At first I was like “WTF does an indie games site have to do with Funko?” then I Googled it…
Looks like they hosted a BUNCH of infringing games, so Funko, instead of doing the righteous thing and sending them a takedown request, just nuked the whole domain…
I mean, I don’t blame them for protecting their IP, they just picked a super shitty way to do it.
I don’t even think they would have needed an official cease and desist… just a friendly note of “Hey, none of this Funko material is licensed, please remove it.”
Well, if you care about an indie gaming site being shut down for copyright violations, yeah, you might want to actually care about copyright infringement.
What they were doing here though was supporting developers profiting off someone elses IP. It would be like, I dunno, I started an independent Superman movie and was fundraising off that. It’s a little different from piracy.
In the case of the Five Nights at Freddies game, the developer is infringing on not one but TWO properties.
“In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”
So, me, making a fan page for FunkoPop versions of the Five Nights at Freddies characters and using their images? THAT’S fair use.
Me charging money for a fan game based on the same Funko versions of those characters is NOT fair use.
“Section 107 of the Copyright Act gives examples of purposes that are favored by fair use: “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, [and] research.””
I blame them for protecting their IP like a old white person protects their property value by shooting at any black person that moves into the neighborhood.
Valve is not a normal company. As far as I know they still have their fluid work structure in place where projects are dictated by what the devs themselves feel like doing and are inspired by.
Icefrog (who was the lead developer of Dota 2 - and Dota 1 for many years before that) is lead developing Deadlock as I understand it. It has his fingerprints all over it, at least. It seems enough other people at Valve liked his idea of a twist on the MOBA concept to turn it into a full project.
I feel your frustration but there isn’t really any opportunity cost lost here. It’s not that they decided to make “a game” and chose this one out of all available options. If they felt like they had enough ideas to make Half-Life 3 (or any other single player game) then they would have. It’s just that this is the game they want to make right now.
This is going very well it seems! I see the next few countries close to passing the threshold are:
Denmark (88%)
Netherlands (87%)
Germany (75%)
Assuming we get those, we would need one more country. The highest remaining country is Ireland (55%). Getting all those still wouldn’t reach 1M signatures, but the rest could keep being distributed across the EU (even including countries which have already passed the threshold, I’m assuming).
This is all very exciting and gives me a lot of hope! Keep signing folks!
At this point I’d that say getting enough individual countries is almost inevitable in the process of getting 1M signatures. If the distribution between countries remains as it is, every country with more than 25% right now would reach the threshold by the end.
Seems to me like the individual country threshold is only added to prevent initiatives getting single-handedly pushed by a single big country and never be the blocker for regular initiatives.
So yeah, the best strategy would most likely be to keep pushing the big countries: Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Speaking of Italy, what’s up with them? Only 18%? Those are rookie numbers.
That’s one thing I checked first, but compared to Germany for example, the average age and percentage of people playing video-games is apparently just a few percentage points of difference. Though “people playing video-games” could of course mean anything and I’d wager that the average person playing casual games on their phone might not care as much.
Discreetly insulting both Australia and Pluto in one sentence! Absolutely love this; will share it with all my Australia and Plutonian friends! If Earth gets attacked, it’s not my fault, but yours :'P
It can be played pretty casually. A run usually takes around an hour but you don’t have to play it in one go. And on the base difficulty it’s pretty approachable. You definitely don’t have to play 500 hours to enjoy it. But you can if you want to :)
Slay The Spire is an excellent recommendation. Although a lot of people find roguelites stressful because they get stressed about losing progress. You just have to play with the right mindset:
Outer Wilds. For a few friends who don’t have it yet. I’ve already bought it a couple times.
I already own it… but it’s just that good. So good I vicariously try to relive the game by watching livestreams and Eelis’ recaps of other live-streamers.
It really is something you have to experience blind. Since the entire game progression is knowledge based and pulling threads on the mysteries until the mosaic of the story and experience unfolds is truly something you can experience once.
I thought you meant The Outer Wilds, and spent a solid two minutes on a routine sanity check. Hadn’t heard of this game though, so we’ll call it even 😸
It was a bit of a slow burner on release so I’m not surprised you didn’t hear about it. People had access to the beta years before the official release, so when it came out essentially nothing really changed and there wasn’t this big announcement.
How is the dlc? I had a tough time with outer wilds. At the time I played it, I found it to be very frustrating. I needed a spoiler to get past two or three major points. But in hindsight I think it’s really an impressive game. I’m thinking about picking up the dlc, but I’m not sure about it and I don’t want to search about it to avoid spoiler.
It started off a little slow, but imo it was better than the main game. It’s both a little more streamlined and better story-wise. You probably should play the main game first
Not really. It will feel like programming if you already know how to program, but I don’t think it will teach you programming anymore than any other problem solving activity.
I’m putting up a minecraft server for my kid and her friends, but I don’t really play myself other than than. Few creative builds so I’m curious if you could please expand for me what exactly you mean when you say to mod the shit out of it. Is it enough to create rules or am I going to have to actively moderate their play?
sad that we’re at this point. when I was young I loved Pokemon and imagined where it could go in the future. was SO EXCITED to hear pokemon go announced. apart from a week or two of social interactions when everyone had got the game all at once, it had no longevity and that was that. it could have been so beautiful!
Honestly, a minimum viable product is entirely what Pokemon Go was designed to be. It exists to extract behavioral surplus from users and convert it into valuable action by inviting users to go to certain places in a community through placement of Pokestops and Gyms. Basically a tool to drive foot traffic, which Niantic can (and does) sell to businesses that want to drive that foot traffic. It worked brilliantly for years and still is a somewhat effective method of driving advertising and sales for real world businesses.
The prequal, Ingress, was even simpler, but that probably made it better as a long run game. There were portals to harvest and a simple system to create triangles between portals to claim territories. Nothing overly complex, and no expectations to bring gameplay mechanics from an other game.
Ingress was obviously dead as soon as Niantic launched the much more popular Pokémon Go. Of course fantastic for Niantic, but I just feel like Ingress would have been a game I would have played for a lot longer if Pokémon Go didn’t happen.
More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.
My running theory has been that the official release date is tied up in Microsoft marketing deals still. So I’m guessing we’ll hear the date from Microsoft during summer game fest.
Its hard to tell what exactly their MS deal is and it would be surprising if MS had much influence beyond “We are part of the first release date”
But 2025 is actually pretty plausible. Pure speculation, but if Silksong was in the polishing/padding stage in even late 2023 and Team Cherry are financially stable? Waiting for a new console release makes a lot of sense. ESPECIALLY the Switch 2 since…
Look. The Switch 1’s launch year was a fucking shitshow. Yeah yeah yeah, they had the greatest wii u of all time and blah blahblah. But the first party releases were pretty jacked up. It was “the Nindies” that carried the Switch 1. And it was ridiculously good for those indie studios who basically were the only games available for the latest Nintendo gameboy.
And Switch 2 is looking the same. That sizzle reel was almost all “We have a small DLC for the Switch 1 game!” and “This will be available in 2026”. So you can bet plenty of indie devs and publishers were in talks with Nintendo about when the release window was so they could decide if they wanted to wait or not.
I assume it will be on basically every subscription IGC.
Big lump sum to start with and guarantee they have a successful launch for any investors. And then people will buy it when it leaves the IGC in 6-12 months because they put it off or were waiting for a DLC or whatever. And then they’ll buy it on every single platform because Hollow Knight is that damned good.
But the actual price to get something in an IGC is not as high as people think it is.
People engage in absolutes. They either love a thing or hate a thing. There’s no nuance.
And it must be made to cater for them, there’s no expectation that it will contain choices they don’t approve of.
And this stance, this modern relationship with the world permeates everything, especially forms of media.
You see it in films and books… Fans and stans and folk trying to take it down. There is no nuance or middle ground.
People don’t accept that, perhaps, something isn’t just “not for them”. That’s why you get grown men complaining about the direction of children’s shows they used to watch.
And this is compounded with social media where polarisation, blunt takes and contradiction are the primary drivers of engagement.
It’s absolutely not just a gaming problem. Movie reviews are getting more and more bandwagon-y. Only a few reviewers post in the first day or two, and everyone else says “okay, they hated it, now I have to hate it too or I’m going to lose credibility”. I think it’s the inevitable outcome of having less famous reviewers, a NYT columnist can post what they feel, but a small blog can fall into obscurity if they have one contrarian review.
The only part that’s unique to gaming is that gamers are the most toxic community in the internet.
Don’t forget the vocal minority problem. The subset of people who comment on things is much smaller than the set of people who consume them. And while the threshold of effort for making comment is low, it isn’t zero, so people who hold more extreme views are going to be more prevalent in the selection because the people with moderate views aren’t going to have the motivation to spend 20 minutes explaining the nuanced position they have, while the ‘love’ and ‘hate’ camps will gladly spend 10 seconds on posting their simplistic view.
Add on the way modern systems work, focusing on likes, upvotes, etc. and you get short form responses getting greater engagement purely because they don’t take as long to read. It’s always easier to get traction with a short, maybe amusing, rehash of a common opinion than with a long dissertation on niche, complex views.
That cycles back in at the top to create a visibility bias so the people making the next round of commentary/content see the wave of love/hate and try to ride it. The result is a feedback loop with a terrible signal to noise ratio.
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