Obviously I disagree with the content. But this just reminds me of the whole “hatred” debacle. the game probably sucks (like hatred did), and its content was very taboo but honestly if some sicko wants to “enjoy” these games i dont think they should be censored. I really hate the idea of people not liking something and it being scrubbed from the internet.
Like if I decided to make a oligarch assassination game with popular figgures as targets. id expect a strong reaction but pulling it from public availability is just plain stupid. And id expect most of the people who think that non-consentual game should be removed would advocate for the murder simulators right to exist. We cant just pick and choose what to censor imo its gotta be all or nothing.
Again, dont care about these games in particular. just playing devils advocate.
It’s an interesting debate. One that I will not touch with ten foot pole because I do not have the knowledge to say which is right, but it’s interesting.
Is it better for people with these uh, interests, to have artificial content if it satisfies their needs? As in, for non consensual the vast majority of people would think it’s revolting, and that it should go. We want no part of it in society. But here’s the rub. What if the alternative is actually committing the crime? By offering an alternative that is morally questionable could it reduce the actual crime from happening?
Same thing with AI generated CSAM. utterly revolting. Think it should be purged. But, some psychologists argue that it would satisfy the desires of some of them, and it could reduce actual children from being harmed. Some say it could make the urge worse but some say it could prevent the real thing from happening
I don’t have the training or knowledge to say this or that, but it’s interesting
I agree, but the issue is that theres already so much taboo content out there ready for the public to “enjoy”. Alot of modern crime content heavily idolizes and even sexualizes actual muderers and r*pists. Game of thrones has incest and child murder in the first episode (i almoat dropped the show based on this alone). The dahmer tv show was outright denounced by the victims and yet still many people “enjoyed” the non-consentual actions of a disgusting man. I agree with censorship when real people are being exploited or hurt. Thats a no brainer. But where do we draw the line? The original ben-hur movie has a actor die gruesomely on film. Do we censor that? Bottom line, humans are gross. I think its best if we just look away from whatever theyre doing in the dark corners of their minds. (assuming they arent hurting anyone mentally or physically)
I really hate the idea of people not liking something and it being scrubbed from the internet.
It’s not, the devs themselves took it off Steam (and honestly I would have thought Valve might have removed it eventually). But it’s not like the devs disappeared from the internet, searching around I saw they still sell the game on at least one game platform outside of Steam. And those same devs could choose to sell it directly themselves if they wanted, to say they’ve been scrubbed from the internet is a bit of a stretch.
Agreed, but i was just speaking in general after mentioning specific examples. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
But to build on your point, You could make the argument that anything that has been uploaded to the internet cannot be scrubbed. most normal people use the internet completely differently than we do. Removing something from Steam, or Epic for most normal people its gone forever. I know for example my parents would never be able to find a movie/show again if its removed from Netflix or HBO.
I don’t follow the genre, but I heard that apparently Steam is also very inconsistent in terms of banning visual novels. And the fans seem to be pretty dedicated to them, so you have an example right there.
I’m personally all for “everything goes”, since the adults only settings exist, which might as well double as “disturbing content” filter. At the same time, it’s Valve’s choice what they want to host, and I don’t know a good balance of “reputation vs freedom”, which they realistically have to keep.
Companies need to grow a spine. Good games sell regardless of what’s out. If your confidence in your own game is so low that you’d push it to a slow release date, it’s probably not worth playing anyway.
I don’t know about that one. Games are expensive these days and if your game releases anywhere near the rumored $100 GTA 6, a LOT of people are going to have to choose one or the other, and it’s very unlikely that in most cases they don’t choose GTA6, literally the most anticipated video game of the last decade. Sure you can always buy the smaller game later, but a huge part of the sales of video games is the opening week, when all the hype around it has had time to come to a head, and you’re influenced by the fact that lots of other people are playing it.
Yeah good games will always sell SOME copies. But if you thinking that a game even releasing in the same month as GTA6 won’t have a permanent impact on that games sales, you’re smoking the reefer.
I think what you’re saying is true but perhaps you’re both talking about different things. I think you’re speaking about the reality of the situation whereas the comment OP is talking about the risk averse nature of large game studios. I don’t think it’s the same thing.
Also, I think I’m part of a growing minority but if gta 6 reviews are bad I’m not buying it until I hear it’s been fixed. I’ve been burned so many times 😭
You cant trust reviews. For example dragon’s dogma 2 which i just picked up is a great game. But some people wouldn’t know it based a lot of criticism and bad reviews it recieved when it launched.
It’s the exact same thing actually. Their claim was:
Good games will sell regardless of what’s out
But that’s just not true, and game studios of all sizes know that. The risk aversion of these companies exist because of the reality of the situation.
It also has nothing to do with a studios confidence in their game. The quality of a game is light years away from being the sole objective indicator of a games sales. The Outer Wilds is objectively one of the greatest games ever made and has no real peers in what it does. And yet it didn’t make nearly the sales numbers as the latest asset flipped Call of Duty game.
The Outer Wilds was a first game from an indie studio. On this basis alone it was practically guaranteed to not get the success it deserved. And it does deserve a ton of it.
Conversely, call of duty is literally one of the most notorious franchises in the entire industry, and pretty much sells on its name alone.
A good observation. Hence why one of those games can afford to launch during a crowded window despite its lack of quality, and the other, despite their confidence in their work, and the high quality of their work, could not. You’re starting to get it now.
I’m buying it regardless of reviews. Which are gonna be amazing anyway but still. I paid full price for Forspoken and actually really enjoyed it. I like the Kojima attitude of (for him it was a bookstore) picking something blindly that calls out to you. It might be amazing, it might be shit, but you learn something from everything you engage with. I just like the surprise of trying something I’ve got a lukewarm interest in and enjoying it a lot. Horizon Lego Adventures and Lost Records Bloom and Rage impressed me recently
Course I play games to play them, not complain about them online all day. And most of the time I enjoy what I find
if you thinking that a game even releasing in the same month as GTA6 won’t have a permanent impact on that games sales, you’re smoking the reefer.
Maybe they should stop trying to peddle bland-ass live service games that live and die by their players numbers then. A good solo game might take a hit to its initial sales but should recover in the long run.
A good solo game might take a hit to its initial sales but should recover in the long run.
It won’t though. This feel-good theory that if a game is “good” then it’ll just make the same amount of money it always would have otherwise is not supported by any real world evidence. And even the most hypothetically high quality, ethical, game making company is still a company in the end, and companies need to money to pay living wages and keep people employed making new games. And if the games they are putting out are high quality, they probably have competent leadership. And competent leadership isn’t going to gamble the future of their company and livelihoods of their employees on an unproven feel-good fantasy espoused only by people on Reddit and Lemmy who’ve never run a business before.
If the game is good, doesnt need an active playerbase to survive (ie isn’t entirely based on multiplayer), and the company is already reputable, it has no reasons to not sell decently in the long run. Also if an (already established) company’s future is jeopardized by a single game not doing well, I’m sorry but it’s not well managed. Ask me how I know.
That’s just not how these things work. Launch windows have a documented history of being uniquely impactful to the long term success of games, movies, even products. It would take some serious evidence to the contrary for you to claim otherwise.
Also if an (already established) company’s future is jeopardized by a single game not doing well, I’m sorry but it’s not well managed. Ask me how I know.
That’s not really here nor there. It also isn’t really true.
The two Horizon games picked really shitty weeks to release on lol. I think that’s done significant damage to the player base. They’re not groundbreaking games, but still extremely well done (imo)
The article totally misses the big intervening step between Skyrim/old Bioware and the failure of Starfield/Dragon Age: CDProjectRED.
While those studios largely just made “more of the same”, CDPR made Witcher 3 and then Cyberpunk 2077. Both games are way better narrative experiences and pushed RPG forward. Starfield looks very dated in comparison to both, and Dragon Age failed to capture to magic. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 are successes because they also bring strong narratives and emotional connections to the stories.
Starfield would have been huge if it had been released soon after Skyrim. But now it just looks old fashioned, and I think the “wide as an ocean, as deep as a puddle” analogy is good for Starfield. Meanwhile Witcher 3 - which is 10 years old! - has quests and storylines with choices and emotional impact. BG3 and KC:D2 are heirs to Witcher 3.
People like to write off CP2077, which is such a shame.
…And maybe this makes me a black sheep, but I bounced off Witcher 2/3? I dunno, I just didn’t like the combat and lore, and ended up watching some of the interesting quests on YouTube.
For context, it’s somewhat common here in Latin America to name markets after the owner’s name; doubly so in smaller cities. (The city where this happened has 9k inhabitants)
It’s also common to name supermarkets “Super [something]”, to highlight that it sells general goods instead of just produce.
With that out of the way: seriously? Nintendo going after a mum-and-dad market in a small city in North America??? This only highlights that the current trademark and intellectual property laws across the world are toilet paper - they aren’t there to defend “healthy competition” or crap like that, but to ensure megacorps get their way. Screw this shit and screw Nintendo - might as well rename their company to Ninjigoku/任地獄, bloody hell.
“make sure your pops doesn’t see you spent 400 hours in futa games.” (I don’t know what that means and I’m not gonna Google it while I’m logged in at work.)
Why would you not look it up from this context, it seems to be a generic “don’t let them see” , why would you be so terrified unless you already knew what it was?
Brooo you can get the title of shithead? Why would you wana be labeled as straight when you could be shithead instead? lol. That’s what I would go for haha
It’s hilarious, it’s almost like they got so used to having their way with a captive console audience that they didn’t consider PC players have a choice.
And I get that the business maybe “has” to be run that way, because of the way it exists in the economic system it exists in, but I’m definitely taking issue with the language he’s employed here. He’s not a prisoner being forced to run things this way.
Yes, but can you roll a platform of the distribution, breadth, depth and persistence over good and bad cycles of the scale of Xbox or PlayStation while being a private company? A few have tried.
No, there are plenty of independent private game developers (Stardew Valley, Baldur’s gate etc come to mind) I was just taking Phil Spencer’s perspective, which I imagine is a platform level one.
This is a pretty complicated topic that touches video games, gambling sites, social media algorithms, and marketing in general. It also touches fundamental philosophical questions like the existence of free will.
We have lots of established law on which sort of “mind tricks” are fair play and which aren’t, but we have not advanced those laws to keep pace with the science. Currently, lying is really the only thing off limits and is covered by fraud statutes. We also have some limits on marketing to children. But one could argue that there are several “persuasion” tactics that can be just as effective as outright lies in manipulating the behavior of others. In fact, licensed therapists are ethically barred from using these tactics, yet we allow salesmen, marketers, etc to use them at will.
I don’t really have an opinion on this lawsuit, nor do I feel qualified to offer a solution. But let me give you an example of how the human mind works which underpins addiction to gambling.
Dopamine is a signaling molecule that regulates a lot of our reward responses. If I find honey in a honeycomb, dopamine gets released and now I am more likely to seek out honeycombs in the future. You can see how this is evolutionarily beneficial. Dopamine release reinforces behavior that increases survival. But let’s say that only about 1/3 of all honeycombs have honey. Now I have a lower chance at a reward, so does that mean the dopamine release is likewise diminished? No, the opposite is true. Dopamine release skyrockets. Evolutionarily this makes sense, we do not want to miss out on a reward simply because the probability is diminished, so the high dopamine release counterbalances the diminished probability such that reward seeking behavior is reinforced so long as the probability of reward is reasonable (it peaks at about 1/4). In fact, dopamine is released even when the honeycomb has no honey. You can draw a direct line between this physical phenomenon and gambling addiction. What people don’t appreciate is that this physiological response is very similar to addictive drugs in effectiveness. It can be hard to acknowledge that one of the reasons you are not a gambling addict is simply that you didn’t start gambling to begin with, not that you are somehow superior to those that are addicted.
We have lots of behavioral quirks like this that can be exploited. At what point does this manipulation cross the line? That is a hard question. For me, gacha games cross that line. But if we want to enact meaningful regulations we need to acknowledge that these mind exploits exist and confront the fact that free will may not be as free as we hope.
Dopamine is a signal substance that is present in several places in the brain, and animals, doing different things in different places. It is not as simple as an exploitable chemical that is enabling this or even involved in the behavioral studies targeted and implemented by gambling companies.
Many things in life is exploitative. The plastic in almost all your utility is designed to break so you have to buy new products. The insurers are purposefully hiding clauses to steal from actual people in distress, at the moment where they lost everything. Oil companies astroturf and lobby to keep the transportation and air quality at this unsustainable level just to make even more money when they already have most of the money in the world, enough to buy whole continents, just lying around in Panama.
Music, film, and other forms of art are the few places where the consumer is more actively engaged and sensitive to being exploited, yet it is also the space where that just doesn’t fly. The gambling area is the most interesting place to view these moral questions in. Why is it okay that their entire business model is to work around regulation as much as possible to reach those most vulnerable in society to take their money?
Games with exploitative practices are going hard out of fashion. The people that engage with those systems unhealthily is the same people that are gambling addicts.
To me it’s just very easy and obviously best to use policy involving support networks and social safety nets to protect people rather than using prohibitive regulation and hope that soulless corporations will ever grow artificial moral spines. These psychopathic global machines will never be human or act human ever
I have obviously simplified the role of dopamine in the brain to make it more digestible, but you are dead wrong about dopamine’s role in intermittent reward and the link to gambling addiction. It has a very strong influence on behavior. Like many aspects of human behavior, the effect is not an on-off switch to enable gambling addiction. We have lots of things going on in our head that are, at times, working against each other as far as behavior is concerned. It is more like an analog adjustment that “pushes” toward a specific behavior much harder than it otherwise would. And this effect is just as powerful as addictive chemicals in potency.
Dopamine levels can measure that effect, it is neither the cause or effect. It is like saying the salt in sea water is the active ingredient making fish live. Only certain fish, only one of the things required, and so on. “it” does not have influence on behaviour, “it” is a chemical used in many different parts of our brain, for instance used to keep us breathing among many other things also in animals and even plants, not affecting their behavior in any way.
Engagement is merely the ability to, or the degree to which you are able to, maintain interaction with something (a system, a game, a fidget toy, whatever) over time. It has absolutely nothing to do with entertainment, although you can use entertainment as a means of achieving or increasing engagement. However, entertainment is hard. People are entertained by different things to different degrees, and respond to their entertainment in different ways. Engagement on the other hand is a fairly simple behavioural matter and that’s a whole field of science (which is mostly bollocks, to be fair, but its lessons can be very effective when applied at scale).
Source: I used to be a behavioural engineer, specifically a gamification specialist. Engagement was the oil I was employed to extract, and entertainment the excuse my field used to pretend what we were (and still are) doing isn’t just social manipulation at scale.
Yes yes yes, I’m very on board with this. I think we all know what we’re doing is wrong and manipulative on some level, but the general consciousness hasn’t caught up to recognising the tort.
It may be just be association, but I’m not a huge fan of the term “entertainment” either. It strikes the same hollow note for me as “content.”
Yes it’s an apt description for a part of an experience, but it comes so laden with its own associations and preconceptions, that it doesn’t feel useful in most contexts in which it’s deployed.
That said I have no objections to how you’ve used it in your comment.
Ok its not loading properly on my phone so i accept i might have to eat my words here, but i remember the vast majority of quests in cyperpunk being “go into a building and kill some guys”… Not exactly ground breaking stuff
There are two tiers of side quests in cyberpunk. Gigs and full on side quests. The gigs are all pretty short ‘go to place, shoot / rescue someone’ stuff but the main side quests are generally more involved, including all the romance options etc.
The gigs can be skipped without missing much, but skipping the side quests misses a ton of story IMO.
And not just that, you’re a mercenary. There’s only so many types of tasks you get hired for. CDPR did a really great job differentiating gigs from eachother IMO.
Sure some of them are cookie cutter, but there’s a story behind them and sometimes you can link that story into the overall world. Sometimes there’s choices to make that impact the outcome. Usually there’s multiple ways to approach it. And very few of them have the same layout.
There’s 89 Gigs in the base game. I didn’t at all feel ripped off that some of them are similar. I’d rather the gigs feel similar than have them encroaching on the side quests in feel.
I feel this way too. You find premium currency laying around all over the place. You can buy everything in the store and the premium warbond for free if explore around as you play, just like any of the other in-game currencies.
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