It blew my mind how quick video games media moves on from abuse scandals. Like the major video media orgs are staffed to the brim with leftist, hyper Twitter finger social justice types but they didn’t lay down continuous pressure on Ubisoft, Quantic Dream, Activision Blizzard. It was report then back to cordial relationship with these companies where pretty much no one faced punishment. At the very least constantly work to destroy their public images until they resign and divest
It’s not just the media companies even the studios are full of leftists/progressives. Like Blizzard should have a fucking hard time to find workers. But nope. The blue hairs still line up to apply or never left. Remember the loudest progressives are just virtue signaling. And they just appropriated punk esthetics but never embraced the punk ethos.
Seems to be a consistent pattern across all types of media, I mean look at all the allegations against people in Hollywood, that came out during the me to movement, and still Roman Polanski gets a standing ovation, more and more it feels to me that most people don’t give a shit about anything other than their self interest in this world.
In Belgium publishers are obligated to send a single copy to the national library, so in that case the only public funding that is wasted is the extra storage space, which would be rather minimal. I don’t know if Japan has similar rules, but I wouldn’t call it a “massive” waste compared to some other places where public money is spent.
I studied some courses on archival, so I am probably biased. I think preservation is important, and even in this case I would prefer for them to be archived too, as the box and box art are also part of the piece and of cultural significance.
I also can’t say I know for sure, but given how grubby Nintendo is and the crap they get away with, it wouldn’t even surprise me if they’re somehow an exception to such a rule.
This wasn’t even the company, they let random people on the internet submit videos. Something nobody with two brain cells to knock together would think was a good idea.
Theoretically you’re not supposed to take about a case because you could mispeak and it could be used against you. In a simple string case it’s not really a threat
Publisher Nexon has now made a statement addressing the situation, saying the ads were submitted by users as part of a ‘TikTok Creative Challenge’, which TikTok describes as an “official creator monetization program that turns your creativity into cash by creating UGC-style ads for your favorite brands”.
“All submitted videos are verified through TikTok’s system to check copyright violations before they are approved as advertising content. However, we have become aware of cases where the circumstances surrounding the production of certain submitted videos appear inappropriate. Thus, we are conducting a thorough joint investigation with TikTok to determine the facts.
How could they not see this coming? Of course this will be gamed and abused. This is what happens when you fire your marketing department and outsource it to TikTok.
I'm going with "they absolutely did see it coming and are confident that they can make it go away for less money than an actual marketing campaign that gets the same amount of attention would cost"
They've got a veneer of plausible deniability, basically no need to expend any money on the material, and just enough of a chance to filter out anything that uses the image of someone that could actually afford to fight them in court about it
I can actually see this as being fully accidental in that light.
Community sourced content is always a minefield. Was it a recent EVO adjacent contest where like three of the finalists were discovered to have used AI Generated Content? And a friend of a friend has explained to me the shockingly painful process of actually determining if the various Gunpla Builders events have 3d printed anything in the submissions.
So I can 100% see an exec or even a community manager wanting to make a name for themselves suggesting they source it through tiktok and let tiktok’s filters handle it for them.
That said, this is also 100% The Future. Just think of the various twitch pre-rolls where they have a bunch of streamers selling bounty paper towels. Occasionally I might have a “hmm. is that Fuzlie under the ninety layers of filters and horrible lighting?” but the vast majority are people I have never heard of. Now imagine if those nobody streamers were fully owned AI property of the advertising firm?
And… this shit is not at all new. In recent years there has been a huge rise in vtubers and the vast majority of folk will never know if Project Melody gets a new VA as long as she sounds enough like the past one. But also?
In mother fucking 2001 we had Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and a huge part of the marketing was that the two leads (voiced by Ming-Na Wen and Alec Baldwin) were so photorealistic that they could be actors in a wide range of films and ad campaigns.
And as dystopic as it is? That company owned AI model is never going to suddenly start supporting Palestine and… Okay, they actually will definitely start calling for the eradication of trans people. But no worries on the anti-genocide front. That model will never complain that doing a Pringles ad is demeaning. That model won’t use their appearance on a youtuber ran game show to start a solo career. And… that AI model won’t need to get scale plus 10 to whip it out “at their peak” and so forth.
Like… this is gonna happen. It might not have been intended to happen this week but… it is coming.
But yeah. It came out at a REALLY weird point. Titan AE and the other one I always forget were fairly high profile animated movies that actually had REALLY good computer graphics but they just didn’t get any traction. I want to say Disney was also suffering around that time? But yeah, it was basically a case where we very much saw what would define “film” 20 years later… and nobody cared.
That said, my understanding is that motion capture in the sense of directly processing The Balls matters a lot less than just having someone on set. Like, animators can’t actually do much more with a bunch of tennis balls taped to Andy Serkis than they could by just overlying/tracing his body. But there is a ridiculous amount of value in just having SOMETHING in that scene to cast shadows and show what the lighting should look like and to simplify making sure all the other actors are actually looking at his face and so forth.
For what its worth, I actually thought Spirits Within was cool. And it led to a brief moment where my father actually liked me because I wanted an issue of Maxim… until he realized it was to look at the computer girl. But yeah, I have no fricking idea who that movie was for. Final Fantasy fans didn’t care because it wasn’t really a Final Fantasy and normies/adults didn’t care because it was just some video game bullshit.
I oversimplified for comedic effect, but the animation was just terrible in that movie. All of the character movement was awkward and didn’t feel natural at all.
The thoughts were, what could be more realistic than the motions of real actors? And the answer was: nearly everything. Sure, we use motion capture, but we’ve mixed it with traditional animation theory and fine tuned it to work. Far from the awkward mirroring they did in FF.
Costs have ballooned, but on the production side, not the distribution side. Perhaps the reduced costs on the distribution side are partially responsible for prices remaining so stable in the face of inflation.
Yes, companies have made very bad decisions in what aspects of production to focus on in the last decade. They’re pouring more and more into ever decreasing rates of return on visual fidelity.
You can’t seriously think something like Cyberpunk or God of War or even Half Life 2 costs less than Super Mario World because they sell more digitally.
In a roundabout way, I guess, due to where they land on the supply-demand curve, but I’m not sure why we’re talking about Super Mario World. Game prices weren’t really standardized in any sort of way until they moved to discs, where the “floor” price for any given game was minuscule, and as we moved to digital distribution in the next few decades, this is the period where prices remained fairly stable, as they rose far slower than inflation.
Cartridges to discs were definitely a massive savings… and happened basically one and a half times (Sega to the CD and Sony from nothing to the Playstation)
Digital… is complicated. It definitely benefits the platform holder and lowers production costs for the major publishers (and makes indie games viable) but it also fundamentally changes marketing. Because people generally don’t browse the PSN Store to find new games. They only get recommendations from influencers. Whereas plenty of us have fond memories of standing in a Best Buy or Circuit City and picking what game looked good on the shelves.
But yes. I agree that not every single generation should have led to a price jump. But I can definitely see an argument for most of them to have raised the price of “AAA” games with tiered pricing beyond that. Because it really is a problem and not just for the major publishers. Indie games basically need to launch at an effective price of 10-20 bucks on PC to stand a chance and… that is great money for the small dev teams but not so much for a medium sized C/B tier game.
So in your world every review is only ever done by an “influencer?” Cause that would make a massive swath of the public “influencers” when generally those guys get paid.
You DO realize the entire point of a review is to influence others, right? Like, just because someone isn’t getting paid (also, the vast majority of the reviews people actually read/watch are either paid content or attempts at building a userbase) doesn’t mean they aren’t an influencer.
And yeah. While I would very much not say “a massive swath of the public” are influencers… a LOT of people online are influencers. Just like anyone who goes to the gym or plays b-ball in their driveway are actually athletes. They just aren’t professionals.
Yeah I just don’t consider things like Steam Reviews or things of the sort to make someone be considered an influencer. They sure as shit aren’t being paid, an if they are, than im owed a substantial amount of money.
The point of the reviews I read are ones that summarize, explain, and detail what an actual game is. The more neutral toned the better.
I would not consider simple reviews by your every day person to be someone I would EVER call an influencer, and if you tried, they would just be confused.
You don’t consider reviews influencers because you are a sane person with two functioning neurons to rub together and have not sucumbed to this social media brainrot that tried to fit everything into socia media labels that social media addicts can understand without having to think.
Cant even rely on reviews anymore… I forget what game it was, but there was a game had a massive pay to win scheme in the game… that was only added on launch day, so the reviewers copies didnt have it… So they gave glowing reviews on the gameplay, without the game having the pay to win store and all the gameplay nerfs that encourage using it.
People don’t browse the PSN store, because it’s crap. I mean, the steam store is pretty bad, but I still manage to just browse and bookmark some games there to get back to later.
I mean the discovery queue is pretty much on point except for the blockbusters they insert “because they are popular”. I don’t care whats popular, i care about what i like, roguelike indies and metroidvanias for example.
The huge win in digital for them was killing the resell market.
No used games means no competition from previous owners. Prices can stay at $60/70/80 forever without any user market forcing prices down.
Every media vendor wants digital only to cut production costs, but it's really to own the market. Consoles did exactly that for decades. The shift to subscriptipns for not only online at all but also to "dont own games, just give us a monthly part of your invome forever" was them pushing this advantage to its maximum conclusion.
Only now, with falling sales and falling interest due to "quick media" like tiktok/instagram/etc, is microsoft giving up on its console moat and sharing all games across devices. Only a loss of relevance as an entertainment medium is forcing them to open the market up again.
People vastly overestimate the impact of reselling on games… and that actually includes the platform holders themselves.
20 years ago? Yeah, Blockbuster was a scourge and there were even some magazine articles about noticeable dips in profit when a popular movie came out (because parents would bring kids to the rental store) and so forth. And Gamestop became a big enough player that they allegedly contributed to the death of the PSP Go
These days? Gamestop is all but dead even though most major studio releases still have physical copies. Because the game itself is increasingly a loss leader with the idea being that people will buy DLCs or even sequels. Project 10 Dollars WORKED except now it is Project 30-90 Dollar Season Pass. And… at that point, it makes a lot of sense to just sell the base game for 20 bucks or even give it away “for free” as an IGC.
And a good point of reference is Nintendo. If they were only interested in shelf space they would do what PC games have done for closer to decades than not: just put a piece of paper in a box. Instead, they have the asinine “game card” system which avoids the cost of cartridges while still allowing for resell. And… you can all but guarantee that Nintendo ain’t doing things for the consumer. Hell, back when they were arguably THE leaders in console gaming, Microsoft basically began their death spiral by trying to do largely the same thing for the XBOX One (which also included things like software to support watch parties of shows with friends). If game reselling was such a massive blight on their revenue they would never have tried that.
“All submitted videos are verified through TikTok’s system to check copyright violations before they are approved as advertising content. However, we have become aware of cases where the circumstances surrounding the production of certain submitted videos appear inappropriate. Thus, we are conducting a thorough joint investigation with TikTok to determine the facts.”
Nobody thought to… I don’t know, watch the ads before they went live?
I don’t think anyone does unless the ads are on a smaller site or service. Anything larger like YouTube, tiktok etc just do some automated checks and send it. That’s why so many scams/propaganda get advertised. Nobody checks
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Aktywne