What industry standards is he talking about here? Steam code of conduct only says you must engage in lawful behaviour. There’s no American law banning far-right symbols. There’s no doubt Steam has a content moderation issue and I would love to see those things go as well. But unless there’s some kind of law then Valve is just going to ignore this problem like they’ve done in the past.
Well, name another game platform that openly allows swastikas. I think they are saying the rest of the industry largely doesn’t allow this so Valve shouldn’t either.
No other gaming platform has the userbase Steam does. I see this more of a numbers thing than anything else. If 2% of the gaming population is far right then it’s going to be much more noticeable when one company has a userbase of ~100million. I’d be very surprised if the other companies like Ubisoft and EA have this kind of content moderation.
I have a steam account. I write like half a review and maybe a handful of comments a year, talking mechanics. The amount of people who don’t even lurk because they are there to play games has to be absolutely overwhelming.
Roblox. It’s a game but also a platform in a sense. It’s full of kids running around yelling racial slurs, kicking users with dark coloured avatars, and lots of far right content. It is like a grade school run by 4chan.
i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:
The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.
The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”
QA is part of the game development process and its supposed to happen before it reaches end users. They’ve made some good games but they can’t act all surprised that selling a game and letting users be free QA doesn’t cut it.
With all the studio buyouts, closures, layoffs, etc to pile on top of all the usual greedy macrotransaction crap - it’s really hard to give a shit about games right now. Seriously, the only upcoming game I’m even remotely interested in is Tiny Glade.
The indie/pseudo-indie space still has a lot of great games. And the reception to those are vital for convincing the few remaining funding sources to “take a risk” on their next game.
But that is also not what the keighleys are. They are basically E3 in that it is about the big publishers and platform owners doing big announcements and a select few smaller studios being allowed to pad things out and get cut if Kojima decides he wants another jerk off session.
But I assume there will be a Steam demo event of some form during this (it feels like we have one of those every week now). There are also actual indie groups that do showcases around the same time. And THOSE are a spectacular time where it is clear people love the games they are working on. Also it is usually a great contrast to “all dudes, all the time” on the keighleys and actually having developers on the indie showcases.
I got badges for PAX this year, first time since pre covid, and was really excited. After I bought them though I was like “Why did I buy these, there are literally no games coming out”. Hoping the indie scene will be great though
Haven’t been to pax in years, but the indie corner was alway my favorite part anyway. So many games to play I’ve never heard about, the lines to play are usually much shorter and you get to talk to someone who’s directly working on the game so they are super passionate about it and happy to have people there.
Yeah last time I was there I met the American truck simulator guys, they were really cool, and learned about a lot of newer games. Definitely a fun area.
I’ve known all year that the game I was most looking forward to was the new trails. Sad/disappointing that were halfway through the year and I can honestly say that there’s almost nothing already announced that excites me, I was hoping to see something that would excite me but alas that wont be the case. And I do play indies as well as bigger budget games and I’m not depressed or mentally unwell (I’ve had people armchair diagnose me on Reddit for not being interested in games before)
The whole situation just made me believe Sean Murray really wanted to make a cool game but he got overwhelmed by the media attention and started running his mouth. Maybe he felt like he had to overpromise and say yes to everything he was asked? Hello Games was still an indie studio before it got all that attention.
If he had done it in bad faith it would have been much easier to cut his losses and run away with the money. Nearly 10 years of expansions wouldn’t come out of it if not for legitimate passion.
It also made their next game announcement pretty funny.
it might just be me but I come back to this game about once a year, play for about 4 hours before feeling like it feels almost exactly the same? I see these huge update drops but they don’t ever feel like anything
I have an idea lets make a game that embodied the spirit of the successful versions, lets stop trying to court devil may cry/elden ring fans and get back to making a turn based rpg or similar to ff10.
It doesn’t have to be turn-based. FFXI and FFXII are also great. I feel the bigger issue is that making a story heavy game while everyone else is also making story heavy games makes it no longer unique.
I wouldn’t mind going back to ATB, but I don’t think that would win back an audience except for nostalgia points.
I enjoyed all of them and FFXVI too. I think it’s okay to reinvent FF combat every iteration to keep it fresh. I’m not sure if I’d enjoy a turn based combat today like I enjoyed it 20 years ago.
Love this idea. The turn-based system in FFX was my absolute favorite, and I was really sad they didn’t follow this direction further (even for FFX-II, like WTF).
This stuff is why “it’s optional” and “it’s just cosmetic” are bullshit arguments.
If you can resist the urge, you’re not the intended target. They don’t make record profits from people who can spend somewhat rationally, even though those are the vast majority of users their contribution to profits is a drop in an ocean.
No, the only reason this model works so well is because it’s exploiting the vulnerabilities of a small percent of big spenders.
So, do you consider paying for more rolls part of the fun?
Because the rest, including the hit of endorphin you get for a stroke of luck, could very well exist without it. But of course on EA’s side getting people addicted has no point if they don’t pay virtually unlimited amounts of money for more.
Not this game in particular. I do gamble and love spending a few hundred every year. I’ll regularly drop $10 or$20 on a mobile time killer when I need them.
You do realize this whole thread and post is about gambling addiction yes? You’re essentially doing the “I have a black friend, I can’t be racist!” but for gambling addiction.
Here's a fun suggestion, how about you unlock the desired players by playing the game? Could even put it into an immersive context, you beat brazil and subsequently unlock their players for your team.
What's so fun about buying a chance to get your player? Is it possibly the shiny colors and the happy soundeffects that are specifically designed to make your brain addicted?
Whales subsidize the cost of the game for everyone else. If there weren’t whales, the cost goes up for everyone or the product diminishes. Reality isn’t a magical realm where the company will not use ROI and net profit to determine what to make or how to price things, it’s all interrelated and you don’t get to hold everything else constant when asking for something to change.
you do realize you’re just saying that the predatory business has to be predatory otherwise they couldn’t operate their predatory business, right? It’s like a sheep defending wolves because if they didn’t eat sheep they wouldn’t be able to continue eating sheep.
I’ve spent €45 for a Mario game yesterday. Last I’ve checked that game costs roughly the same for everyone (except understandable variations in regional pricing). Not €45 once for me and $2,000 per week for some guy with an addiction problem.
Yet that game was made, and thousands more that didn’t rely on gacha, lootboxes or whatever.
People with a gambling addiction will find an outlet for it unless they get help controlling it, just like people with any addiction. Addiction is treated on an individual basis, not by banning an activity that the vast majority of the population can partake in with self-control.
We don’t have tons of public numbers to be able to discuss the initial development, licensing, marketing, support and ongoing development, distribution and overhead costs vs initial costs, expansion and MTX income of games at a large scale. But you can be sure the companies that make the games have those numbers, and they’re used for pricing and budgeting of future development. And that’s before we open the can of worms that is discussing how much profit is ethical.
Maybe they could make less money, maybe they could not make certain features, but where does the ethical line fall when it comes to predatory features and marketing? Who needs protection? From who? How do you implement it without infringing the rights of others? Is it ok to let them gamble if there’s a deterministic worst-case scenario? What if there’s a limit on how much they can spend? What if purchases are purely only deterministic, but they’re limited time exclusives that will never return? What about if you can earn them by playing or pay extra to just get them up front or faster? What about if they carve that feature out of the main product and sell it as an additional cost? These are all predatory in some way, but we don’t need to ban them all when a person can make their own value judgments and interact with games in a way that brings them enjoyment. Otherwise, it’s a slippery slope to asking why we even let people “waste” money on entertainment.
And yet plenty drugs and medicine are controlled substances because they’d be so easy to abuse or hurt yourself with. We could just assign the same to ingame gambling, no? Since that’s also on an individual basis, handle it the same all around?
So to buy a lootbox:
Go to a doctor.
Doctor prescribes you a daily dosage of say, 1 lootbox.
Each day you can go to the pharmacy and pick up a pack of 1 lootbox code, you can have at maximum a store of 4 of them at home then pharmacies stop giving you more so you cannot stockpile. (going by the pills a friend of mine gets prescribed here)
No, whales subsidize the cost of a yacht for the CEO. The games could be paid just from the money you pay for them, if the companies weren’t continuously being siphoned off the top by C-suites and shareholders.
I don’t think it has a place in a work of fiction like Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe a small reference somewhere. The Russian government is a bunch of cunts, but not every piece of media needs to reference that constantly. I could also imagine that it would be could annoying if you’re playing Cyberpunk to distract yourself from the war as an Ukrainian and then you’re still constantly reminded of it
It can make political points, but the war in Ukraine does not exist in that timeline. So it makes no sense to directly refer to it. And forcing it into only the Ukrainian translation without the developer being aware of it is just unprofessional.
Anything negative about the Russian government is probably accurate and deserved. Extending that to the Russian people is iffy at best.
And remember this game is rather explicitly fifty years in the future, so anything current will be as relevant as Vietnam references are today. Not even counting the alternate history and corporatocracy of the setting.
I have never seen a swastika on steam... how do you guys find them? I have come across "git gud" idiots and met one single nazi on there. What in the world are you people up to?
instances of Pepe the frog, a meme appropriated by the far right
LOl, get outta here. I use pepe all the time. It's a friggin' frog. I won't let the far right take him away from me. Fuck off.
You literally just need to go into the discussion boards for trending games or check out the curation pages for groups like “DEI watch.” Guaranteed to find comments and posts of huge ASCII swastikas eventually. There’s next to no moderation for any given game’s discussion board or comments for anything related to it (workshop, screenshots, other media, etc).
I frequent Steam discussions on and off to see what morons say. BG3, Veilguard, anything they accuse of DEI or whatever. In all of my scrolling I’ve never encountered a swastika or someone just straight up being a white supremacist. I’m sure it’s there somewhere, but it’s not rampant. I also see a lot of moderation in those discussions. Goobers getting banned all the time. So if it is, I do think it’s getting moderated to some extent. That probably also falls on the game dev I guess. Not sure who controls the discussion forums.
Yeah, I’m definitely in favor of banning the edgy kids who use fascist imagery on the platform, but Pepe is not and has never been that. Just because some assholes tried to appropriate it for a few months doesn’t mean everyone else should just surrender it to them.
I get it there… but sadly to my knowledge it is lost. Generally speaking when you see the “SomeoneNew has joined the server” and see a pepe avatar… I already pretype the /ban SomoeneNew command watch the screen for 15 seconds… and 9/10 times they say something blatantly racist within that time-frame.
(and don’t think that 1/10 that they don’t means 10% aren’t alt right… of those that don’t manage to break the rules in the first 30 seconds, I don’t think I’ve seen one that’s gone a week without doing so)
Point is… Pepe is the modern swastika… For those who don’t know, the swastika was a peaceful symbol used by many different cultures for thousands of years. But the fact is, using it now just gives legitimacy to those who have attached it to their hateful messages.
The Pepe doesn’t quite have the same significance and weight yet. It’s not too late. Make leftist Pepes. Drown their identifiers in false positives until they become useless.
Well I have to say, off the bat, it needs to be not just leftist/marxist. It would need to have large non offensive use in general discourse.
Again my example of pepe for general discord moderation. It’s not trolls that show up in say political discussion groups. It’s trolls that show up in random game discords or other non-pollitical locations. IE as a moderator I’d also be auto banning someone bringing up random arguements on how we need wealth re-distribution, not because I disagree with them, but because people are just there to talk about a game, and not have political arguement.
and in short that’s generally the thing, IMO Pepe isn’t… really that overwhelmingly good of a meme where it’s just a universal funny to outside groups. But the alt right is the only ones bringing it into more general average Joe locations, along with their hateful rhetoric.
In short for pepe to be recovered it needs… major mainstream Apolitical usage, which quite frankly I don’t see often.
A signal is less useful the more “false” signals (i.e. noise) pollute the medium it’s transferred over.
If we can make it clear that “their” memes aren’t actually just theirs by “re-appropriating” them and abuse whatever secret identification dogwhistles they want to use, we can drown their signals in noise.
Posting Pepes for non-nazi purposes is an act of resistance.
The only way they can actually disrupt gaming is by putting out something people want. Once upon a time, Microsoft and Sony seemed like “Bizarrely unfamiliar foreign invaders of gaming” but slowly settled into understanding what their customers wanted.
As the article points out, tone-deaf or imperfect offerings have really bounced off. Heck, this is an age where many of Sony and Microsoft’s signature ventures have failed.
Gamers don’t know what they want half the time. On one hand, posts like these seem to elicit the idea that gamers are united against predatory, bad publisher fuckery. But we aren’t. Activision Blizzard still make the most money in the entire industry shitting out garbage. People line up in droves to play the latest Assassins Creed. And mobile games have never been more popular. Many people play games simply because it’s in front of their face, not because they understand the nuances of game design or have any investment in the industry itself.
And Microsoft isn’t too far behind either of them. Apple makes a lot of money for sure, but it’s not the most, and it’s definitely not orders of magnitude more.
On console you can get texture packs and add-ons… from the marketplace.
On other bedrock platforms (Windows or Mobile) you can install textures and add-ons from your own files. The problem is that Bedrock add-ons are significantly less capable than Java’s mods.
Bedrock makes it easier to play with friends, it also has cross-platform support (except for Linux and Mac). Console players can only play on featured servers (unless they use workarounds).
Java is better in most other aspects (I am biased for it though, since it’s what I play): you can mod it, play older versions, use custom shaders (with mods), no microtransactions, play on any server you want, (apparently) less game-breaking bugs, etc.
Yeah, it is incovenient when you play Java and other people you know play Bedrock (or vice-versa). There is a community-made plugin called Geyser that allows Bedrock players to play on Java servers (it can be buggy sometimes but it is the closest we have to Java-Bedrock crossplay).
Java is the original and Bedrock is the C++ adaptation that came about once Microsoft bought Minecraft. Microsoft couldn’t really justify getting rid of Java edition because that’s what the entire PC userbase was using at the time, and they’ve gotten very used to the features it allows for. Namely mods. However they still wanted to unify the casual playerbase and better monetize the game.
On the topic of monetization, Minecraft originally had this nasty little clause (for Microsoft) written in I forget either the ToS, EULA, or what, but it essentially guaranteed all future updates to the game for free. I believe it also made some other guarantees about no MTX, should never have to pay for servers, etc but those I’m less certain about. Around the time MS bought the game there was a lot of talk about how the only way they’d really be able to get out of that guarantee to the millions of players who already owned “Java edition” (just regular Minecraft back then) was to make a Minecraft 2.0 that didn’t have that clause. Their approach for that problem appears to have been bedrock edition which they maintain alongside Java edition. Because it’s not the version they bought, they can make changes to the legal agreements including charging for things Java Edition users have a guaranteed right to.
Those are the two main reasons I’m aware of for the two editions. I believe the majority of the PC playerbase is currently on Bedrock Edition so although they would have some backlash if they suddenly decided to axe it I think the majority of the playerbase would chug on like normal. Afaik the main reason they don’t is because anyone who purchased Minecraft before there was a “Java Edition” would have a legal claim to say Bedrock is clearly the same game under another title, they’re not getting future updates as guaranteed, and are entitled to either updates or compensation. And I can’t imagine MS is interested in litigiously pissing off millions of players.
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