts in the majority of genres, but there have definitely been standouts in certain genres over the years.
In the deck building and rogue like genre we’ve seen Balatro, the poker based game. In the retro inspired games genre, we’ve got Corn Kidz 64, a shorter game that controls and looks like an N64 title.
Fucking seriously. Dude was a massive box office draw and on top of that had had a truly wholesome career. He was well respected. Could really act…had solid comedy chops. Very few true stinkers in his IMDB page. And he threw it all away for a bitch who LAUGHS about cheating on him.
I hate the word because of right wing fucks but there is no other way to describe it. He’s a fucking cuck.
Ton Cruise is incredibly successful, vastly more successful than better people with no baggage. It’s kind of weird because Cruise’s cult is way, way worse than the slap. But Cruise also seems to be more talented and outwardly likable and his cult is pretty good at staying hidden.
Cruise can pull on that star power like no one else.
Everyone knows the shit cult he’s in, but when he’s in a movie it doesn’t matter. Even basically kidnapping Katie Holmes didn’t stop him. I can only imagine how much of an insufferable asshole he is day to day, but he still rocks as an actor.
I think about that interview with Spielberg where he refused to make a comment about Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts only ever appeared in one Spielberg movie. He’s Steven Spielberg, he doesn’t have to work with assholes if he doesn’t want to.
Tom Cruise has appeared in multiple Spielberg movies. I take that as a sign he’s not an asshole. He’s just in a fucked up cult.
True, he doesn’t push it on outsiders. He is number two in the cult though and makes speeches and stuff for them regularly. His best friend is the head guy.
Will and Jada have some suspicious ties to the Church and its beliefs too. They’ve denied being part of it but some instances are so overt that it’s likely true.
From pretty much all reports Tom Cruise is generally really nice to people. If you’re a nice weirdo then whatever, they’re Hollywood people, they’re all weirdos.
But if you’re an asshole weirdo, that’s when people won’t like you anymore.
Eh…not really. He hadn’t done anything Independence Day level for a while but he was still cranking out popular shit. That movie about the Williams sisters was only 1 year before he threw it all away and that did pretty well.
Goes to show how much the slap stole the show, cause I can’t even recall what he was nominated for. Had to look it up, but he won for King Richard (the movie about Sernea and Venus Williams).
That reminds me. Some social media feminists were furious that movie about Williams sisters is named after a man.
I was like, they’re both executive producers and their other sister (Isha Price) was also involved in the making of the film. Maybe they wanted to honour their dad?
I mean… Five minutes before the slap, he was sitting in his front-row seat at an internationally-televised award ceremony where he had just been nominated for two of the most coveted honors in cinema. I dunno if he was that bad off.
Outside of it looking like a game from 2012, it seems to be very much pay to win, clunky, and I watched their videos and looked through pics and read the description on the games page…Not a single picture or mention of Will Smith at all. Nothing.
Is it actually known that the slap had a negative effect on his career? I don’t follow these things, but most of the reactions I’ve seen were on the neutral/comedic side
People make jokes about it but… People also make jokes about Elon musk while at the same time hating the fucker. He’s not Elon musk level hated now but the reaction in this comment section seems to show that both people really don’t like him anymore. I know I’m one of them for sure and I grew up with the dude. So many huge things in my life were him.
And then look at the facts… He’s done basically nothing since then. There’s this game. He has a few producer credits on his IMDb. And last I heard the only actual movie he works is a completely nonsensical sequel to I Am Legend.
He fucking died at the end of that movie! They flat out said they’re just going to pretend the end of the movie didn’t happen so they could make a sequel lol.
There’s two different endings. In one of them he survives, but accept that he won’t cure the disease because the camps are the next step in human evolution. Also, he realizes his experiments to cure the disease are horrific and he has become a monster.
Much is made about online cancel culture, but that’s just people making a lot of noise on the internet and doesn’t matter much.
The real cancel culture is when most people simply don’t like an actor as much as they used to. If the majority of people like an actor just 10% less than they used to, they take a massive hit to their career. Just liking someone a slightly less means you’re just going to watch something else instead. But when a majority of people feel the same way then liking someone a little less means translates into a large percentage of people not watching something. It’s not like you are going to watch 90% of a Will Smith movie because you like him 10% less, you either watch a movie or you don’t.
Real cancel culture isn’t “I HATE THIS GUY SO MUCH I’LL NEVER EVER WATCH ANYTHING HE’S IN!” as portrayed on the internet. The real version is “Will Smith? Meh… there’s probably something better to watch.”
I don’t vehemently hate Will Smith for the slap. But The fact that I’m a little less likely to watch his movies now and the fact that there’s always other things to watch means it’s unlikely I’ll watch another Will Smith movie.
And whatever, he’s got lots of money already, it’s no big deal if his show business career is over.
I’ve not really thought about it before, but how does a dmca takedown work? Is it just the company telling the hosting to get rid of it and they comply? What is to keep someone from self hosting or hosting somewhere hard to do anything about?
Once the alleged infringing content is removed, the infringing party has the option to file a Counter Claim in response, stating under penalty of perjury that the DMCA Notice is false. The OSP/ISP must wait 10-14 days after receiving a valid DMCA Counter Claim before reactivating or allowing access to the claimed infringing content. The claimant who filed the DMCA Takedown Notice must then file a court order against the infringing site owner and the OSP/ISP if they wish to keep the infringing content offline.
Self-hosters are also subject to DMCA. Failure to comply runs the risk of being sued.
Self-hosters are also subject to DMCA. Failure to comply runs the risk of being sued.
Not if the self-hoster is self-hosting out of DMCA jurisdiction. Also, not if the self-hoster can not be found (say, redirect your mailer to /dev/null).
I fail to feel any sympathy for higher ups in any company these days especially video games. “You are already working 80 hour weeks please do more so I can make more money”
Yeah, but I have to feel sympathy for the devs here. Definitely need a game Dev Union strike like the writers strike did, I think. Though that’s difficult to pull off.
I definitely prefer the world in which we have unions and better worker rights, but I am starting to be aware of that world’s drawbacks.
Take a look at the great pyramids of Egypt. Take a look at classic anime, filled with intensely detailed high-framerate animation. These are fantastic works that, in some way, are made possible by people that are working far, far longer than a healthy work day for probably mediocre compensation. It’s almost lead to a zeitgeist where many games have not reached the height of the 360/PS3 era due to a mass of brain drain in development - thousands of really talented developers focusing on their life plan rather than passions.
In a utopia, one day we’d have high-paying employers that can truly willingly rally the greatest minds, but I think too many studios and publishers are growth/profit-minded to really get there.
“Worker’s rights suck because only extreme capitalist exploitation can create true art, like the video game I am entitled to play now now noww” - this fool right here
There’s awesome art made under fair working conditions, but I can’t imagine how you’d put together the kind that needs ludicrous hours. The kind that involves hundreds of thousands of hand drawn frames all in the same art style.
When it needs both creativity and intense devotion, it no longer becomes a 9-5 thing, even if you’re your own boss. Some people do that voluntarily but end up with carpal tunnel, sleep issues, etc. That has even been the case with a lot of Japanese creators I’ve seen.
I generally agree with that, and yet we have a lot of it around that people lament being “not perfect” or demand more of faster; so there’s societal pressure to keep it up. It also feels terrible to have appreciated something amazing, but then afterwards learn its creation process essentially involved boiling kittens or something.
If it takes slavery to make a pyramid or an anime that I enjoy then I don’t need either of them. And no one should feel differently but that’s just my opinion.
I got that as well but my point was lack of wonders like pyramid and some media doesn’t even count as a drawback if we can abolish slavery, which still exist in a different form and name. They simply aren’t on the same balance.
I don’t really follow what “on the same balance” means; I guess it’s simply that the benefit far, far outweighs the negative? Or, that the negative should never be mentioned because it implies benefits behind something horrible?
I can marginally understand the latter. It’s a bit like trying to praise a piece of artwork on its own (because it’s a really amazing piece, and it could even inspire other people) while trying to set aside that its artist was a terrible person who deserves no recognition.
Part of the reason I bring it up is, I’d like to hear more vocalizations on whether these things should exist. Under a certain forward-thinking mindset, it could be that neither GTA 6 or Elder Scrolls 6 ever comes out - or they cost $100 and take 10 years, to adequately pay the developers and give them healthy time off. The math is never straightforward, of course, but it’s something of a thought experiment to get people to think about what they care about most.
Former actually, as you said pretty much every good thing had some negatives, it’s all a trade off on one way or another. But if it was between art and slavery, one outweigh the other heavily. And I feel the same for games as well, I don’t mind waiting and paying a higher price if I have to.
Speaking as someone who’s worked inside a couple “AAA” studios, sympathy to a union has definitely increased in the past decade. It’s no coincidence that bonuses and profit sharing (a major part of compensation) have plummeted over that same time. As much as fans hate unambitious and venal design choices in recent games I assure them that devs hate them just as much or even more, since they ruin years of work. We have steadily decreasing feedback into these choices and are expected more and more to stick to our corner pushing pixels and writing code. Morale is probably the lowest I’ve ever experienced and mandatory RTO adds insult to injury.
The various QA Union success stories have lots of support on the dev side. However many people believe it’s impossible somehow, or that they personally would get laid off or have their job outsourced if there is even a hint of organizing. Especially the past 12 months, the bloodbath has workers terrified. Everyone is trying to keep their heads down as much as possible. I unfortunately don’t see this ending well unless funding loosens up and people can start small studios again. There was a wave of this during Covid but those studios are all dying now. It’s seriously depressing. I’m a refugee from the VFX world and I feel like I’m watching the sequel.
All Rockstar Games ever have been pushed back by months or years. They have all had monolithic levels of crunch. People not working in the office is definitely not to blame. Particularly if they were hired as offside, which the article claims.
kotaku.com
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