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.
As one Reddit commenter put it: “I thought Capcom organised this circuit as a marketing tool for the game. Makes no sense to charge viewers to watch it. And esports is, unfortunately, still way too niche for that to be profitable.”
It’s shooting themselves in the foot, not their audience. Their audience has plenty of Street Fighter tournaments to watch.
Where the Trump-as-Master Chief post is merely cringeworthy, the Homeland Security message is flat-out dangerous. Comparing immigrants in the US to a parasitic alien life form that infects and annihilates advanced societies is not deeply offensive, it’s also rooted in the worst of human history: As seen in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch of the Holocaust and “cockroaches” in Rwanda, to name a couple recent examples, dehumanizing the “other” so you can more easily inflict cruelty, injustice, and horrors upon them is hardly a new technique, and the US government’s messaging was not subtle.
You might think that using imagery from one of its best known videogames in a call to “destroy” immigrants would prompt Microsoft to action, or at least to express some small modicum of disapproval. For now, at least, you would be wrong: Rather like Nintendo, which eagerly picks copyright fights it knows it can win but kept its mouth tightly zipped when Homeland Security used Pokémon to promote violent immigration raids, a representative told PC Gamer that “Microsoft does not have anything to share on this matter.”
Unexpectedly good political commentary from checks notes PC Gamer
… Did they not realize that the UNSC is an authoritarian fascist organization, and the Spartan program was originally aimed at fighting “rebels” who wanted to have control over the planets they lived on?
Literally the MC was kidnapped and experimented on to become a killing machine for the military junta for the express purpose of murdering colonists. No pay, no benefits, no end of contract.
Just like with Starship Troopers, satire like this goes flying over people’s heads so low and fast, it breaks the sound barrier and loosens dentalwork.
Yeah. I’m waiting on them to show ICE agents as helldivers or something. That IP could not be more clear about it’s parody of the far right “freedom” quislings.
I’m actually starting to think it’s on purpose. Just like with spam email with misspellings and the kind of ear-marks that warns off smart people, the only ones left to click on “win a free iphone” are easily duped. Going after people that are drawn in by iconography and optics, but fail to understand nuance and the substance behind them, may be entirely the point.
I’ve been saying it for months, but fascists are “stupid” for the same reason Nigerian prince emails are always poorly written, and full of spelling and grammar mistakes…
Trump’s tweets make a lot more sense if you view them in this contey
One of my most surreal gaming experiences was playing helldivers with a player I didn’t know. They said they liked the game because it “wasn’t political”. I was just fucking flabbergasted.
He’s right. It’s despicable. Trading card games, too. The thing with Valve is that, outside of this monetization of online games, they’ve unquestionably had an enormous positive impact on all sorts of things in this medium just by way of sheer market forces. They’ve done a lot of great open source work, and they’ve helped create a viable exit ramp from Windows. Despite claims of monopoly on PC, they’ve created more market competition than we could have ever hoped to see otherwise. A lot of what they do is informed by what they would want to pay for if they were the customers. That stuff can be true, and at the same time, they have directed their online games in a data-driven way toward whatever creates the best results, and that result is legalized (mostly, for now) gambling for children and other addiction-driven spending behavior via battle passes. The worst part is that if they ever arrived here by accident, they’re not remorseful enough to stop, since it makes so much money.
Rejecting monetization strategies that look, function, and feel a lot like gambling doesn’t mean players will always appreciate their alternatives, however. Hall said that even he is frustrated by the “Paradox model” of paid expansion and DLC packs his studio RocketWerkz chose for its survival game Icarus after moving away from a free-to-play scheme.
It’s been years, and I still scoff at the criticism. The Paradox model is to ask a price for a good that they produced. If you don’t feel it’s worth it, you don’t buy it. They don’t obfuscate the details of what’s in the expansion; they don’t make things available for a limited time only; they ask what they feel is a fair price for a product. It’s the only method of monetizing a video game that doesn’t feel scummy to me. If Hall doesn’t like monetizing Icarus that way, he needs to scope his projects down so they can put a bow on the last one and move on to the next one more quickly.
Im sympathizing with both sides of the conversation. Grand strategy games are so complex and can be supported for 10+ years so it makes sense that they regularly make DLCs to support development.
But they’re not totally optional/unnecessary. The problem is that many games are balanced around the new DLCs that sometimes you’re at a disadvantage if you dont buy them. I remember some drama around crusader kings where some mechanics don’t make sense unless you buy some DLCs
I agree. Strategy game do occupy a weird space, EU4 was a go to game for me for like 10 years. I appreciated the support for the game and did buy the DLC that changed mechanics (skipping most flavour packs). I remember people complaining about janky mechanics without DLC, but I know others would rollback to previous versions.
Funny thing is that despite playing EU4 for years and really enjoying the game. I feel little urge to upgrade to EU5.
That’s like 10 development years worth of additional content. There’s not many games that get that much post release dev time without a valid monetization strategy.
You have a point but the cost of Paradox DLCs FAR exceeds the development time most of the time. You really have to do your research before buying anything
I feel like doing research shouldn’t be an issue for people playing Paradox games, where it takes hours of research in the tooltips just to understand the mechanics.
That said, my research for new Paradox DLC usually consists of hovering over it in the store, ignoring anything with reviews less than mixed, taking interest in those with positive, and reading the first dozen reviews of the mixed ones, and that works well enough.
I think that’s a fair critism, but also it’s not like people get a dlc buying addiction. It’s not necessarily predatory (although it could be if the base game was incomplete and needed to be fixed by DLCs) like gambling is
The price is off-putting because we can see the sticker in order to get sticker shock. But lootboxes and gambling have no upfront sticker, the true cost is obfuscated and extended over years. In that regard, Paradox is much more transparent than Valve.
That being said, my beef with them is their "subscription for DLC" model, at least the version I saw being rolled out for EU4. That and the free updates tend to be fairly unbalanced if you don't also buy the corresponding DLC for that update. That seems skeevy... but still not as skeevy as lootboxes.
He is right. And remember you pay for a subscription you don’t own the game or dlc :
“As a Subscriber you may obtain access to certain services, software and content available to Subscribers or purchase certain Hardware (as defined below) on Steam. The Steam client software and any other software, content, and updates you download or access via Steam, including but not limited to Valve or third-party video games and in-game content, software associated with Hardware and any virtual items you may acquire in a Subscription Marketplace are referred to in this Agreement as “Content and Services;” the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as “Subscriptions.””
We do have to hold Microsoft to a very slightly different standard, because they’re a Military Contractor. They’re not going to risk hundreds of billions of dollars to take a stance and make a statement. In that sense, this should not surprise anybody.
It is, though. It’s one thing for some random artist to condemn the current admin, a totally different thing for a massive military contractor to. That is a different standard.
If Trump made himself an AI Trump Mickey Mouse video and somebody specifically asked reanimated Walt Disney for comment, that would be shocking. If a similar circumstance happened to Boeing or Northrop Grumman, then… No shit no comment.
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