I can’t speak for everyone, but the transition from one version to another loses almost as many features as it gains. It is especially crappy about its provided sprites, to the point where we keep losing entire sprite types, many sprite sets are just plain unfinished or untested, and they insisted we move from sprites that people could somewhat take seriously to chibi/moe sprites that nobody on Earth can take seriously for an adventure game.
Another issue is that the series keeps releasing new versions that are incremental improvements at best, and they want us to pay a lot of money for each installment and half-sequel with said very few improvements, and also pay for a lot of content packs. There are things that should have been added 15 years ago and still aren’t here. They can’t even allow us to customize menus, and countless other issues. Honestly the dev team seems like they’re not very good at programming or art in the first place, and they’re just raking in money from incremental improvements over many decades. People try to excuse the engines’ lack of basic features with “but you can program it in Ruby/Javascript yourself!” Which is a really bad thing to rely on for a game-creation engine of this type.
I’m sure other people are annoyed by things I’m not even thinking of right now.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative, and paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor. You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks. If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op (because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk), but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative
Apart from existing in a sea of capitalist companies than can ruthlessly outcompete them. Co-operatives don’t stand a chance.
paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
That would only be feasible in a very small company, with sufficient profits to spread among the workforce.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
Yep, like I just said.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor.
I’d frame it as: you need money to live. Therefore, you suck it up and let someone exploit you so they can profit from your work, and give you scraps out of that profit.
You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks.
Those “business risks” only exist as a result of the same system that necessitates wage labour: capitalism. The risks generally have to do failing to increase growth and therefore going under due to lack of owner capital. A democratic economy has no owners, only a collective workforce who will together use their resources to fund the company and pay their own wages - this means there is no need for growth. That huge risk no longer exists.
If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op
That’s not even worth thinking about. We live in capitalism. Of course working with a capitalist model would work best - it’s the only way to ensure profits for the owners.
(because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk)
You’re still assuming an owner. A democratic workplace wouldn’t have an owner - they’d all share responsibility for the business. And pay would be agreed democratically.
but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.
No, it suggests that co-ops are ill-equipped to compete. It’s a moral decision, not a business one, and an incredibly risky one. Any company that isn’t willing to exploit its workers will be beaten out by one that is willing to do that, because the competitive, capitalist one will inevitably have more resources to throw behind it.
Think about this: for a company to be a co-op, it either has to be founded that way, or changed some time afterward. A company that runs in a traditionally capitalist way can only have fundamental changes happen at the behest of its owner; workers have no say how their business is run. This means that the small amount of co-ops has nothing to do with workers’ willingness to take risks. It has to do with owners not wanting to relinquish power and profit - an owner can only lose when transitioning to a co-op.
I’m not saying that Re-Logic should be a co-op. I’m saying our entire economic system demands that they exploit their workers.
My comment wasn’t aimed at Re-Logic precisely, and I admit I was only making assumptions. My assumption was that their company fit into the mold of how capitalist companies operate. If they are a co-op, and practise profit sharing, then I admit I was wrong in my assumption, but I hope you agree it’s an assumption closely related to the reality of capitalist economics.
EDIT: Re-Logic has an owner. Sorry, my original comment stands.
<span style="color:#323232;">Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative
</span>
Apart from existing in a sea of capitalist companies than can ruthlessly outcompete them. Co-operatives don’t stand a chance.
Why not? Why do workers and owners being exactly the same set of people make it impossible to successfully develop games? This is an extra-important question to answer because a lot of these indie dev companies are a dozen or so people in total.
Could it be that the upfront costs, and the delayed nature of turning any profit at all (along with no profit being assured) means that getting paid a fixed amount to do game dev labor regardless of success is a safer option for most developers, rather than actually being a stakeholder?
<span style="color:#323232;">paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
</span>
That would only be feasible in a very small company, with sufficient profits to spread among the workforce.
Most indie game devs ARE very small companies.
<span style="color:#323232;">But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
</span>
Yep, like I just said.
That’s the nature of dealing with a market economy - you make a thing or provide a service, there are costs involved in doing so, and if you earn more in revenue than your costs then you profit. If not, you don’t. Either way in a typical company it’s the owners that benefit or lose as a consequence, as paying employees to do a thing is one of those costs. In a co-op, those employees are the owners, and win or lose accordingly.
<span style="color:#323232;">The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor.
</span>
I’d frame it as: you need money to live. Therefore, you suck it up and let someone exploit you so they can profit from your work, and give you scraps out of that profit.
You don’t have to - you could go into business for yourself. Make a thing and sell that thing, and reap the full profits of your labor. This is an especially possible thing to do in the game development world where some of the largest games ever literally started as someone’s pet project or as soe other project that got trashed and repurposed. The Warcraft franchise (as in WoW) for example, started as an attempt at making a Warhammer RTS that Games Workshop wasn’t interested in. Sierra Online started as a couple making PC games at home. Notch sold Minecraft to Microsoft for 4 billion dollars, and it literally started as a one man project being sold on a cheesy looking website for a few bucks.
<span style="color:#323232;">You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks.
</span>
Those “business risks” only exist as a result of the same system that necessitates wage labour: capitalism. The risks generally have to do failing to increase growth and therefore going under due to lack of owner capital. A democratic economy has no owners, only a collective workforce who will together use their resources to fund the company and pay their own wages - this means there is no need for growth. That huge risk no longer exists.
Yes, yes, once there’s a communist revolution that actually results in “real” communism and thus utopia get back to me. But, umm, we’ve had several attempts at communist revolutions and they never seem to actually turn out that way, largely because of a combination of people being greedy (good luck fixing that) and communist revolutions tending to create the sort of power vacuums that lead to authoritarian takeovers in relatively short order. Although, under that system good luck creating games that don’t glorify the Party, because that is of course the purpose of all art.
Failing to increase growth is not necessarily a problem. Failing to generate revenue in excess of costs is a problem. The need for endless growth is specifically an issue for publicly traded companies, because the charter almost necessarily says the function of the company is to increase shareholder value, and shareholders are going to do whatever they have to do to increase both their dividends and hypothetical sale value of their shares as much as possible, because that is what most benefits them. The incentive model is a bit different for a co-op.
<span style="color:#323232;">If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op
</span>
That’s not even worth thinking about. We live in capitalism. Of course working with a capitalist model would work best - it’s the only way to ensure profits for the owners.
Of course it is worth thinking about.
You’ve got basically two scenarios - one in which a business owner assumes the risks of operating the business and pays workers an agreed upon wage regardless of the revenue that results. In this case the worker gets the same benefit for their labor no matter what, and the owner is attempting to get more value from the worker’s product than he paid for it in wages, supplies, and materials. If he does, he reaps the benefit and if he doesn’t he eats the loss.
In the other scenario, the workers and the owners are the exact same people. Meaning the workers assume the costs of operating the business and the risks that it won’t result in revenue in excess of those costs but also reaps the benefit if it does. Sometimes this occurs as a co-op, but more often as an entrepreneur in which someone starts a small business in the hopes that they can generate revenue in excess of their costs and thus profit.
<span style="color:#323232;">(because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk)
</span>
You’re still assuming an owner. A democratic workplace wouldn’t have an owner - they’d all share responsibility for the business. And pay would be agreed democratically.
I’m assuming a free market instead of a centrally controlled economy. I’m specifically talking about the reason why we trend towards wage labor over entrepreneurs or co-ops, even in fields where the barriers to entry are as low as can be. Most of the workforce is unwilling to accept the financial risk of failing to generate revenue in excess of costs, and so sell their labor at some agreed upon fixed rate that they will receive regardless of month-to-month revenue for better or worse.
Why not? Why do workers and owners being exactly the same set of people make it impossible to successfully develop games? This is an extra-important question to answer because a lot of these indie dev companies are a dozen or so people in total.
Lot money divided by many people = little money
Lot money in one person not divided. Still lot
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
Also - didn’t say it made it impossible to develop a game. Nice go making weird assumptions, though.
You do realize indie devs consisting of one or two people are also businesses, right?
seems to me that there’s some sort of critical mass they need to achieve first before the fuckery sets in, small teams aren’t “evil” (yet) simply because they can’t be (yet)
EDIT I mean “evil” as in “we want profit above all else, let’s milk this cow dry until she dies”
I did this for The Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels challenge. If you beat the game without warping you could get to world 9, and if you sent in a screenshot they sent you a patch. I’ve still got it lol
Pretty sure Minecraft was the most profitable game of all time.
And you can be that reductive for pretty much all games. Run right and jump on mushrooms. Watch shapes rotate and fall. Punch cubes. Three of the other most profitable games of all time.
Minecraft is the highest selling game (beating out GTA V by 110 million units sold source), but it’s not the most profitable. GTA does have it beat there ($9.9 billion vs $3.3 billion). Though CoD has them both beat at $31 billion (source).
That’s true (to be even more precise, the GTA metric is also for the franchise…which GTAV makes up $8.5 billion of >.>). How about Candy Crush at $20 billion?
Are most video games protagonists straight? Cuz I have played way more games where the protagonist is mute and doesn’t show sexual interest in anything at all.
Like… Is Gordon Freeman straight? Doom guy? Kirby? Capt. Olimar? Red? The Prince of All Cosmos? 🤔
I’d say that video games have the most asexual representation of all forms of media.
I’ve actually heard that’s why overdraft fees are a thing. The money transfer system gets confused if you’re around zero and ends up creating money that doesn’t exist.
back in the late 00’s there was (maybe still is, who knows) an online service called “gamefly” where you could rent games. At the time the DS pokemon games would allow you to plug in a pokemon GBA cart and copy the pokemon from the GBA to your DS. So I would constantly rent GBA Pokemon games in hopes of finding something good on them to copy to my DS Pokemon game. I had it all scheduled out and everything. You could also wondertrade hacked pokemon or like really good pokemon online. I don’t remember exactly HOW you did it but I do remembering doing it.
Generally, but it has some issues. I found the C-stick to be very uncomfortable with the lack of a cap, and you can’t really press two face buttons at the same time unless one of them is A. The latter isn’t usually a problem, but certain games, like the Arkham series, would be virtually unplayable. That there’s only one shoulder button on one side is also pretty weird. The dual stage triggers are pretty neat, though, and the only other controller I’ve used with them is the Steam Controller, which has a pretty steep learning curve.
Yeah, figuring how to roll my fingers among the face buttons to do fancy stuff in Metroid Prime was tricky. I also like to use my thumbs to reach across the controller to the dpad and c stick on the opposite side so that I can change visors while on the move, for example.
I can’t play souls games on anything but a steam controller. The pads are so much better than a stick for camera movement, and the pads are incredibly useful with the games’ awkward layout for sprinting.
Currently playing Armored Core 6 with a Steam Controller, and I love it. But… the right track pad leaves a lot to be desired.
The best aspect of the Steam Controller, without a doubt, is the modularity and shareability of it. The standard control scheme a game tries to assume, most of the time it stinks. But being able to browse through community-made control schemes and finding one that works for me is fantastic. The highest downloaded control scheme for AC6 got me 95% of the way there; I just had to change the bindings of the back pedals to suit me. Now it uses the track pad and the gyro in conjunction-- track pad for big sweeping movements and gyro for small adjustments-- and I love it.
The C-stick and Z bumper are the two big weaknesses. If it had a proper twin-stick design instead of the C-stick nub, and actual bumpers that felt good, it would hands down be the best controller ever designed.
I remember laughing at people buying horse armor when Oblivion came out, and now I'm glued to the screen watching streamers drop $300 on gacha game pulls
That shirtless guy in Morrowwind was an asshole. Sending some kid into a basement to fight giant rats well knowing that it’d be their first battle and likely not surviving, while he stayed at home shirtless and well fit to remove those pestering rats, just pretending to be an alcoholic or something.
I mean your whole argument still stands though because iirc correctly the first real quest he gives is the “go into the bandit filled murder robot dungeon and find a tiny ass Rubik’s cube”
Shout out to Deus Ex: Human Revolution for baiting me into thinking I could do a non-lethal playthrough and avoid combat.
There are forced boss fights in that game that require you to engage in firefights against bullet spongey enemies. I had put all my points into stealth. Not fun!!!
They did in the directors cut or whatever the revised version was called. They got so much flak for the boss fights (because they were contracted out it seems) that they redid them entirely like a year after the game came out.
Yeah, the strat to beat them non lethal is basically unload all your massive lethal weaponry on them until they have a tiny bit of health, then tase or tranq or whatever non lethal right at the end.
Which is kind of lame, but it is basically the same as the few similar types of battles in the original Deus Ex, though some of those you can avoid various story paths or outright flee from them.
Out of curiosity… anyone know if it is even possible for Gunther to just not survive Liberty Island without you killing him?
Maybe set up TNT boxes that get shot by enemies as he escapes and blow him up? Or is he just invincible in the first level?
I did this same thing in Undertale. I “killed” the training dummy in the tutorial and had 5xp the entire game. I was unable to do a pacifist run. I later found out you can’t do pacifist on your first run anyways so it kinda sorted itself out.
I stopped playing the game after I ran into the first bullet sponge boss, tried several times to beat it with my all-stealth character and realized I’d probably have to start over
I think they updated it at some point so stealth builds could be viable. Still a pretty big oversight for the devs to releases it initially without that consideration
If I remember right, that game also had bugs with knocked out enemies that made it just about impossible to get the non-lethal achievement (bosses don’t count towards it, fwiw).
FF14 has an insane amount of filler in every quest. Sooooo many times you need to travel to whole different area just to have some completely inconsequential chat with an npc or they break a simple task into 10 steps with a long ass cast time that doesn’t show your character doing anything. I will say the story is (after a while) quite good.
At least they give new players aetheryte tickets to teleport directly to the waking sands now. No more teleporting to Horizon and taking public transit like some kind of peasant.
Yeah, the barrier for entry for new players is insane too. This guy once bought the game and he is like “Gonna rush through the story so lets play some dungeons next week”, yeahhh… nah, you are gonna play with us in a month maybe more. Also, you posted this comment twice, might wanna delete the other.
It’s not clear exactly why Hanzo has such a bad reputation, but it probably has to do with the fact that he’s a character who requires a highly skilled player to really be effective. Unlike other characters, Hanzo tends to work best as a lone wolf, so there’s often the perception that he’s not really contributing to the team’s composition as a whole. This becomes particularly irksome when a team has a hole in its composition that so desperately needs to be filled, but that last person on the team decides to go for Hanzo instead
Article here. I don’t play overwatch, so I didn’t get it.
A Hanzo Main is an insult Overwatch players throw around when one of their teammates exclusively plays the archer — Hanzo Shimada — regardless of the situation or how they’re playing.
Diehard fans of the archer will select him even when he’s clearly a poor choice, and refuse to switch characters if they’re struggling to find their mark and everyone else on their team is begging them to switch. To make matters worse, the most toxic Hanzo Mains are notorious for blaming their team for losing a game, even when it was clearly their unwillingness to cooperate that led to defeat.
Your explanation is actually good, the first article the other guy linked is trying so hard to justify bad hanzo players it’s funny.
Overwatch literally pings every time someone kills another, hanzo is a sniper, if he is good EVERYONE IN THE MATCH will notice. Good Hanzo players don’t play away from their teams, their range compared to Widow is low and they don’t have great disengage skills, they need their team to peel for them. A lone hanzo is a dead hanzo 90% of the time
I enjoy how all of the thieves guilds in ESO are these gigantic caves directly under every city. If ES6 doesn’t have multiple cities destroyed by thieves guild sink holes I’m going be upset.
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