MicroProse has really been filling a niche I’ve missed with these “old style” games. I mean, maybe an odd post to comment this specifically on, because this is and old game, but their recent releases in general seem to harken back to an older era of gaming that I’ve missed.
Hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll get to try their hands at another MechWarrior!
But those moves have traditionally come when a game is out and has, by whatever metric, failed. Or, at the other end of the scale, when a game fails to get off the ground earlier in development, and a publisher decides to cut its losses, or as it would probably say, “reallocate resources”. To commit five years of work, to build an entire company around the goal of producing a single game, and then throw it all in the bin just days before it was supposed to come out is a whole new level of ineptitude that’s particularly cruel, even by this industry’s cruel-by-default standards.
Abandoning a project right out of the gate before there’s a real chance to see what it can be is “cruel”.
Recognizing that a product doesn’t deserve to be shipped is a good thing. They gave it a great chance to get to a finished product, evaluated where it was at, and had the decency to not shovel shit out the door and rip people off.
Do we always want to play as the good guys? Are all actors to be prohibited from portraying bad guys? Is all media going to end up like Barney the Purple Dinosaur episodes? Games, movies, books, songs are supposed to be entertaining.
I feel like it also has to do with lots of games featuring elements of (or full-blown) violence as part of their regular gameplay loop.
Yeah, in Helldivers 2, you’re committing genocide for insidious political reasons. But in Pokémon, you’re committing genocide, because you’re a ten year old and your neighbor gifted you a pet.
Normally, the genocide part would be the very obvious red flag for something political going on. Instead, you need to be aware of why precisely you’re doing the genocide this time around.
Such genocide elements are usually also paired with fun gameplay (because violence is easy to translate into gameplay), and with a terrible story, so it’s understandable that people would skip all the story elements.
Conflating Pokemon and genocide really reduces the value of genocide. That it might be a tongue in cheek accusation towards our livestock and animal treatments … but genocide.
Like calling everyone Hitler and a nazi. Or groomer or…
To me the real story here is that the field of cybersecurity, and actually proprietary software in general is a giant fucking scam: we see hacks happening constantly to huge companies and government agencies that either advertise their products/services or market/promote themselves as very secure.
The only actual known and effective way to combat this in almost every scenario you have ever heard of is to use open source software that can be reviewed by anyone, and when a flaw is found, an alert can go out and then it gets fixed, and you can actually verify that it has been fixed; that combined with actually having employees follow basic cybersec guidelines.
Time and time again individuals and large organizations pay for proprietary software that claims it is secure, and often either have cybersecurity ‘experts’ on staff, or consult with a cybersec firm.
Time and time again people and organizations pay for software that is sold to them as providing security, and when it doesnt, the sellers of said software are never actually liable.
Why would anyone trust any kind of such software at all? Much less pat for it?
And the hacks just keep happening.
Accountability for this is no where. Not in any real, effective sense.
Yes, which can be avoided with the basic cybersecurity standard of teaching your employees how to not fall for that.
Literally not much more complicated than ‘dont give anyone your work login and password, If you think something is suspicious, report it to security and never, ever, EVER connect any of your work hardware or accounts to your personal hardware or accounts’.
But to your main point yes, its a million times easier to hack a human brain than a computer, and no one seems to get this.
Am I the only person that has read or even heard of Kevin Mitnick?
Heh. It's a LOT more complicated than that. Especially post-covid, with everybody ready to support working from home.
Hey, good luck getting hundreds to thousands of people, ranging from engineers to a bunch of kids doing QA to technically illiterate administrative positions and office workers to keep rigid, government-level security standards when each and every one of them has some degree of remote access and mostly are just... you know, going about their lives and going to work every day. You sound like you'd love doing IT for a game studio.
And hey, guess what, all of their work hardware and accounts are probably connected to their personal hardware and accounts. Or are, in fact, the same hardware and accounts. Nobody has time or money to equip every single employee with a second phone and laptop overnight and all of them had to work remotely during the pandemic, just as much as everybody else. It's kind of chilling to know that the games industry is under this level of harassment and these leaks keep happening, because I guarantee any other non-tech industry that has shifted to remote work the past few years is doing much worse at this. Gaming was already weirdly secretive, even when compared to movies and TV or other similar cultural industries.
For the record, games are full of open source software (and closed source as well). Go check out the list of OSS on any game's credits. They still have to comply by disclosures required by most licenses, so it'll be in there somewhere.
Uh… I have managed and maintained cybersecurity policies for a non profit albeit not as head of IT but working in close cooperation with him as the team i was on was in charge of a huge system that nearly all employees and definitely all our clients used.
We successfully managed to not have any cybersecurity incidents while I was working there.
We gave everyone work phones and work laptops because that is how you do cybersecurity right.
And uh, no, if youre going by companies specifically being targeted and compromised by hackers, as opposed to hackers going for anything connected to a widely used software service, uh, gaming companies are actually doing far worse than other industries, likely due in large part to incompetent management.
Sure, yep, its chilling that employees at video game companies are at risk because their management is incompetent.
No clue what you mean by ‘gaming was always weirdly secretive when compared to movies and music.’ Music and movies are even easier to pirate than video games which have to be cracked… Not sure what youre talking about here.
And oh dear god here at the end youre going to ‘for the record’ inform me, a person who has written code for game mods for 20 years and professionally for various roles in the tech industry for a decade that games have open source and closed source code in them.
Thats not even relevant to how a whole company’s network gets breached and its employees get basically doxxed.
The… the video game company’s internal software for managing employee records, clock ins, clock outs, wage payment, emails, etc, is different from the software it uses in its product, the game.
It doesnt matter if a game has OpenGL and a bit of a liscensed proprietary physics engine.
Thats not connected to the company email server.
Why do you have such an arrogant attitude when you have no idea what you are talking about?
Partially. Too much of the software and defenses require the user to act in a specific way to complete the defenses. And humans are not rational beings. This gives attackers ways to circumvent the security measures. This in addition to cybersecurity too often being an afterthought.
Yes, which is why I said ‘and also get employees to follow basic cybersecurity practices.’
If the problem is either company culture or human nature is in the way of implementing cybersecurity properly, and I can assure you that this is true, having managed cybersecurity policies at a large non profit for over a year…
…then the field of cybersecurity should actually be figuring out how to successfully mitigate or solve this issue, they should be focusing on far more than just esoteric techno buzzwords in their marketing, and you know, actually be capable of delivering ‘security’, the thing they claim to sell.
If that means pivoting to things like the imoportance of training employees, developing a security conscious company culture, holding seminars to convince execs and middle management to not have cybersecurity as an afterthought as well as what it actually takes to actually be secure… then the field of cybersecurity should do that.
Sorry if i came off as too hostile, a bit off the anger may have carried over from explaining to graphics card marketing buzzword enthusiast ninjan, as politely as i could, that he has no idea what its actually like to work for a world class tech firm as a software engineer, over in another thread.
Hmm, some of those titles are suspicious because yes perverted nerds do cause some of society’s problems as we learned from the whole incel movement, and there are studies showing some types of porn lowers empathy etc for others.
Yes, there are good reasons for moderating a platform that distribute games.
The deleted article’s author question some of the feminist group’s claim, and highlight some involved parties are motivated by faith. But don’t dispute the need for moderating Steam where necessary, for instance if there is CSAM.
I don’t see a good reason to censor those articles. They could be better, maybe better highlight the danger of some porn, and the need for moderating. But the articles are not that bad.
If this sticks, expect every conservative group in the US to start trying this. Pressure Visa/ MC/ PayPal not to accept charges from Planned Parenthood, or from LGBT-friendly businesses, or from book publishers they don’t like, etc. This is just censorship by other means.
I quit Overwatch after hundreds of hours due to Blizzard’s performative support of the LGBTQ+ community. Limiting the Pride events to countries where it sells while excluding others, some of which are in the EU and don’t even have any laws that would prohibit that, means Blizzard couldn’t care less about the most oppressed.
Funnily, NetEase is better on that front in that its rainbow-colored mountain background in Naraka coinciding with Pride was global. Hopefully Rivals follows suit.
I mean any and all corporate support of a cause (like LGBTQ) is going to be performative. Don’t expect corporations to take a stand unless their existence is predicated on that cause.
You’re basically resorting to the perfect solution fallacy. The reality is that even my Naraka example shows it can be done better, though there are even better examples, like Apex Legends that didn’t mind greeting everyone with the trans flag at one point.
At the end of the day, even if the motives are not genuine, sending a strong and universal message has an impact, as does accurate representation. Many LGBTQ+ people will see it as validating, anybody on the fence will get closer to accepting it as normal, while those who hate will see that their views aren’t embraced. What certainly doesn’t help is showing people that there is a Pride event but not in their country, suggesting their existence is viewed as second-class.
I’d argue you’re the one that’s committed the nirvana fallacy if anyone.
You want them to take a useful stance but you quit supporting them because it wasn’t enough of a useful stance.
I’m just saying, don’t moralize companies … they’ll let you down every time. It’s not about doing what’s right, it’s about fitting in. Companies are like the virtue signalers in high school, they’ll only do it if it’s cool.
Maybe that’s useful to your cause, maybe it isn’t, maybe you support them maybe you don’t, but I wouldn’t expect a company to do things from a place of morals.
It was the opposite of a useful or helpful stance. For the countries that got the events, it was performative. For the countries that didn’t get them, it was contributing to the problem by telling people they aren’t welcome. Even doing nothing is better than that, which is why I’d rather play any other game.
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