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BoulevardBlvd, do gaming w Discord confirms it's moving toward 'becoming a public company' as it hires a former Activision executive as its new CEO

How the fuck are blizzard execs still getting fucking jobs?!?!! Jesus Christ people, could you find a worse person to run the company?

LucidNightmare,

Probably the point, honestly. If they lose money from it, at least they made it worse for the cattle who stuck with it!

dangling_cat,

Because he “has experience managing a public company” and in his portfolio only focuses on cherry-picked KPIs and no mention of any negatives at all.

I hate that our society encourages failing up and instead of punishment because of poor management skills and decisions, they do mass layoffs and give themselves fat bonuses because of “cost savings”.

Frankly, if a company fails, they will ruin other companies; it’s never their fault because of “complicated reasons”.

SculptusPoe, do games w PC gamers spend 92% of their time on older games, oh and there are apparently 908 million of us now
@SculptusPoe@lemmy.world avatar

I have hundreds of games on steam.

I mostly play minecraft.

tonytins,
@tonytins@pawb.social avatar

My games library is so huge, and I suffer from choice paralysis all the time.

gonzo-rand19,

You might get some use out of this Steam randomizer, I've used it before when I can't pick what to play. You can apply filters too.

tonytins,
@tonytins@pawb.social avatar

⭐w⭐ Thanks!

purrtastic,

Terraria. Every time I fire up the deck to buy a new game, a few days later I am back to Terraria.

tal, (edited )
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I like the game (as well as the similar https://store.steampowered.com/app/211820/Starbound/) but every time I play it, I wish that it had more ability to create stuff that does things. Like, more Noita-style interactions with the world or Factorio-style automation. The stuff you can make is mostly static.

C45513,

This 100%. I looooove Noita and any deep systems-driven games where players explore, discover, and create content for years.

One of my favourite things is the sudden discovery that a game is much bigger and more open-ended than I thought. Especially when it happens dozens of hours in.

Cocodapuf,

I’ve been playing a lot of terraria with my son recently, it’s been a lot of fun going back to it. Coincidentally, I just saw the trailer for Noita for the first time last night, and thought “woah, that looks cool as hell…”

dovahking,

Have you looked at mods? I’m sure I saw an auomation mod for Terraria a while back.

Same might be true for starbound. But I don’t know much about its mods.

SculptusPoe,
@SculptusPoe@lemmy.world avatar

I die too fast in Noita to get too deep into it… I liked what I played of it though. Something about Starbound made it feel like Temu Terraria… I can’t put my finger on why it feels so … fake? Like physics or the way the player model moves and interacts with blocks is off or something. Maybe it is just too close to Terraria and the many hours I spent in Terraria makes anything close feel off.

SculptusPoe,
@SculptusPoe@lemmy.world avatar

I suppose in a few months, after this current round of Minecraft, I’ll be pulled into Terraria again. I had a pretty good head of steam on the way to finishing my 2 year old run of BG3 when I made the mistake of opening Minecraft… Terraria is about the only thing that could rival minecraft in addictive qualities for me. It has the added benefit that I can talk my wife into playing Terraria but she won’t touch minecraft.

CarbonBasedNPU,

There’s a group working on a terraria mod pack with all of the big mods with custom integrations. It’s very cool.

Agent_Karyo, do games w Against the Storm looks charming and cosy, but it's actually the best and most fiendish city builder I've played in years
@Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world avatar

This is a great game. They’ve managed to pull off a roguelike citybuilder; a genre combination that one would think would not work. Great visuals and atmosphere too.

Jaderick,

I played it when it came out and it was great. I loved the campaign setup. I need to get back into it with that new DLC

Starayo,

I didn’t think I would like it because I like colony sims and city builders where I’m just playing the same map for extended periods, but I gave it a try on game pass and ended up playing hundreds of hours. It’s something special.

Agent_Karyo,
@Agent_Karyo@lemmy.world avatar

It really is special. I initially tried it out because I liked the aesthetic and the map setup/setting; small fantasy colony surrounded by impenetrable forest in a post-apocalyptic world. I was really skeptical about the roguelike x citybuilder hybrid as I like long city-builder sessions with huge maps and elaborate city designs, but they pulled it off perfectly.

I have 100+ hours. I did stop playing after the one of the early access builds made some changes that undermined by core strategy, but that’s a personal thing. Really need to try out the DLC and start from scratch.

Mad_Punda,

Same!!

Dark_Arc,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

I’m in like the opposite camp… But I’ve never been able to get past the initial learning curve of the game. Something has never clicked with this one for me

fishbone,

It also runs quite well and looks great on medium and low settings. I can run it on high on my 2060 quite easily, but I don’t feel like I need to cause the artstyle works so well.

Might not be a big deal for others, but I love when games look good while taking very little computer resources.

Godort, do games w After being honored at The Game Awards for helping laid-off devs, Amir Satvat says he's received 'countless' hateful messages

Man, that fucking sucks. The work this dude is doing is worth respect.

Fogle, do gaming w Sony backs down on demand that Helldivers 2 players log into a PSN account

It didn’t even take them the whole weekend. Good.

OsaErisXero,

It's Monday in Japan, it took precisely the whole weekend.

Fogle,

Fair enough I guess

Flyberius, do gaming w An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards
@Flyberius@hexbear.net avatar

I remember when GPUs were used to fold proteins…

Snowyday,

I wore an onion on my belt

SturgiesYrFase,
@SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml avatar

As was the fashion at the time

Voroxpete, do games w Peter Molyneux is ready to disappoint us again with his latest game, a blockchain-based business sim

Only this motherfucker could make a blockchain based product in 2023 and think he’s still ahead of the curve (and not, y’know, turning up to buy tickets on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg).

zik,

It’s probably been in development since 2009 when it was cutting edge.

jkmooney, do games w The recent criticism of Linus Tech Tips, explained
@jkmooney@kbin.social avatar

I'm not really that familiar with LTT. I did subscribe to his channel, mainly because I was bemused by him borking his PC by rushing an install of Pop_OS and Steam. ("yes, do as I say", if you recall). Reading the PC Gamer article, it appears he did the same, "just drive on without thinking it through" approach to this prototype cooler. I haven't watched a lot of his videos and anyone can make a mistake but, there is an expectation that a "tech expert" show a bit of diligence. Plus, if he's showcasing a vendor, he should make sure they have every chance to shine.
.
.....this guy is starting to look like a poser now....

HellAwaits,

…this guy is starting to look like a poser now…

Not starting, always has been

Pxtl, (edited )
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

imho, what’s happened at LTT has a few separate root causes:

  1. A focus on extremely high output that means poor-quality work and poor working environment.
  2. Extreme unprofessionalism that works okay when you’re a handful of guys who are close friends and all personally invested in the mission, but not when you’re a big company with communication problems across the various working groups. This is normal growing pains when a company moves from “nimble start-up” into “big production”, but Linus has been handling it really badly, and seems like a big part of the problem. Stepping back from the CEO role was a good first step but he’s obviously still de-facto running the company.

I can’t call Linus a poser since he and his team quite apparently know a massive amount about PC hardware, but the above factors mean they’re going to make near-constant screw-ups, and now they’re seeing real comeuppance from that.

edit: I just read the rest of the allegations on Xitter and holy shit this is worse than I thought. She really buried the lede. It’s still “unprofessionalism” but a level of unprofessionalism that totally crosses the line far beyond normal growing pains. Flubbing workplace sexual harassment is a serious leadership fuckup.

imPastaSyndrome, do games w The recent criticism of Linus Tech Tips, explained

Geez what a bunch of assholes

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Well yeah, LTT has long gone fully corporate. This was a problem years ago already, it was just always weird seeing so many flock to their channel when it was clearly a rote production like a 15 years ongoing weekly crime drama, not an actual tech channel.

Their production value is often stellar, don’t get me wrong. But that’s it. That’s all they have. It’s all about optimizing the production to maximize ad revenue.

ydieb, (edited )

Imo, any large company, even if started hardcore by linus and luke (and co), will always in the end be mostly created by all the employees.

The ownership of any large company should imo always be gradually moved over to the people who work there.

Worker coops are not a silver bullet and will always be corruptible in any way any other democracy can, but at least it has the possibility to be proper, in contrast to strict founder / investor ownership where you are at their mercy.

Voyajer,
@Voyajer@lemmy.world avatar

LMG becoming an ESOP would be an interesting development if implemented properly.

exu,

If they just focused on the drama and fun stuff there would be no issue imo. The weirder videos are sometimes fun to kill time, but it’s clear they’re making a lot of mistakes (look at any server video by them).
Trying to provide accurate and in-depth reviews really isn’t their strong suit.

Evolushan,

I fully agree. But that’s the thing, if you don’t consider LTT as a tech channel anymore, like GN or whatever, it’s fine. I now consider LTT as pure entertainment, I will never go to them to actually buy a PC or a tech product. For that I go to forums, I watch multiple reviews, etc. And if the production value is all they have, I’ll just watch it like a show with actors that are - well - acting.

I’m not trying to defend LTT, what they did was shite and I feel that they should be held accountable. But let’s compare apples with apples, LTT isn’t a tech channel anymore.

Belazor,

This is how I feel about LTT too. There should never be one single location you go to for all your review needs - even if it had every single product in existence in for review.

I’ll look at LTT videos to see people doing dumb shit with tens of thousands of Britannian Monies worth of tech, sometimes there’s some genuinely good “hey, this exists” (see: PowerToys which gave me Spotlight on Windows), and sometimes it triggers a “hey I could use X, I’ll do my own research and collation of reviews”.

If they can get their Labs up and running and their tests being transparent enough that they can be peer reviewed, then Labs will be a tool in the toolbox, not the toolbox itself.

BarneyPiccolo, do games w Young men are 'playing videogames all day' instead of getting jobs because they can mooch off of free healthcare, claims congressman

I’m not concerned about some young videogamer getting free healthcare. I’m more concerned with the DOGE GOBLIN getting BILLIONS in government contracts to build rockets that blow up spectacularly, wasting a billion dollars with every explosion, just so he can quip “Just a scratch.”

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

I’m not worried about American citizens getting health care, I’m worried about Foreign Sociopathic Oligarchs getting BILLIONS in government contracts, paid for by taxes on the working class, while calling those same workers/taxpayers “parasites.”

UnderpantsWeevil,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.

RedFrank24, do games w The 'Stop Killing Games' initiative is close to its final deadline, and after that, its leader is understandably done: 'Either the frog hops out of the pot, or it's dead'

Every time I see the argument that “Oooh no you can’t release server code, there’s proprietary code there!”, I question my software development skills.

You mean to tell me when you have licensed code, you don’t wrap it with your own interfaces? I was always under the impression that it was best practice to never rely on one single concrete implementation of your interface, hence the Dependency Inversion Principle.

If you have a proprietary library you use for determining the positioning of players on a map, you wouldn’t be directly instantiating BinglyBooCharacterPositionWhatsit, you’d be using ICharacterPositioner and then using BinglyBooCharacterPositionWhatsit as the implementation of that interface, surely?

vala,

Idk if most software developers know this is what they should be doing and ignore it completely or if they just don’t know.

There are so, so many reasons to do this.

But I don’t think this really happens very often in the real world because it’s not the shortest line from A to B.

flop_leash_973,

In my experience working with devs at game studios (i’m a sysadmin/infra engineer type by trade), it is rarely them that is so against open sourcing code, or giving fans of the game the tools needed to keep it going on their own once the devs move on. Most of the devs I have dealt with would like nothing more than to see the thing they created live on and be enjoyed by people, even if they are not personally getting paid for it 10 years down the line.

It is nearly always the executives looking to make sure no one manages to enjoy something the people that work for them created without the c-suite getting paid for it first that is the road block.

eupraxia, (edited )

I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.

It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.

Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game’s kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren’t supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn’t even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I’m no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.

ipkpjersi,

Devs geting screwed over by management (not even just game devs but all devs) is a tale older than time, sadly.

NuXCOM_90Percent,

Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real “okay, let’s go back and reduce our technical debt” for the majority of games.

So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.

But also… how does that change anything? “Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works”?

catloaf,

Most devs are shit at their jobs.

Not that this is exclusive to devs. Most people in general are shit at their jobs.

Justdaveisfine,

I’m not a smart nor good developer so maybe I’m looking at this wrong, but if you’re a game Dev and you’re using Unreal Engine or Unity, aren’t you already bound to whatever license they have?

I believe if you’re following say Unreal’s structure, you’re using their server/client netcode, and while you can release whatever you’ve made you can’t use or share any of Epic’s code. That would still require users to agree to Epic’s EULA to get the full engine to compile your server setup.

Add in server handling for VoIP, audio middleware like FMOD, proprietary stuff like Xbox/PS crossplay, Steam’s SDK, etc and I feel like that’s a tangled web.

I’m also very tired and am probably not fully registering here.

RedFrank24,

I’ve never worked with Unreal’s server setup, but I imagine it doesn’t absolutely require to use their code, right? You can still make an Unreal game on the client and use something else for your server, meaning there must be some sort of common interface between them.

The point is yes, there is going to be code you can’t legally release, libraries you can’t use, but you can release what code you can, and then leave the interfaces for code you can’t, leaving hobbyist devs to pick up the slack. You can even make servers from scratch that way, as with stuff like AzerothCore, where all of the code was figured out from scratch based on packets from client to server and studying hex code for hours. Technically AzerothCore was just building on top of MaNGOS but that was created using packets.

Even if you strip out the code you can’t legally release, that’s a hell of a boost to development that you wouldn’t otherwise get.

Justdaveisfine, (edited )

Taking a cursory glance through the solutions that already exist for this (which are largely standalone MMO style servers):

You lose out on many network troubleshooting tools unreal has built-in, as well as some of Unreal’s play-in-editor testing tools. Its also common to add roughly 1.25-2x netcode development time as you’re going to be coding things in on the Unreal client side as well as the server side.

I can see why this is feasible but rare to see in the wild. I think anything you pitch to an exec with a note that it may add 6 months to a year of extra development time (and QA time) is going to cause people to start swinging.

Edit: This comes off as negative and I don’t mean it to be - A lot of companies do their own Unreal engine tweaks and I could see if a company built it up, they could have something solid and easily reworkable for future projects.

RedFrank24,

Ideally though, if this became law, you would be accounting for the fact you might have to swap out the server implementation into your initial development of the game.

Also, some of those tools you might not need for production client code. Yes it’s gonna be a pain in the arse to develop server code without those tools, but not necessarily impossible. You could release server code with those tools stripped out, or able to be configured to work with those tools if someone else has the license for them.

In essence, you could modify the client to include configuration points that can point to specific servers, and then release documentation to say “Hey, this is what tool was originally used, these are the kinds of packets the client is sending (and whether they are expecting a response), and these are the kinds of packets the server is sending to the clients”. You then leave the actual server development to whoever wants to build one. That is, effectively, how private MMO servers are made, but regardless of the type of game, you’re still sending UDP packets to a server and receiving UDP packets from the server. You just need to know the purpose of those packets.

Justdaveisfine,

Well its only been a few days, but I’ve been trying to dive into this and I’ve hit roadblock after roadblock. I think setting this up as well as the tools is well beyond my skill level.

Depending on what the law actually ends up being and how it actually effects me, the shorter road would be to move away from doing multiplayer games.

Though my games are considerably smaller than anything else mentioned in these threads, so I don’t think anyone will really mind haha.

theneverfox,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

Abstraction is a trade off. You don’t want to build interface layers between everything… It’s a pain in the ass, and if there’s a 1-1 relationship between parts of a system then you’re basically putting in a minimum cost to modify that area in any way. So if you do it, it’ll probably be once you’ve locked down the design pretty well

Game development is pretty different than normal development too. You have a lot of one off and lose ends based on creative decisions… You aren’t building up on top of your system, you’re building out

And frankly, it leads to a mix of mind blowingly good code and a lot of terrible code

So no, I don’t think it’s that easy. I think it’s also a bullshit argument, and they should release the “proprietary” code when they finish supporting the game, or put in the time to make the interfaces

thesmokingman,

I don’t follow this argument. In this context, proprietary code is work product that has value to its owner. Often large swathes of said work product is reused across games so the theory is that releasing the work product means your competitors can make your work product. I do not understand how wrapping someone else’s work product in your own work product doesn’t require them to first release their work product.

Note I don’t necessarily buy the company mindset on proprietary code; I explained here because I don’t understand where you’re coming from.

RedFrank24,

I mean if you are required to release a server dev kit, or at least make best efforts to release one, you can release what code you have and go “Here are the interfaces, but I can’t legally release this code because I don’t own it, so someone else is going to have to create an alternative”.

It’s about making it easier for other devs to make up for the gaps, rather than going “Nope! Proprietary code, can’t do anything!”

LostWanderer, (edited ) do games w Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital

Ah, so basically Nexus Mods is dead to me now. Whenever venture capital is injected to anything, it’s a bad sign. Ugh, great these particular Capitalists are from the crypto community…

They’ve been souring a lot of potentially cool projects with blockchain/web3 nonsense, like Playtron, for example. Lutris is now dead in the water and hasn’t been updated for months now; the former dev is working on Playtron. There is a huge issue log that doesn’t seem to be addressed at the moment.

catloaf,

Read the article. They are.

LostWanderer,

I did, and my worries were confirmed! I haven’t updated my comment.

wetbeardhairs, do gaming w Minecraft is rolling out its first glow up in years tomorrow

Sounds like the bedrock-only part is just a visual update. If you’re on Java you already have access to shaders.

But still - fuck MS for making bedrock a totally separate game so they could avoid giving alpha buyers free in app purchases.

MentalEdge,
@MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz avatar

I for one am happy they didn’t twist the original game into the bullshit that bedrock edition has become.

RandomVideos,

But they gave all bedrock players who bought it from minecraft.net java edition for free and are now selling both games

Also, bedrock edition was created years before microsoft bought mojang

The in-app purchases are obviously bad and mojang tried making bedrock edition the “official” version, but there were reasons other than money that the 2 versions were separated

arifinhiding, do games w 'No gay, no pay': The RuneScape community is absolutely mauling Jagex's new CEO over his decision to cancel new Pride Month events

Pride month celebrations were my go-to events in secret. My family doesn’t really understand the niche appeal of the game, and state religious agents can’t really “disguise themselves” ingame. But if Jagex is veering right, they might (like twitter) sell my information to security agencies the same way the Sauds/Turks did to Twitter a few years ago.

At least I get to wear my pride cape 24/7 until my membership runs out. In hindsight, It was a bad idea to assume that shooting stars/maple forestry/w301 hate chats were “isolated incidents”. They’re clearly part of an ongoing trend that has the CEO’s approval. Oh well, there’s always a countdown to good things. I should enjoy it while it lasts.

outhouseperilous,

Not everything has to be shit at all times. We could make a world where good things are, like, normal.

amino,

consider private servers. idk if they’re less reactionary though because I haven’t tried them

Croquette, do games w Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'

I wish my clients would understand that, and my code is a lot simpler than a video game.

funkless_eck,

I built an API connector for work (I’m a hobbyist, not a pro) to download what is the most common cargo transported by trucking companies from the DoT database. Everyone complained because they had to enter the company names correctly into a CSV as it wouldn’t accept typos or do fuzzy matching, nor could it automatically determine which was the head office of a company, only return a list of all of the offices.

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