While I am a strong supporter of independent games media (and am ride or die Remap):
“For quality games media, I continue to believe that the best form of stability is dedicated reader bases to remove reliance on funds, and a hybrid of direct reader funding and advertisements. If people want to keep reading quality content from full time professionals, they need to support it or lose it. That’s never been more critical than now.”
This doesn’t scale. The outlets doing this can support MAYBE 3 people with the outliers being Kinda Funny who have never found a sponsorship they didn’t like and Giant Bomb who are pretty much riding on the massive support wave after they got fired AND have THE biggest legacy name out there and… time will really tell if they can keep supporting the whole crew this time next year. Oh, and MinnMax where Ben has to constantly remind people that he is actually the only full time employee and all the cohorts are contractors with day jobs and that you can also see Janet at Remap or her twitch channel and Charles at Game Informer and Jacob talking about death in a video essay on Nebula and…
But the other aspect, which Remap (specifically Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny) have pointed out is… when you are part of a big org you have, among other things, lawyers. You can’t really do investigative journalism without those. With the power of (I think at the time it was) Kotaku? Jason Schreier is the “press sneak thief” and Bethesda just puts the outlet on a shitlist for review codes until the end of time. Without the power of Kotaku? Jason gets a letter in the mail and needs to find a lawyer who can protect him.
Outlets like 404 Media (and, to a much lesser extent, Aftermath) have more or less structured themselves entirely around this and I don’t actually know how they are pulling it off.
But Independent Games Media is, by and large, just that: Games Media. Not Games Journalism. And the reason you want the latter can probably be summed up with the Nintendo pricing of the Switch 2. They very specifically did not mention it as part of their press event or in the copy they sent out. And many outlets (including Remap and MinnMax) pointed out why. It is not going to look good for them but by doing it that way they control the message. Because all the Hype is gonna be for the Direct. So they get all the benefits of all your favorite talking heads Talking Over a Mario Kart trailer but the actual pricing? That is MAYBE an updated news article or a tweet. Which becomes “it is what it is” when they go to buy rather than “Wait… IS a gameboy actually worth 500 bucks?” discourse that we see for brands like XBOX that couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag at this point.
And we’ve seen similar with so many controversies over the years. People who are REALLY tuned in might have heard about The mordhau “Show us your kni**a” thread and rampant racism or the black myth wukon sexism. But the majority of outlets people actually go to for coverage/opinions are VERY aware that their legal department is Uncle Jack and don’t want that smoke. So you mostly just get “we aren’t going to cover it” rather than “Yo dog, this shit is fucked” that we would in the old days.
I get the feeling the people at Aftermath are just hungry to poke the bear. I imagine it’ll eventually catch up to them, but hey, more power to them for now.
It would be nice if more people gave a shit about in depth reporting on the industry but it’s an ever-shrinking niche. I think that’s a problem with any “enthusiast press” though. The game industry is huge and has asinine amounts of cash sloshing around in it though, so maybe we just end up with a bigger gulf between sites regurgitating press releases and sites actually doing reporting?
Most importantly, it’s “press sneak thank you very much!
Is this a “we’re just gonna let AI do it” kind of thing? Because I think there’s going to be a market for 100% human non-AI content opening up. I think some people would be happy to pay a premium for it, even if it’s just Patreon-level dollar a month stuff.
final fantasy III (us III, the magitek mech kefka one) has tunes I STILL use as background music on audio production: magitek factory, the intro and shadow’s theme specifically
the idea this god damned genuis would let an algorithm write music he’s bother to even listen to is madness
I’ll be really curious to see the next few months of the Steam Hardware Surveys to see if Linux usage goes up a bit. Can we hit 3% this year? September already ended at 2.68% (+0.04%)
would be awesome, but the Steam Hardware Survey also reflects that the majority of users just want to use the thing that simply works. Low-end components and 1080p have dominated those charts for years and years now. For that 97% of users stuck on Windows, you can be sure that almost all of them will just click “upgrade to 11” and be done with it. Sounds like 2/3 of them are already there, the remaining 1/3 are probably waiting til the last minute, or they are in Europe and they get to wait an extra year.
or they are in Europe and they get to wait an extra year.
This is being offered in the USA, too, you know. You have to submit to logging in with a Microsoft account and allowing them to back up your system preferences to the cloud.
Secondly, the onerous TPM 2.0 requirement is actually what is going to stop a lot of those low-end computers from upgrading. I recently was helping a friend with what seemed like a relatively recent machine and I was shocked to find it still has a BIOS and not a UEFI and I had to redo my installation disk to support MBR partitioning instead of GPT partitioning. People like that will be SOL and simply won’t be able to upgrade, even if they want to.
The ESU license will be associated with the Microsoft account used to enroll. You may be prompted to sign in with a Microsoft account if you typically sign into Windows with a local account.
Hahaha fuck you microsoft.
You can enroll in ESU in one of the following three ways: At no additional cost if you are syncing your PC Settings. Redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points. One-time purchase of $30 USD or local currency equivalent plus applicable tax.
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Aktywne