The wild monetary successes of Call of Duty and Fortnite send a clear message: treat unsupervised children as prey and you will earn billions of dollars
I have an issue with the idea that Borderlands is dominating gaming news. I didn’t even realise it had launched so I wouldn’t exactly call it popping off the shelf.
I was going to comment the same thing. Maybe it’s just the circles i’m in, but like the only thing i’ve heard about it is the price and the performance issues on PC
Yeah but I would have known thwy had released because they would have been advertising or something. I don’t feel like anyone’s spoken about Borderlands since that comment about how it should be $90 or whatever.
That’s interesting, because without even really looking for it, it came up in Nintendo Directs, Keighley presentations, Sony presentations, and any discourse about games moving around release dates on account of GTA VI. For whatever reason, this game’s release date was moved up by a couple of weeks over its initial release date announcement, and that pretty much never happens, so it made headlines for that too. Oh yeah, and while trying to watch streamers play Borderlands, those streams have been interrupted by ads for Borderlands 4.
I get where you're coming from, I found out Borderlands 4 launched when I saw the news about it having performance issues. That said, if you look at Steam charts Borderlands 4 is just smidge below Silksong numbers and at the time of writing this comment Silksong is the 4th most popular game and Borderlands is 6th most popular game, barely beaten out by a game called Banana (which I've never even heard of and I have no clue why it's that popular).
I get what kind of a game it is. I don't get how that is so popular. We're talking about player counts that not even Destiny 2 could reach. The only rational conclusion I came come to is that those numbers have to be botted.
my guess is that a lot of people let the game idle in the background to farm items, that’s why it’s so “popular”. It’s not “active players”, it’s just a large number of people farming items in the hopes to get one they can sell for a larger sum.
Afaik it has been in the top charts for over a year.
Kojima, the driving force of Metal Gear is gone. What is left is a corporate committee who through focus testing and guesswork try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
They will make any new version look and feel as much as possible as the previous games, only deviating for committee-approved reasons of monetization, trend chasing, or marketing appeal.
What they will not and can not do is to strap a rocket to the roof of Metal Gear Solid, take a hard right and drive the car off the road and into the hills and launch it over Mount Everest. They don’t have the will, the auteur ability, or the trust of the fanbase.
Kojima could do that, which is what made the franchise what it is today.
MGS is dead, but Konami owns the pelt. What comes out next is just taxidermy with animatronics.
As far as I’m concerned the series is definitively over. 5 was the final. You don’t really need Kojima for remakes, just a team of good devs who love the series. But I also don’t trust Konami to pull that simple thing off. What is with the really bad “remake” ports from all the game companies in the last few years? Is it that hard to remake a game?
As someone who thinks Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the best Metal Gear since Solid 1*, I really do wish it had become an ensemble world. Platinum doing Raiden/Grey Fox. Imagine IOI making an ACTUAL stealth game set in that world. Hell, I could even see a timeline where Arkane made a game where you play as The Cobras. Instead, we just kept going back to the Snake well and had ever increasing dissonance between cutscene, boss, and normal gameplay characterizations.
As for bad remasters/remakes: A lot of that is that this is The COVID Year in terms of releases. These are most of the games that would have had most of their dev cycle during lockdown and were heavily delayed or had massive scope changes to meet release windows. Sometimes that means we get truly amazing games (BG3) and sometimes that means we have shovelware that just needs to avoid sunken cost fallacies.
And the other aspect is that a LOT of studios, particularly Japanese ones, are in the process of upgrading their tech. I loved Like a Dragon: Ishin (and am so excited for Gaiden next week). But that was a VERY small scope/ambition game (a mostly beat for beat remake of one of the lesser PS2 games) that was pretty openly about exploring Unreal Engine. And there have been a lot of games that are less open about “Hey, we are mostly dicking around to see if this tech works for us”.
*: 3 was awesome but very much “Empire Strikes Back”… in a lot of ways including the conspiratorial “So did the Creator actually write this? Because a lot of signs point to ‘no’”. And 5 was an awesome sandbox with no plot or pacing to speak of
I played the main series and never played the side, PSP games like peace walker, so I was completely lost when playing 5. I was wondering what this setting and people were for a while, until I realized I had to go back and read up on peace walker.
Having played Portable Ops (fine), Peace Walker (fine), and Acid 1 and 2 (FUCK YEAH): 5 was still mostly nonsense.
All you get from PW/PO (since PW largely felt like a redo of PO and PW was a prototype for the format of TPP):
This random lesbian was in love with The Boss but ended up fucking Huey and is Otacon’s mom. And somehow that is the least problematic portion of her arc.
Paz is basically the jailbait version of EVA in that she is a spy who betrays you but also everyone wants to fuck her but her true love is, and always will be, Big Boss. And don’t ask how old she is because nobody wants to know that.
Chico is your loveable sidekick that you never really gave a shit about but he is like 12
Big Boss has either stopped or started using Big Boss as a title for the umpteenth time because we can’t play as someone not called “Snake” and has something that may or may not be Outer Heaven built on an oil rig.
Don’t think too hard about why Skullface is basically just Hot Coldman but more of an edgelord.
A friend summed it up perfectly: Ground Zeroes works a LOT better if you pretend that Peace Walker didn’t exist and this is just “the adventures of Naked Snake”. Similar to how we never really know what Solid and Otacon did as an NGO before they became international terrorists in MGS2.
I hate it when developers make what they say are side games in a series essential to canon, especially when they don’t tell you they’re doing it or when they go into the side game not planning to make it canon and then decide it’s canon during or after development.
Or I should say, I hate it when developers make the next main series game assuming you’ve played the essential “side” game and leave out or half-ass their catch-up for people who haven’t played it. I call it “Chain of Memories syndrome” after when Kingdom Hearts made Chain of Memories essential to fully understanding KH2.
What they need to do is take whoever the next director of the game is going to be, strap them to a chair Clockwork Orange style and mix the entire Criterion Collection and Evangelion for about a year or two.
Then just for good measure have them write a page of names and slap them anytime a name nears anything of normal.
Then, and only then, should they be allowed to start working.
try to keep the franchise on the road roughly in the same direction it has been going and avoid crashing into stuff.
Based on their last attempt they couldn’t even manage that. Have we already forgotten that as soon as Kojima left the company, Metal Gear Survive came out?
PS, Kojima has a really cool Instagram where he posts his thoughts and stuff he likes, if anyone is a big fan and wants to sub to him. Dude has some radical tastes lol
I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like “that ones got real bad reviews” and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.
“Hey gonks! Remember that game we released and was dirty as hell but you all gave up the eddies because we told you it was preem. We finally have the game we should have released just 3 years later. Go ahead and flatline your 200hr characters and reboot.”
Same. But I have wanted to explore other characters. My current one I made a baseball bat wielding, hard punching, aggressive nomad punk with a heart of gold, with some sniper secondary skills. Basically what I imagined a nomad would be like, with the skills I thought they’d have.
I kind of want to see what it’s like as full stealth or a corpo hacker or a street samurai katana wielder or knife thrower.
If you got 200hours out of release then clear you got your moneys worth out of the game and enjoyed it, promises not kept or not.
Personally the game could’ve been better but I certainly enjoyed the one 120ish hour playthrough I did and had no major issues other than some texture bugs or weird physics, I had a capable PC though not a last gen console trying to play at being modern.
And don't circlejerk over the dead horse that this game is unsalvageable because it had a shitty release. People forgave No Man's Sky, but the internet won't let this one go.
Shitty games with shitty releases go into oblivion, the game is obviously good.
I’m not criticizing the game, I’m criticizing the company and the billionaries that preside it and decided people swallow it all up if they launched a game in the state they did.
I agree but I think it took about this long from Cyberpunk released till there was a better outlook on No Man’s Sky and I bought both at release, I enjoyed both, but I’d say at release Cyberpunk was a better game at launch (I didn’t have any bugs I got lucky). NMS did much more work on content in the following years to where it’s barely the same experience. Has been awhile since I restarted Cyberpunk will do for 2.0 though. Maybe I haven’t caught much newer content and they added it but it seemed updates were tweaks / fixes than content.
if there was a movie that was 200 hours long and you chose to stay for the entire duration and not walk out, then you either enjoyed the movie or you need to learn about the sunk-cost fallacy
I did a heavily modded 90hr playthrough and loved it. Dealt with a ton of crashes though 😅 I’m planning on playing this vanilla finally, or very lightly modded for UI and stuff.
Yea I played vanilla release over 100 hours, then some ui/qol mods. Looking forward to a vanilla 2.0 and dlc run then maybe see what some of these overhaul mods are doing a few months after that once they’ve been patched up
PC launch play was mostly fine. Only Console launch, mostly caused by massive delusion about min. spec.s, was f'd up completely. The PC issues were also the easiest to fix and even when they could fix the Console issues, they had to convince the Console store's Owners that the relaunch wouldn't be a shit show. But then I play on PC and so expect similar to last time, once I buy it after it launches.
I’m actually a fan of the game. I’m excited to play it. I just find it funny they are saying they have made it so much better that they recommend starting over. My point is that they are saying they finally got a lot of things “right” in 2.0 that we were playing an inferior game with quite a few quaility issues. Probably due to deadlines, etc. I’m happy devs continue to improve based on sales and feedback to make it better.
No it’s a good game. I like it even with the qc issues because it’s ambitious. But the devs are basically admitting that they worked on it for 3 years to fullfill the original vision and it’s so much better that it’s worth starting over.
Yeah, I’m not buying that either. I’m on a 2014 i7 and a 3060 playing on ultra. My sole issue was not running on an SSD which I resolved yesterday. That kid is clearly playing on a potato and lying.
They’ve pretty much been standard for gaming and containing the os on PC for 5 if not more. HDDs are still good for storage, but only luddites and people trying to save money in the stupidest way would have their games on them.
Playing on ultra on a 3060 ? So you’re getting 20-30 fps? Because that’s what it gets on mine with a much newer CPU. I had to turn it down to med-high to average 45 fps
Gotta love the Bethesda fanboys upvoting this one cherry picked comment. They’re are like 70 comments in there with all different combos of system specs complaining about performance.
The original looks fine; it’s gone from ‘okay for 2000’, through to ‘dated’ and back to ‘retro charm’ again. Plus you can turn up the resolution and fps to silly levels, which wasn’t the originally intended effect but is pretty nice.
All early 3D games look so bad that the slight year-on-year improvements are nearly irrelevant now. A hideous AI texture ‘upgrade’ doesn’t bring it to to modern standards, and distracts from the truly amazing game behind it all.
The funny thing is the original is only playable with fan patches so technically I can see demand for a remaster. They just really fumbled this in a weird way.
So you’re saying they’re trying to cash in on the game’s popularity with a crappy remaster? You’re either a troll or you need to work on your logical deduction skills if you can’t figure out why people are complaining.
the fuck?? why would they remaster a game that no one liked and no one wants to play? if its a crappy remaster then that sucks, but its pretty fucking obvious if you think for 2 seconds and use the context clues in your own comment.
i think this entire thread needs to work on their logic skills, take a moment to comprehend before going full piss mode. what is crappy about their remaster? their “ai graphics”? unfounded stupidity and cynicism over a game that hasnt even been released yet.
who asked for your pissy comment about it?? oh no one? you should probably stop leaving comments because no one asked and theyre gonna be bad anyways. good job trolling though fr, you did well.
right, another response with no actual substance. this is truly hilarious. i definitely work for the company that is producing this and im obviously spending my time on lemmy asking people whats so bad about it. good observation. ill let my boss know not a single person complaining knows what the fuck theyre talking about, then he will check my lemmy account and pay me for talking to dumbasses on a social media nobody in my life has even heard of. genius.
i wouldnt have considered it very alive before the remaster was announced. there are millions of people that will now be able to play it on their new consoles, and millions of people that will consider playing the game for the first time.
if you dont understand why remasters exist (obviously you dont) seek help. there is a reason why there are so many remasters, people like them and they buy them. if you arent one of those people thats fine, but if youre not the target audience just ignore it? why tf are you complaining about it and belittling it before it even exists? thats like saying they shouldve just kept crash bandicoot, spyro, tomb raider, etc. with no modernization and say fuck the new generation if you want to play it you have to endure the headaches and bs
if you dont want remasters just dont buy them. its that easy. some people want native ultrawide support, QOL features, cloud saves, graphics that arent 240p, etc. etc. without having to install 30 mods and still have a shitty experience.
sorry you have to be so pissy when people are enabling others to enjoy a beloved game.
Hey, if you’re OK buying a game that looks worse than the original for QOL improvements that could, and should, be patches, you go ahead and support exploitative business practices.
And don’t forget to continue to freak out at online strangers for not joining you on your bootlicking adventures. That’ll make your life better, I’m sure.
cannot believe you think the og looks better. that is extremely baffling. at least everyone else will admit the original looks like absolute trash. the textures are seemingly 240p or less with no actual lighting or depth. pngs posted on a blob with horror inducing hands lmao. nostalgia≠quality.
and truly none of it fucking matters because more people will still get to play a wonderful game, it is being made more accessible for everyone and being released on new platforms.
you want them to patch in a complete graphical and QoL overhaul, port it to the switch, ps5, and series x, introduce cloud saving, ultrawide and dual monitor functionality etc all for free? oh, you didnt read any of that and you are being pissy for no reason? damn.
Bullshit like this is why our industry is a mess, Nintendo may be greedy fucks but their code is good because the same dudes have been working there since the fucken 80s.
Their crunch culture is def bad (they’re going to kill Sakurai one day), but there is quite a few things they do right. They don’t lay people off and their executives take accountability. Iwata took a significant pay cut when the Wii U flopped.
They can’t lay people off, so they just put them in a room with no work to do until they get so bored that they quit. It’s the same thing but different.
Exactly, I would start taking naps and watch movies. You can’t bore or shame me into quitting, the second I know it’s a game, I will be breaking a b**** lol
forreal I write as a hobby and I spend as much free time at work sticking it to the boss by writing lol. if they literally handed me a room with little stimuli and let me bring my notebook in I’d be living
You wouldn’t have a notebook. Any and all stimuli would be banned as the purpose is making your experience horrible.
Also, you get incredibly mundane tasks as well. Maybe you’ll get a couple sheets of random symbols and are tasked to count a certain letter. And if you don’t do this task you can be laid off for underperforming.
In Japan, the barrier to firing workers is much higher than in many other places. Even layoffs for financial reasons are tough and can be challenged. This is one reason companies sit on hordes of cash here is to weather financial issues, but it also has negative economic impacts as well. That said, Nintendo are a bunch of greedy cunts IMO, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don't get a cut).
In the US the barrier to firing workers is much lower than in other countries. Even layoffs for purely arbitrary or personal reasons are easy and hard to challenge in courts. This is one of the reasons companies have little free capital and choose to lay off many workers as soon as the market looks to be turning. But it also has positive economic impacts as well. That said, EA are a bunch of greedy cunts, and I try never to buy anything new from them anymore (just buying used where they don’t get a cut, if they released any games worth owning).
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn't - it's GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
It was straight up broken for many console players.
Some PC players had performance issues.
For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
Linus really doesn’t respond well to criticism. He’s trying to act like a sale and an auction are 2 different things? If some hardware vendor tried to feed him that excuse he’d devote a whole video to it! Hell, if someone had sold one of his screwdriver prototypes he’d probably have thrown a fit and sued (as is his right)!
He’s picking quantity of videos over quality, so stuff like this is only going to accelerate.
Ignoring everything else, because other accusations seem to have more credibility, although a charity auction is certainly a type of sale, sale has completely different connotations than charity auction when devoid of context. It's a fair issue for them to have and raise.
No it’s not. It’s not how the item got out of LTT’s hands that the issue here. It’s that LTT didn’t return a fucking prototype! Sold, lost, melted down, really doesn’t matter. If I’m making products and want to send one to LMG for a review, I’m insisting on him paying a hefty deposit first, because he clearly can’t be trusted.
I see this as a “you’re technically right, there is a legal difference; BUT the issue here is not how it was passed to someone else and not returned to the owners, but that it happened at all” type deal.
The wording doesn’t matter. Call it an auction, sale, donation, grand theft, whatever you want. But that the end of the day, a small company now no longer has access to their expensive prototype. That’s very damaging to them as a business, let alone the damage that LTT caused to Billet’s image by their haphazard review process. Billet has every right to sue for damages over this, and I personally think they should.
After Silksong, Lethal Company and Content Warning were my two most played games in 2025.
I agree that calling these low-poly multiplayer games “slop” is terrible, because there is clearly a ton of love and effort poured into them. I hope the name doesn’t catch on.
Yeah, I see many people using the name without apparent malice but it feels inappropriate. Slop is low effort bullshit designed to capture the biggest market for the lowest cost, with little artistic vision. I don’t get that impression from most, if any, of these games.
I’ve heard it previously, the first time I couldn’t help but crack up because the term was so petulant and asinine. ‘They’re playing cheap games with low res graphics with their friends and having fun, someone make them stop!!’ is the vibe I get every time I hear it, and it’s still a hilarious term to me.
I’ve heard it for a while now, and when I first heard it I know precisely what it meant with no explanation. It really is a “good” (linguistically only) word. The definition and usage is asenine and counter productive, however.
I think it comes from a different place, unrelated to graphics. “Old” or “traditional” gamers are more and more getting turned off by games like among us, fall guys, and the like. Those are some early examples which popped off during the pandemic, but the “genre” of similar games is what is referred to by friendslop. Playing games with friends is fine, but many of these games would be entirely unplayable without friends, and rely substantially on interactions with friends to provide entertainment with only a loose framework to support that.
That itself isn’t necessarily bad, but the point where this turns into a problem is when a lot of these games fail or do not try to actually make good gameplay beyond that. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just describing why it exists.
There is a growing rift from the group of people that would be described as “gamers” in the 90’s, 2000’s and 10’s and the group of people that are described as gamers now, which is largely more casual than the first group. The former group is where most of the people who would use the term friendslop come from. They want games with substantial gameplay that doesn’t have to rely on social interaction, regardless if it relies on online multiplayer. The latter group is just having fun doing things with their friends, where 10, 20, or 30 years ago if they were the same age, they might have done in person while “gamers” at the time would still be playing video games.
So the “slop” part of it comes from the idea that game developers are churning out games that don’t provide much entertainment, and you’re supposed to “bring your own” fun in their framework. It also very much seems tied to the rise of youtubers or tick tockers playing these games, hyping up random social interactions and people see those 3 seconds and simply want to experience the (fake) reactions and emotions that are on display. The constant barrage of these games and reaction videos on social media is inescapable.
All of that being said, there’s no reason you can’t make a game that does all of that but does actually have good polished gameplay, but so many games chasing (and catching) this trend do not.
Let me reiterate 2 things: I don’t agree with the phrase. A game is a game and if it’s fun, it’s a good game. But also, it really has nothing to do with graphics. You can make friendslop with AAA graphics and it could fit in perfectly with all the other friendslop games.
I think your explanation is pretty accurate and I agree with your point that it has nothing to do with graphics. however..
there’s no reason you can’t make a game that does all of that but does actually have good polished gameplay, but so many games chasing (and catching) this trend do not.
Any time I see someone say this, they always fail to actually provide any examples of games that fit this description. I know you aren’t defending the term but I just noticed that parallel between your description and the explanations provided by people who criticize these sort of games.
The first time I heard of the term, and when it started getting popular, was around the time PEAK released. At first glance, it seemed like the game fit the term, but after a bit people started realizing that it actually was a fun and well designed game that has some longevity. Ever since then, people who use the term negatively always concede that their prime example doesn’t even fit their criticism, but fail to provide a list of other examples.
It really makes me feel like it’s just people complaining about things for being popular, without any actual basis for their criticism.
I think among us is a great example of this, to take the first one that got popular. It’s just a form of werewolf, blood on the clock tower, town of Salem, etc. Just distilled and simplified and put onto phones and made accessible. The “gameplay” is that of a board game, just with a few moving pngs. I’d much rather play one of the games I listed above which has more engaging mechanics with the same premise. Among us is hyper simplified, and I believe it relied on social media and the pandemic and an extremely low bar to entry to gain snowballing popularity.
It’s not a “good” game in comparison to most of its competitors at the time. But its competitors weren’t as conducive to social media reactions and didn’t have that spark of luck at just the right time to start snowballing, or lacked the accessibility of simple mechanics.
I typically do not play these games, but I see a new one on a daily basis. The problem with naming and shaming is that someone who sees something they don’t like doesn’t investigate further, but starts to notice trends and patterns over time of the same “type of stuff” on their social media feeds (or suggestions from friends). My friends keep suggesting games like this as well. A couple of them were space themed, a few were horror themed, but most of them (and I investigated every single one at the time since a friend personally suggested them, but promptly forgot about them) were in the same genre of “mediocre but fun game clearly conducive to inciting TikTok reactions”
Edit: just to make a point on the other end, I think lethal company is a pretty great game. It’s immersive, pretty scary sometimes, the “manned ship with a computer” mechanic is unique and impactful, and specific interactions with each monster, item, role, map, and weather make for a bit of emergent gameplay here and there between the normal gameplay. It’s very good, even if I think it has a shorter than average shelf life before it gets old compared to most games I like. It ALSO is conducive to TikTok reactions, but it provides new and interesting mechanics of its own.
I know this and that they didn’t specifically design for it, but it was the reason for its success, and the community instantly took notice and started designing to replicate that specific phenomenon. The success itself relied on social media, not the devs. I bet if social media in the lockdown didn’t launch it into the stratosphere it would have stayed at its original level of success.
Any time I see someone say this, they always fail to actually provide any examples of games that fit this description
Lethal Company is actually pretty fun if you’re playing it alone. That’s a positive example.
Another one is Don’t Starve Together. Great together, but Don’t Starve itself is also fun.
Among us on the other hand has no bots and you won’t have any fun without other players. However, you’d also not have fun without other players in Uno, Chess or Checkers.
Were these enough examples or did I misunderstand your point?
I don’t agree that you have to make games be good beyond the multiplayer experience. I’d love it to get my money’s worth, if I can play the game alone AND share the fun with friends I’ll gladly pay extra.
As it stands, many friendjank games only cost a few euros so I can live with them not being fun after a while or without friends. After all I used to buy cinema cards for my friends and I and didn’t have more than a few hours of fun, and cinema cards are often way more expensive than friendslop.
I agree that calling these low-poly multiplayer games “slop” is terrible, because there is clearly a ton of love and effort poured into them.
Depends on the game. Lethal Company? I wouldn’t call that slop at all. Content Warning? Yeah, no, that’s slop. It was a fun little jaunt to try it out for free, but that game felt so shallow and burned out on me so incredibly fast that if I had paid anything for it I’d probably have felt ripped off.
To me, “friendslop” doesn’t necessarily mean the game isn’t fun or has “bad graphics,” it instead means that it 1) relies heavily on friends to be fun and 2) has some element of feeling like either a cash-in or a low-effort project. I don’t count Lethal Company because it doesn’t have either issue for me. Content Warning, meanwhile, was worthless to me in singleplayer and relied so thoroughly on the camera as a gimmick that it feels like the epitome of the term. Hell, it was literally made as a break from a larger project, so I think it cinches the “low-effort” part, at least relative to other games.
R.E.P.O., however – which you didn’t mention but which I still have thoughts on – I’m torn on. On one hand, the gameplay is a more detailed and engaging form of what Lethal Company has, and it can easily be fun alone. On the other, the way semiwork interacts with their community in their news videos feels like Youtube engagement rot so strongly that it taints the game for me by extension; it (and their emoji abuse) makes me feel like the game has the “love and passion” of a dorm room dildo prank, even though it’s well-put-together enough that there’s no way that’s the case.
Edit: I should probably also add that it is absolutely possible for me to feel that a game does have love & passion behind its development, and yet still qualify to me as friendslop. I think the best way to explain this would be to liken it to a Youtuber who makes engaging and deep videos, but who also uses a lot of clickbait and algorithm-hacks to drive engagement too. It’s not that so much that the developer is being a bad or careless person so much as it is that the game itself has an ick about it, which is unfortunately always going to be extremely subjective and ill-defined. As another example: I called PEAK friendslop when I first played, softened up on that feeling over time (especially when the very excellent Mesa update hit), and then the feeling came right back when they announced some concert or other occurring in the game like they were Fortnite.
I think it’s that the world has changed into having fractured multiple cultures.
In the 80s/90s being gay was considered by general society to be an insult. If you’re under 25, the concept of something being negative being called “gay” as the standard insult just sounds made up.
But people who are 40 years old may remember being in school, and you got a D on a quiz. Your buddy might say “You got a D? That’s gay.”
Had nothing to do with actual homosexuality. It’s just that’s what society was. Being gay wasn’t accepted, and it was cool and trendy to hate on gays to the point that it wasn’t questioned if you called anything bad “gay”.
It’s impossible to place an exact date on when the culture changed, because it likely changed at different times for different regions. I assume California was the first to change.
I first noticed the shift in pop culture around 2003. There was a russian pop singer duo/band called tatu. Terrible music, but they kissed in their one hit wonder music video.
The reactions I saw on MTV were people saying they were brave for being openly gay. Whereas if it would have happened in the 80s, I’m sure they’d have gotten death threats.
And I STILL see people who don’t accept gay people.
So society is now fractured on what popular belief is. Now it’s more like several circles, who all have different views. As opposed to one giant unified viewpoint, with those not conforming left on the outside in the underground.
Because that’s just one topic. There’s other people who are ok with gay people, but not ok with trans. So thats another circle. Now imagine every single viewpoint which has a counter viewpoint.
Whereas in the 80s, something like 92% of the vote went towards reagan, and everybody conformed to the preapproved normal viewpoints. We don’t do that anymore. We each find our own meaning of normal.
Now me personally, I don’t find giving a nazi salute to be normal. But you’ll still find herds of people defending musk. You’ll also find people like me who say fuck musk, and fuck any self identifying nazi. So, another example of how different people are now in different circles.
Of course there’s always being Nazi apologists and equally there’s always been people who are just incapable of moving with the times. That’s not a new thing that’s always been the case.
The meaning of the word Gay has shifted a lot in different directions over the decades. Way, way back “gay” had the meaning of joyful and fun, without any form of connotation to sexuality. Just as a addition to your text, please don’t read it in any kind of negative meaning.
Nope, that designation goes to Massachusetts. First gay marriages occurred in 2004 and never had a prop 8 pass as late as 2008. California was a red state, redder than Florida is now, until very recently. California is a relatively recent leftward shift.
I first noticed the shift in pop culture around 2003. There was a russian pop singer duo/band called tatu. Terrible music, but they kissed in their one hit wonder music video.
Unrelated rant following:
Back in around 2002-2003 as I started becoming cognitive enough to appreciate different artists and styles, I didn’t have Internet at home (Eastern Europe yay), but we had a couple of non-local TV channels somehow. One being VIVA (the German channel, not the UK one), which at some time of day just played the week’s top 100 hits for Germany, many of which were one hit wonders. Tatu was one of them, though they were more of a 1.5 hit wonder (they’re not gonna get us was half a hit compared to the big one).
This was wonderful, because it got me hearing all kinds of music as a 7 year old that I normally wouldn’t have. Where the hell else was I going to hear The Rasmus - In The Shadows, a bunch of songs by Eminem, and then suddenly Las Ketchup Song? Or for something way less commonly known: Travel Time by Starsplash
Yeah, 43 here, went to school with a kid who’s parents must have been from the 19th century, and named him Gaylord. Holy shit, I left that school after middle school, but I would honestly not be surprised if he killed himself.
…part of me wants to know the middle name. Part of me wonders if that might be doxxing him at that point.
Because middle names are weird, but with a name like Gaylord, he doesn’t have much to risk.
He might be like “Call me Olive!”
And it’s somehow better than being Gaylord in the 80s/90s.
I think I’d just create a persona. Thats what a kid at my school did. His name was Adam, but he was like “Call me, The Jew!”
Not “Jew”, not “The Jew Kid” he specifically called himself “The Jew”. Pro wrestling was popular, and it was like how there was “The Rock”. Except he was “The Jew”.
Then one kid thought it would be funny to come in with a red armband with swastika on it. He asked The Jew if he thought it was funny. And The Jew said no…with his fist. Over and over and over and over. Usually school fights had an honor to them. Kid falls down, you won the fight. You walk away. Anyone tried contining the fight on a downed opponent, and the whole crowd would step in. They’d end the fight for you, and it wouldn’t be good for you.
That didn’t happen here. This kid went down, and The Jew just kept punching him. Over and over and over. For what seemed like forever. Nobody stepped in. Usually during fights, the crowd was rowdy. It was exciting. This was dead silent.
In normal times, The Jew was the most chill laid back easy to get along with guy. It’s 20+ years since I saw him last, and I still remember him and refer to him as that. By his request. So you can kind of get an idea of how he didn’t let things get to him. No ego. Just a good kid really.
When he saw that swastika, he just went off. And everybody had the same silent collective thought. Not to step in, and when teachers get here, we all stand behind The Jew. And we all did. Literally 30 kids all got detention for a month, because not one of us ratted out who beat the fuck out of gary. Eventually the teachers pieced together what happened, when gary came out of the hospital and was able to talk again. We still had to serve detention. Even after they “knew”, we still didn’t talk.
And now, I’ve gotten so sidetracked that I don’t even remember the point of this story. Other than to say fuck nazis. Fuck gary. And fuck anyone who owns a swastika armband. Gary had it coming.
His middle name was normal, I honestly don’t remember exactly what it was, because we barely ever spoke to each other. The only reason I knew the kid even existed was because his name was Gaylord. Jacob, maybe? Something like that.
I don’t know why you would use a third Party Tool that estimates your purchases, when it has always been right there in your account, without estimates.
Main reason for me is that I have bought humble bundles, donated to gamejams, and gotten keys off of legit and grey-market sites in the past in conjunction with buying directly from Steam. Those aren’t included in the Steam spend category.
The tool doesn’t know how much you paid for it, though, so it’s completely ignoring sales, donations and in app purchases, and just applies a price to it.
This isn't a 3rd party tool, it's a separate Steam Support page that lists your total purchases. It basically takes the data from the Purchase History section (assuming that you usually pay directly and not using Steam gift cards) and totals it so that you don't have to do that manually.
It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.
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