Capcom is 100% betting on their Japanese viewers, the west is just a “sad casualty”, so to speak. If this ends up working in their favor, expect this shit to expand to other companies and tournaments, just like pay2win did.
If you take a look at all the loot box mechanics out there honestly theirs is the least bad. STILL BAD and shouldn’t be a thing, but they’re way less in-your-face and also you can sell the boxes that you get for free just by playing and use that to buy games.
I’m not defending lootboxes but I will defend history. They weren’t the first one. The physical implementation of the same concept has been around for decades (gatchapon in the east, baseball cards in the west), the first digital implementation was in Maplestory about half a decade before Valve and the first implementation in a western game was in FIFA (whichever it was that contained the ultimate team) about a year before Valve made their implementation.
There’s plenty of blame to throw at Valve, but some of the lootbox blame, namely the one you’ve brought up, should be thrown at EA because EA was first in the western market and the industry would’ve gone down the lootbox route even if Valve hadn’t done anything.
In Western regions (North America and Europe) around 2009, the video game industry saw the success of Zynga and other large publishers of social-network games that offered the games for free on sites like Facebook but included microtransactions to accelerate one's progress in the game, providing that publishers could depend on revenue from post-sale transactions rather than initial sale.[23] One of the first games to introduce loot box-like mechanics was FIFA 09, made by Electronic Arts (EA), in March 2009 which allowed players to create a team of association football players from in-game card packs they opened using in-game currency earned through regular playing of the game or via microtransactions.[26] Another early game with loot box mechanics was Team Fortress 2 in September 2010, when Valve added the ability to earn random "crates" to be opened with purchased keys.[13] Valve's Robin Walker stated that the intent was to create "network effects" that would draw more players to the game, so that there would be more players to obtain revenue from the keys to unlock crates.[23] Valve later transitioned to a free-to-play model, reporting an increase in player count of over 12 times after the transition,[25] and hired Yanis Varoufakis to research virtual economies.[27] Over the next few years many MMOs and multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) also transitioned to a free-to-play business model to help grow out their player base, many adding loot-box monetisation in the process,[25][28] with the first two being both Star Trek Online[29] and The Lord of the Rings Online[citation needed] in December 2011.
Far Isle was a human colony planet, within Unified Earth Government space. The colony was the site of what is considered to be one of the United Nations Space Command’s worst atrocities; in response to a rebellion in 2492 that they were unable to quell, the UNSC razed the colony using nuclear weapons, leaving no survivors.
I assume that part of the prompt is tying back to WW2 era propaganda and a lot of those posters have yellowed with age by the time they made it into the dataset.
Yeah all AI images have a bend towards warm yellow hues. So much that If you keep feeding the output of AI back into AI it just gets more yellow over time. It’s probably something to do with training sets taking in movies and social media posts where people prefer to show themselves in “golden hour”.
Generative models (what is often referred to as AI) are opaque and it’s almost impossible to understand exactly how something got added or why it’s happening. But somewhere along the way models started to use it and no one looking at the output thought it was bad enough to not post.
I wish somebody did shove that old cunt into that suit like somebody trying to stuff a sleeping bag into the carry bag it can’t in. the trauma would be unreal.
They know nobody is going to purchase the pay-per-view, but I guess they don’t care since the alternative is not getting any money anyways. Esports was never sustainable because fans refuse to spend money, so they rely on shady sponsorships from gambling sites and Saudi money.
They’re charging for it because the Japanese audience will pay for it, and I guess they don’t want to handle it differently abroad. Fighting games, at least up to this point, have been sustainable in a way that the rest of e-sports have not. The rest of e-sports was predicated on future growth, and fighting games have only grown as fast as the money coming in, in general. (2XKO is putting out $50k in pot bonuses for a game that doesn’t look to be earning that much, and the Saudis now own SNK and treat Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting like they’re Call of Duty.)
I feel like Dota 2’s The International goes against your claim. It was the esports tournament with highest prize pool several years in a row, and it was funded almost exclusively by Dota 2 players buying The Battle pass. Valve removed battle pass like 2 years ago, but it’s still ocupies top 1 up to top 7 esports tournaments with highest prize pool: www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments.
A sustainable scene wouldn’t have dropped from a $40M prize pool to $4M. The issue is that the esports scene was not self funded, it was funded by a percentage of the base game economy.
The reduction in prize pool being related to the removal of battle pass shows that fans never cared about supporting the esports scene, they only wanted the battle pass for the skins or whatever it is that you get from it.
Even if the Dota 2 esports was sustainable, that would be one game out of dozens.
Rainbow Six Siege has had a pretty strong competitive scene for pretty much the entirety of it’s lifespan- it’s definitely fluctuated a bit in popularity, but the prize pools have always been reasonable numbers, and it’s always had decent viewership.
I understand your outrage but silence is not consent. It is fear. Apply that phrase to any other situation where consent is required and that would be considered victim blaming.
Now M$ COULD be fine with this, we truly don’t know, but they could also be afraid of how the administration would retaliate against them if they spoke up. I do agree with you when you say these companies are cowardly.
Lol, they willingly work with this fascist regime and others around the globe. Their silence is implicit consent, because a multi billion dollar company doesn’t get to cry fear in the face of the governments they willingly work with.
Stop defending corpos, they’ll gladly sell you to the government and tell your family they’re suuuuuper sorry you got nabbed but there’s nothing they can do.
I don’t really care. Idiots are easily parted with their money. Thats their fault. I’ve played CS for decades and never paid for a chest or whatever. Never had an interest.
After they start and get addicted. You’re not ill when you start . Unless you have something else going on not related. You have full power not to start. Just play the game, kill the other guy, have fun with your team. Thats all you need to do in any game. Thats all I’ve ever done in a game like CS. I don’t even notice all the other stuff. I play the game.
There was a ballot proposition in my state some years back to build a local casino. I’m not a gambler, but we all have our vices, and it’s possible it could stimulate the local economy, so I looked into it. Of the research I could find, the best-case scenario seemed to be that it maybe had no ill effects on the local populace. The worst case was that people susceptible to gambling addiction were now exposed to it when they otherwise wouldn’t have been, and that was devastating on those people’s lives. Not only is online gambling accessible to us anywhere, which is proving to be systemically problematic in things like sports betting apps now, Valve skirts current regulations to make it available to those under 21.
I think people just want someone to blame. It’s as stupid as blaming a scummy car salesman because you bought a car you can’t afford. You let yourself be talked into it. You let somebody sell you something. They didn’t take the money from your pocket. Maybe I just don’t understand because I didn’t grow in the privilege to have money to waste on digital shit in digital crates. And if my parents did (they didn’t) they would’ve never ever given me access to their banking. Thats foolish.
It’s like people who expect things to be censored because they’re too lazy to monitor their children or learn router and dns level blocking. Or for gods sake, don’t give you child a smart phone.
You share that opinion with the many libertarians in this world, but unfortunately it is not that simple (and has not that much to do with financial privilege). I know it is en vogue to dismiss scientific insight, but sociology, psychology and medicine paint a very complex picture with many internal and external risk factors.
Exposing children and young adults to a gambling system with a very low entry barrier in a space that is hard for parents/guardians to oversee means malevolently accepting that you‘ll turn some of them into addicts that would not be otherwise. It’s like selling meth at a school yard fence.
If you are not an addict, that just means that you haven‘t been in the right (wrong) situation (yet). That of course is a true privilege.
You know, we restrict and ban certain drugs like fentanyl and heroin respectively because their addiction potential is so high and can cause a lot of harm at the population level.
Sure people have individual responsibility, but it’s also unrealistic to expect most people to resist an entire social and structural environments geared around certain behaviours, like drinking alcohol or smoking back in the day. Not everyone has the same has the same ironclad will and perfect emotionless reasoning as you, especially youth–remember they used to have smoking ads aimed at kids? And now it’s vaping.
While a lot of things I can easily resist, like narcotics and alcohol, I still get influenced by certain types of ads to try things, get addicted to certain games, and eat way too much junk food. For a lot of things, you can’t know it’s going to be a problem for you until it’s a problem. Plenty of people buy a few loot boxes here and there and don’t develop a gambling addiction. That doesn’t mean gambling addiction isn’t a risk and problem to take seriously and address at the systemic level, not just leave it to the individual.
Casinos and gambling venues IRL are almost always their own thing, you can’t go one by mistake and you shouldn’t see them surfacing in unspecialized common spaces, e.g. on Olympics stadium.
In videogames the casino element penetrates recreational spaces that were mostly safe from that for years. Not as a shadow scheme with reselling/gambling on some third party site - this can’t be stopped - but in the game itself. Valve’s promotional algorythm walks around the lobby giving everyone free spins coupons, that not only reaches mentally unstable addicts, but also normalizes the practice of jerking the slot machine from time to time for the larger userbase. Every actor in that trend is a self-serving agent, but their collective influence puts a foot in the door and proclaims that gambling is a casual part of a daily life and there’s nothing wrong in seeing it everywhere, even parting with a couple of bucks recreationally, that in the end makes bazillions to the house.
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