It happens all the time on Steam and physical retail. Especially when the game is critically panned or is old enough that it’s not selling at the original price anymore.
Pretty funny to see the big budget “AAAA” games going from $70 to $5 in just a few months, while seeing an independent game like RimWorld never go on sale and have multiple DLCs that aren’t much cheaper than the base game because the former loses interest hella fast, while the latter seems to keep gaining popularity.
I think part of this has to be related to the idea that you cant do good, creative, interesting things on e the number of cooks in the kitchen gets above a certain size, which might actually be quite small. I mean look at terraria and stardew valley. Microscopic dev teams with impact the size of asteroids in terms of total effect and the long term impact on gaming.
I think “good” in media is an extension of having a singular vision for what you are trying to do. Focus too much on crowd pleasing and you lose the plot.
I completely agree with that. Even the games that made the big companies big back in the day started off being like 3-5 people, tops. Now they have hundreds of people, tons of ideas, along with limited time and tons of bureaucracy. Even if there’s just one person making the decisions, it can’t be easy frequently hearing good suggestions from other people working on the thing under you and not wanting to try and incorporate them.
Just fyi, Ludeon Studios changed their stance on sales some time ago, in fact it’s on sale right now! Never more than a 20% discount though. Factorio however has still never been on sale. But your point still stands
On the contrary, IME they significantly slowed down the early game, but they removed the early-mid-game dip right after you unlock fluids and oil processing
I just bought Biotech and Anamoly for regular price like 2 weeks ago. I hate not being able to predict the future. This way of perceiving time sucks ass.
Even if Blizzard games haven’t had a high note since 2016, I would like to remind everyone that the company still had absurd amounts of goodwill and customer loyalty for a large and corporate studio at the time, with fans owning and actively collecting literal decades of merchendise.
Things only really truly collapsed for Blizzard and saw their goodwill vanish when they openly supported and endorsed the chinese oppression of Hong Kong.
Specifically, the winner of a Hearthstone tournament was interviewed after his win and gave the pro-Hong Kong slogan “free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times”, which there was absolutely no rule or stipulation against. China demanded that the company not endorse that (because authoritarianism), but Blizzard ACTIVELY WENT THE EXTRA MILE to strip the player of his prize money and ban him from all future events alongside other punishments, specifically in the name of appeasing the chinese government.
It wouldn’t be fair to expect a game company to singlehandedly stand up to an authoritarian regime that loves to make people disappear. But it is absolutely fair to recognize that Blizzard’s actions very clearly demonstrated that they weren’t just doing this because they were threatened into it- they were more than happy to actively endorse the chinese government’s oppression of Hong Kong. And THAT is what we should always remember about Blizzard’s morals and principles, or lack thereof.
Same, was just starting wow classic with my partner as she’d never played wow before, that made us both cancel immediately and never give them another cent.
There are a couple of VERY GOOD classic pservers out there which are not only better maintained than the Blizz servers, these have also much less bots and way healthier populations and economies.
I can absolutely recommend Turtle WoW. It is such a good classic+ experience: imagine if there never were any of the wow addons but instead the base game got expanded in a meaningful and in terms of Warcraft 3 lore-friendly way. There are new and very well-done zones which were empty before. There are new items and professions without nullifying the existing ones, there are two new races and new race/class combos (to keep close to WC3 lore), there are new dungeons and raids, tons of new quests and a lot of quality of life improvements. You have many options to play how you want: restrict yourself on how much exp you get and play slow & steady, opt in for a built-in hardcore mode, activate warmode to be flagged for pvp or a combination of those. Also, pretty much all classes got rebalanced (some more than others, though) to make more builds viable without altering the game to much (more balance updates are in the roadmap). The dev team is very active and dedicated.
All the sex pests felt like a “good” reason to quit WoW but I’d say my real reason was it had become a piece of shit that didn’t value my time, and I’d honestly been looking for a reason to quit for a long time.
I might just be too casual, but I remember that half the fun of WoW was traveling. Of course, I never got into raids or pvp anyway, I leveled up and did dungeons lol
Travel (especially in older zones where you would be using portals) consists of:
Mount flying mount, point in the right direction, hit auto-run, wait.
Not really the most exciting game play experience when you’ve already flown over the area a dozen times before. Taxis are also just as bad. Other MMOs (Guldwars 2, FF14) have no problem with players teleporting directly to somewhere close to their destination. They already traveled their once, no need to force them to do it again.
and this is why i wish people would make it profitable, fuck AAA titles, give your money to indies who respect the consumers and actually just want to make a fun game.
I wish game devs would found a union that helps developers fund and publish games with no profit incentive, it seems like such an obvious thing to do and has the potential to revolutionizing how people create and play games.
No longer would we be beholden to companies, no longer would developers have to compromise their works for profit, no longer would players have to tolerate predatory bullshit.
Just good games made by passionate people who are happy to have people enjoy their works while being able to afford to live on it.
That’s what I normally do - pirate or ignore AAA’s, but always buy indies.
The problem with the union idea is that most games just won’t pay off huge investments, so there needs to be someone competent who filters out profitable games, and funds games based on expected returns…and at that point we get, essentially, a publisher company. Or maybe a cooperative. But barely a union.
Not sure what you mean. They needed more NFTs and AI from what I can tell! /s
Honestly though whenever I hear big companies like this fail, it keeps making me go back to the Steve Jobs interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
I mean, it’s not true inside a bubble. I’m sure there’s some incredible games that have been made by one person that didn’t find the kind of success that Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Super Meat Boy, etc did. But at a giant corporation like Ubisoft, they’re not on their own! They have marketing people, interns, studios and sub-studios, finance people, trend analysts, etc.
Ubisoft has some great IPs. But all of their best games came out over 20 years ago! So yes, quality is not the only thing, but it definitely matters.
Random Nintendo execs show up to your house unannounced.
“We would like to play”
You stare at them blankly for a beat then shut the door in their faces. This is your time away from the world and its demands. No one will take that away from you.
My brain just did some work. Now I can’t unseen this as that manly handshake scene from Predator. The two 'i’s are the guys, and the ‘W’ is a zoom-in of their handshake.
They don’t even say sorry. They did not use the words Sorry, Mistake, Problem, Wrong, or Fault. They say the approximation of “We see you’re absolutely outraged. We’ve decided to change our decisions. We are always improving.”
They haven’t. Ghosts of Tsushima’s PC release is going to require account-linking from day 1 for the online component. The only thing Sony has learned is that the shittiness has to be ready and working from the start.
Translated: Dear suckers who keep giving us money for half-finished products. We are sincerely sorry, sorry for getting caught. We thought we could squeeze through with this one, but apparently our PC fans are not as gullible as our console fans.
Sony just did a Unity here. How the hell can you ruin such a beloved game in a single cheer stupid move, for the purpose of just gathering data. It’s beyond me.
::: spoiler spoiler Joel is portrayed as being a part of the journey of the game. He dies in the first “chapter”. They went so far as to switch a character out for him to make it look like he would be alive for the game. And then they try to make you sympathetic to the person who killed him by making you play as them for half the game. :::
It makes my blood boil how bad pt 2 is after the first one is one of the best games ever.
Did that actually break computers? I remember hearing about it at the time but I also don’t remember having a problem. I didn’t think I took any real precautions either, I just carried on as per and nothing ever happened.
the starforce driver sometimes prevented some exotic cd drives from working or caused bsods while playing audio cds, but the cases were relatively rare
nvm i didn’t realize they were talking about a different kind of drm
Not just any old malware, but insecure rootkits that allowed ANYONE to have total control over the system with their own malware above the OS-level with no way to even know the malware was there.
That’s the version people actually play, and which has the furthest developed systems to do bigger stuff. Look up PaperMC, it enables some wild stuff for Minecraft multiplayer.
The server options available for multiplayer in Bedrock are truly pathetic in comparison.
I know. I’ve seen a lot of videos on the differences between Java and Bedrock, how Bedrock came to be, modding on Java like Feed The Beast, and multiplayer servers like 2BT2 (for those that don’t know FitMC has some good vidoes on 2B2T; it’s a neat rabbit hole to go down if you want to kill sometime).
What I am saying is I am surprised that Microsoft is still updating Java when there’s so much money to be made nickle and diming players in Bedrock edition. Like paying for skins for example. It would definitely piss off a lot of the player base but I don’t know if it would cause them to lose money in the long run. I imagine a lot of casual players are content using Bedrock and unaware of why Java is important.
Minecraft is already on the way out of the Zeitgeist of cultural relevance. The minecraft audience is mostly nostalgic grown ups now. Bedrock is kept alive by parents trying to have quality time with their kids on a safer or easier to maintain server space. The truly passionate and obsessed users, doing crazy and innovative stuff to their servers are still on Java edition. Kill Java and you kill Minecraft for all practical intents and purposes.
I feel like Minecraft surges in popularity pretty regularly. As long as people continue streaming it and posting videos of it I think that’ll remain the same. I don’t know if someone who is looking for a taste of what they saw online will know the limitations of Bedrock. They might just pick it up because it’s available on whatever platform they use.
I suppose killing Java might put a stop to the content that is being created with Minecraft and that might cause it lose its relevance but I don’t know if a majority of content creators are using Java or Bedrock.
Streamers almost exclusively use Java. There are certain popular games and mods that are only possible and/or easier to setup on JE. Achievement Hunter was one of the rare channels that used the console version at first and even them changed to the JE eventually. But they are not relevant anymore, weren’t for some time before their closure. Hyper massive servers, custom maps, automated gamerules with scripts, most of those things that make Minecraft creative and interesting to watch exist only on the JE.
Never seen so much buzz thanks to distance horizons and now every shader is building in compatibility to make some truely stunning visuals. Let alone the insanely amazing mods packs and general content!
It’s funny you bring that up. Because it’s par for the course. Bedrock is the prettier Minecraft, but JE is the gameplay Minecraft. Flashy shaders and shitty LOD have their splash for a few days. But ultimately they are not what Minecraft is about. Same thing happened with ray tracing. People think they want to play with those things because they’re shiny, but then they realize their old hardware can’t run it without lag, so they go back to their obby maps and squid game servers that look like shit but run at 60fps and are actually fun.
I agree for shaders, but distant horizons brings a level of immersion i have no felt to the game in a long time. Add this with the mod packs and its so good! (Ages fan here)
I didn’t say it is out of relevance. I said it is on its way out of cultural relevance. As in, it’s slowly dwindling over time. Nothing extremely popular disappears over night. It will take decades. And it’s not that I don’t like it, I bought Minecraft on alpha 1 and something. 14 years ago. Have played every single update until recently, and played almost everything it has to offer.
However much I love it, I can also recognize that it is no longer like the heyday of popularity around 2015, when the default YouTube page was plastered with Minecraft let’s plays, and the only non-Minecraft streamers on the newly minted Twitch brand were WoW players and speed runners. Kids are no longer making Minecraft fanfic comics, and there’s fewer Minecraft themed birthdays. Again, the average Minecraft player has a higher chance of having kids by now than being a kid themselves.
Java is quite popular online due to all the mods and the videos people upload to YouTube using those mods, but I believe in terms of number of users, Bedrock outscores it quite a bit. The barrier to entry is lower – $7 on iOS/Android and most people have phones.
actually bedrock servers are way more capable, bedrock has proper reconnect packets, custom ui frameworks (i.e. servers can do proper themed guis that look fucking awesome instead of relying on chests) and custom 3d models.
I’m just saying that yes bedrock (and it’s server) may have better mod features, but the mods end up being sold on the minecraft marketplace or whatever anyway. Yes you can download and install mods for free, but I bet the majority of players just buy them.
I’m talking about features available to server software, not addons.
bedrock servers can use custom 3d models natively, build fully custom native uis (instead of relying on chests) and reconnect players to other servers without resorting to terrible hacks like on the java edition
also bedrock server software itself is objectively much more efficient, there’s no point of even comparing it to the java server software, even unofficial servers like papermc.
It’s the main reason why cubecraft’s CTF mode is severely limited on the java edition, they basically crippled it just to allow the server to keep up
yes, the marketplace sucks ass but my point still stands.
Any argument in favour of respecting the minecraft copyright went out the window wheb The Hated One sold out the playerbase to microsoft for two billions.
Good, I hope this means we get even more turn-based RPGs again. I’m 100% fine with people enjoying the new action-oriented RPGs like Final Fantasy has become, but I love turn based so much more. I didn’t like that it felt like there couldn’t be both on the market. There is just something way more enjoyable to me about turn-based as opposed to mashing buttons and twitchy moves like I’m playing God of War.
I agree, I’m glad games like this (and baldur’s gate!) are enjoying so much success and attention right now. It’s better for everyone if we have a variety of polished experiences in different genres.
That being said I don’t often find myself enjoying turn based games lol. Even going back to the super nintendo, I massively preferred Secret of Mana (with it’s real time combat system) to Final Fantasy. There’s just something extremely satisfying to me about a well done action-oriented RPG, where you feel like your skills are improving alongside your character’s.
“Well done” is not to be overlooked, of course. I was quite disappointed with final fantasy 16, as it truly did just feel like mashing buttons
I never really liked turn-based RPGs until I became an adult with a full time job because they’re perfect for when I’m burnt and wanna play video games but I’m also too burnt to play most games.
I imagine there’s a lot of millennials/early gen-Z that feel the same way. A whole market that is just starting to be tapped
Final Fantasy moving away from turn-based because it's "outdated" is peak Square silliness. Have they ever heard of chess, card games, board games, DnD, Civilization, Persona, Dragon Quest, XCOM, Pokemon, Darkest Dungeon? If anything, DMC-style character action games are far more niche.
Funny enough Yoshi P was the one that said turn-based was outdated and he's worked on DQ before but only the MMO, arcade games, Minecraft clone and a Wii FPS thing. I think it's pretty obvious he just doesn't like the genre. DQ11 was the breakthrough hit in the West and he had nothing to do with it.
I seem to remember them being surprised by the success of Bravely Default, not expecting a deliberately old-school RPG to appeal to modern audiences.
The cynical part of me believes this is performative on their part - they know a game like that will be popular, but it won’t be the most popular thing ever and they won’t make all the money. So, they try to push bigger games that are more easily monetized in hopes that people will just forget their own preferences.
Could also just be their own tastes evolving. I used to love turn-based combat RPGs and the RTS genre but I’m kinda over both of them now. If game makers lose passion for those kinds of games, then the “it won’t appeal” might even be more of a “I’m not into it, so if I do make it, it won’t be very appealing” than a “no one wants this kind of game”.
It turned me off the FFVII remake, which is a shame as I really wanted to experience the original but in a modern style. I guess I may actually boot the original up instead; I wonder if there are mods to make it more playable.
I've got the benefit of nostalgia I guess, but I played through the original a few months ago for probably the fifth time in my life and still enjoyed myself. The main things that has aged is the ugly character models, this mod can improve those. Might want to look as some of these as well. You want to play through the original+crisis core first before the remake for... reasons.
Yeah it’s far more relaxing to play a jrpg with good music, nice looking environments when I can actually listen to the music and look at the world instead of focusing on the enemies tells and dodgeroll at the exact perfect moment. Nothing wrong with perfect dodgerolls. But I don’t want them in all my games.
I have the feeling there are like 20 turn-based rpg going out every month, it’s one of the most seeked genre out there. Sure, AAA titles kind of strayed away from it but the AA and indie markets are still very much into them.
Would it be so bad if games didn’t have insane budgets? Most of my favorite games from the past decade are from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.
I can’t remember who it was. A famous actor, anyway. They were talking about what’s happened with movies. There’s nothing in the middle.
It’s either $100m+ or less than $3m. Either it gets a big producer and they pump so much money into it that it must be safe because it can’t lose money. Or is a small producer doing it for the love, but a small budget doesn’t go very far. The risky narratives done well would be funded somewhere between the two extremes but it’s just not how it’s done anymore.
In a strange way, to get more money in for the riskier productions, we need to get the money out of Hollywood. Can’t see it happening, myself.
You can’t? We just had a summer filled with high-budget flops, and now both the actors and the writers are on strike meaning that the studios won’t be able to recoup their losses any time soon. Add the reduced to non-existent theatre turnout in the first couple of years of the decade due to COVID and there’s been a hell of a lot of money “getting out of Hollywood.”
I disagree that a flop means lost revenue. This is an industry that’s so adept at hiding income to avoid paying taxes, actors, and every other studio worker that dodgy accounting is known as ‘Hollywood Accounting’. Maybe we’re talking about different things. When I say Hollywood, I mean the movie industry as a whole.
Hollywood has failed to capture some income streams. From theatres, for example, as you say. But there’s still too much money to be made (and too much propaganda potential) for enough big money to leave that the problems of monopoly finance capital go away.
High budgets are killing the film industry. In the case of gaming, it plays a factor, but greed is probably the main issue. Most big budget AAA games in the past made large amounts of money even if they didn’t have universal appeal. Because companies realised that they could make large amounts of money off loot boxes, microtransactions, cash shops and battle passes, they started trying to funnel players into games, mainly so that players would buy things. That’s one of the main reasons the AAA industry is getting worse: games need to appeal to as many as possible, while coming out as fast as possible, all so that players will buy the overpriced in-game items endlessly shoved in players’ faces.
I love me some good AAA games and want them to stick around. But I think it would be much better if they were a bit fewer and further between, and the big studios shift to more regular AA games, and give their devs chances to do some more oddball stuff with even lower budgets. More expiremntation and risky projects can only enrich the industry.
You never know what those experiments can lead too. There will be a lot of failures however someone is going to look at the failure and realize what needs to be need to be tweaked.
Good point. And it’s a lot easier to accept ‘failure’ (there could still be something learned in a game that doesn’t quite hit the mark) if the budget isn’t astronomical.
There are games like FFXV that get quite creative on a big budget. (Not sure if it’s AAA.) I enjoyed that game but some of the novel features bugged me a little bit and they skimped on some important features, I thought. Maybe there’s a better formula for trialling novelty than an all or nothing approach.
Yep. The final fantsay series was a bunch of lads in an attic. Now those lads are legends… with a fantasic legacy. Yet I’m still waiting for ES5 and GTA 6…
BG3 did have a pretty huge budget though. I would totally be fine if games took notes from BG3 but reduced scope a lot. Bioware used to make games similar to BG, but they stopped and now make garbage. The idea other studios can’t make similar games is wrong. They can’t make games this big usually though without publishers telling them they need to include microtransactions and other bullshit.
Black Isle was the publisher, Bioware developed the game. Baldurs Gate lead to BG2, which lead to Neverwinter Nights, which lead to Knights of the Old Republic.
Kind of! Though if we are being entirely honest, the real thing to blame is the head writer being replaced and the dev time cut by almost a year.
Personally would have enjoyed it more if they went with the Biotics/Dark Energy that Drew Karpyshyn had put down groundwork for, rather than the AI subplot that Mac Walters hastily slapped together for ME3 that directly contradicted ME1 threads and subplots.
True, but IMO the link wasn’t nearly as strong between KotoR and ME as any of the previous games in the link which were all clearly D&D based systems. ME1 had a lot in common with KotoR but there were some major deviations too as they moved away from the table top standard.
Yep, you’re right. I didn’t realize they were a studio at that point. Yeah, they have no reason to complain about new expectations. They could have created BG3 if they had kept doing what they were known for, but EA and the money were too good…
You could give studios unlimited budgets and they’d still complain they don’t have enough time / money to get things right. The rhetoric is that “games are just so complex nowadays” and that justifies their 4/5/6 year development periods.
I’m not seeing the complexity that warrants that type of long development period. The visual fidelity on some games is impressive, but is it actually worth that 5 year dev time?
“Emulators are only OK when we specifically release them for our own hardware to run an extremely limited catalog that we hand pick and then charge the price of a brand new release for. Everyone else get fucked”
They’ve been suspected of selling downloaded ROMs several times, but the incident with the most evidence was when they released a port of a GBA collection of Medabots games on the switch eShop using a pirated version of the mGBA emulator. Like: there were strings of code matching from the original emulator.
The EULA of mGBA actually allows commercial use, but Nintendo didn’t credit the emulator or the author, making it piracy.
It isn’t eBay where anybody can sell anything. Nintendo curates and specifically authorizes all games sold on the platform, and they also license the right to emulate their legacy hardware in commercial releases on their platform.
They charged money to allow the sale of pirated software.
I thought this was a 3rd party company, not a Nintendo 1st party product. I can’t remember the name, but it was a company that rereleases out of print games on physical cartridges.
Git off discord tho for game development, it ends up causing only the types of people who are really active on discord to interact and give feedback and I have seen that really send some games off the rails as the rest of the playerbase begins to get the vibe the game is being developed for a small sliver of the game’s fans (the ones on discord and really active).
Seriously. Definitely gives the loudest a place to control how games should work. And when they don’t get their way, they get loud in other places and make drama.
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions. I see devs have some issues with Steam forums because of the toxicity, but most still take feedback from there too.
Usually Discord is just a funnel to redirect feedback to an internal backlog though. Together with all the other channels, including in-game reporting tools.
Any dev worth their salt knows to balance and weigh the feedback across all channels. Discord is easy for quick troubleshooting and frequently asked questions.
I am sure most devs who primarily interact with their game’s community through discord believe they are listening to feedback from a variety of sources, but it is clear to me in every case I know of where a game has “join our discord!” plastered all over the store page that functionally the only place where your feedback will actually be taken seriously and get to the devs is discord.
That might just be the instant chat nature of Discord and how it’s easier to get a reply on there. I’m sure if you went the classic route of sending email it would be acknowledged as well, generally speaking.
One of the biggest mistakes I keep seeing devs make is listening to the no-lifers who live on social media. Especially the content whiners: fuck content, make the game work right first.
Speaking from experience giving the loudest users real time access to your sanity isn’t great either. Better to corral them into a slower mode of communication, such as an old fashion forum or use githubs “discussions” feature. Then you can spend your weekend on unwinding without a bunch of kids screeching that they’ve been ignored because you missed some message that was checks notes 200 paragraphs of back scrolling.
p.s. its 1000x worse when you inherit this kind of “community” from someone before you who let the monkeys do whatever. All I can say is thank god discord has that slow-mode feature now.
My wife got me a copy of Mass effect Andromeda as a gift once. She bought the physical copy (or so she thought) since that makes a better gift. When I opened the case, there was literally nothing in there but a code for EA Origin on a sticker.
Ea games are awful for this. I bought sims 4 when it first came out and had the same issue. It’s so cool that I can’t own games even if I try to buy the physical copy. I’m just glad that other companies haven’t been doing digital only hard copies.
I mean, do you even have a bluray drive on your PC? That’s why they do it, I remember having the option to buy San Andreas on one dvd or 8 cds or something, precisely because people don’t often replace their drives.
Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn’t happen much. GOG isn’t gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn’t going to support DRM free AAA games.
Steam is privately held, so there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there’s some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn’t worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
It’s more complicated than just one law that says “you must be a bastard” I admit, but fiduciary responsibility is a core requirement of any publicly traded company and very much is legally enforceable (this parenthetical aside stands in for about three pages of niche caveats and overly wordy exceptions that I’m just going to shamelessly handwave away). At best a CEO might be found to be civilly liable, but peasants non-C-suite employees are criminally charged for neglecting their fiduciary duty every day in the US.
Absolutely, but fiduciary responsibility, has never and was never intended to mean absolutely maximizing profits and especially at the long term expense.
That was a twisted idea that was put forward in the late 70s early 80s as a means to justify destroying companies for short term gain.
If you breach fiduciary duty the best thing you can hope for is to be fired. Executives have been criminally charged for it as well though. And while it has to be an intentional act of malfeasance, that gets pretty blurry when the shareholders hire thousand dollar an hour lawyers to come after you.
So while yes, the root cause is greed, the system itself is setup to feed that.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Not only do they not understand, they actively don’t care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
Because most of these MBA fucks don’t understand the concept of piracy being a service problem. They have run perfectly fine systems into the ground because they insist on making it infinitely harder to use legit services than to just rip shit off.
Thats interesting, I hadn’t connected those before. I think it would be hard to argue in favor of separate expectations for inflation of wages and the companies profits.
Like I understand having a stellar year, but the goal is still set the same, and its fine to return tk that baseline next year. Or maybe even doing well one year means we can lower the goal next year, or bank the difference for bad weather years.
Would be interesting if companies had an interest in the long term like that.
Oh geez there’s so many people tend to write articles about the general phenomenon rather than specific examples.
One of the biggest recent examples though has got to be Boeing. While they’re a publicly traded company, they resisted the call of greed above all until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and the MD executives won the battle for control of the merged company. Things went on a decades long slide after that which resulted in hundreds of deaths and a chain of high profile mechanical failures we’re still not sure is over.
For privately held corporations it’s all about that new leadership. In fact around 70 percent of family run ones fail in the second generation. But any generation can run the business into the ground or change it up. Bancroft and Barings are great examples of that. Barings was 232 years old when it went bankrupt under mismanagement.
There are lots of finger-pointing here. Funko said the takedown was done by their partner, BrandShield. BrandShield said it was a URL-specific (or is it subdomain?) takedown, not the whole domain. The registrar, Iwantmyname, responded said takedown by taking down the WHOLE domain.
I think Funko shouldn’t have trusted AI to do legal-related stuff. BrandShield is a stupid idea born from the AI-hype. It’s stupid and shouldn’t have existed. Iwantmyname is just as incompetent if not more–they haven’t even released any public statement about this. Their customer support are also slow to response apparently.
Itch.io should move domain registrar. Funko should stop using BrandShield, it only damages their brand more.
Also what’s up with Funko calling someone’s mom lol. that’s stupid
I also think that this is why AI won’t replace our jobs. I’ve seen many instances where technologies replaces jobs, but this ain’t it
I think Iwantmyname may be the worst player in this story.
Everyone else kind of did what they were expected to do:
Itch provides a platform for user generated content and took down some questionable content when asked.
Funko is an IP based toy company and asked a tech company to protect their IP online
BrandShield is a fucking cancer of a service that acted aggressively to protect its client’s interests
But:
Iwantmyname is meant to provide a domain name registration service, it’s a cutthroat industry where often times customer service is viewed as an unnecessary cost, but itch was their client and they should have been helping itch respond to the notice in a manner that allowed it to continue to exist. Instead they were willing to shut it down without any real dialog.
The rest might be decent business partners if you are looking for their kind of service but Iwantmyname isn’t to be trusted.
Agree, though I would not use the word “decent” about BrandShield or Funko. Being harmfully lazy and immoral legally and according to contract is still harmfully lazy and immoral.
While the registrar should have made more to understand the situation before acting, it’s important to keep in mind that according to itch.io, the request was not a DMCA takedown but an accusation of “fraud and fishing”. There’s probably a very large legal exposure for a registrar to let criminal website use their service if they are made aware of it, so reducing their liability is probably their highest priority.
BrandShield is inexcusable for using such a claim as a first step.
Also: brand shield says they only wanted the url gone but you don’t get that when talking to the registrar. Registrar are all or nothing, so clearly they knew they were doing this
The question is are they really that incompetent, or are they really that malicious? Add in mislabeling the report as fraud instead of infringement, I lean towards them being malicious, but I guess that could also be gross incompetence. Either way, Brandshield looks terrible.
The Idea to use AI to detect possible copyright infringements isnt even that bad. Its gets bad when you trust the AI to be able to tell things apart. If the alerts from the AI aren’t reviewed by humans it is doomed to fail.
lemmy.world
Ważne