This is going to be very interesting, as Dune Messiah is a radically different book to Dune. It eschews lot of the action and heroics in favor of discussions of politics and statecraft. Very much a slow-burn compared to book I.
Same here, Sim City 3000 and The Sims were my jam and I still listen to their soundtracks every once in a while, they’re so good. There was something truly magical about Maxis back then.
Holy shit. Never thought I’d see the day. When I was working QA they would lay us off after the end of every project. It sucked. We’d be off work for months at a time. No benefits, no healthcare, no OT pay, long hours, bullshit 1099 contracts. And if you were on a shit title, sorry homie. Enjoy Barbie’s Island adventure.
QA could use some unionizing across the software/game industry imo.
It’s amazing how buggy websites of billion dollar companies are. They either don’t have a QA team or don’t prioritize any of the bugs they file. If I were still in that field I’d probably team up with some litigious ADA lawyers.
I’m super happy to see this. Just a few years ago, I was working as QA in a studio adjacent to this group. (We had our own QA, but worked alongside the activision group) and god they needed to do this.
So happy to see them fighting back. I hope the rest of the employees who don’t get fucked QUITE as hard as QA join too.
I applied for a job as a QA at Nintendo and barely was not taken. Hearing about all of the bad experiences people have had working as QAs, maybe it’s for the better lol
I’m OK with them wanting to keep making money from it as long as they update it for compatibility with newer operating systems. Selling something they have completely abandoned us not cool.
What makes you say that this is aiming to make that impossible? I picked up RA2 because it was cheap and I figured if I didn’t like the port (doesn’t work well, forces you to play on their application, etc) I’d just return it and so far it’s been good enough for me to use. The installation process was a lot easier than the original game and I was able to hop straight in and play. Haven’t had any issues with it yet.
So far I haven’t seen anything to suggest that this is anything but them catering to a different market that being the steam community.
Yes I both am aware and agree that that would be acting against archives and the like. EA making these games available on Steam however is not the same as Nintendo suing emulators.
EA's launcher still requires internet access though, right? If so, you're probably better off sticking to the GOG versions. I booted up Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, and EA told me "no".
Maybe not. The disclaimers on the side of the store page appear to be different between these and some other EA games. I hate how hard it is these days to discern if a game has a stupid always-online requirement.
Alternatively, maybe a better work culture that could be advocated for by the union would result in better working conditions, more realistic deadlines, happier developers, and by virtue of these things a reduction in the kind of error you are referencing.
But also people make mistakes sometimes. Unions don’t cause that, and I’m skeptical of claims that they seriously aid or promote mistakes either.
As someone who worked for Activision, in QA, on major CoD titles, I guarantee you that wasn’t QAs fault.
I can’t even count the amount of bugs my team found, documented, and raised a hell of a stink about, that still went live.
Major bugs like that in live are not due to QA missing them. It’s due to the rediculous pace ATVI makes the team put out content. Doesn’t matter if QA reports something, if the devs are not given the time needed to fix it.
Maybe you should read how software is developed, what roles there are, how business functions in general, and so on - all that before blaming anyone for anything on the internet.
I make crappy corporate software. I know how this garbage is made and it has no quality. It’s all release after release and hope the bugs get fixed after a while by the tram.
This is great news. This is probably one of the companies that most desperately needed a union. Sure, I was laid off due to (bragged about) nepotism at my last dev job, and maybe a union would have helped, but according to my lawyer they didn’t break any laws laying me off. I’m just glad I was able to bounce back and land on my feet in a higher paying job.
Even considering all of that, I find it hard to think of a company more desperately needing of a union than Activision/Blizzard.
Oh no! Pretty soon the union will be demanding all kinds of crazy things like “stop stealing breast milk from the female employees” and “don’t drive employees to suicide.” When will it end?!
Hey listen, those employees signed an agreement when they came onboard that anything produced while in the employment of Blizzard was automatically Blizzard‘s property.
So when Mike Ybarra gets thirsty? That shit is his.
Those are things the Blizzard employees have had happen to them. The boys club that was going on there was horrific and the women that worked there went through a ton of shit.
It’s definitely sarcasm. It’s framed in “soon they’ll be demanding all kinds of crazy things like…”. If it weren’t sarcasm this would imply this person really thinks those things are crazy.
I could agree on the /s being sardonic over sarcasm. With how irony has been slowly redefined over the years I can see how people could preceieve why that would be a sarcastic statement and accepted as such, cus language changes over to time and whatnot.
Companies should not see this as a negative. They should think about this as a “radical invitation of social corporate interaction in the gaming industry to maximize long term engagement of the developers.”
Populous The Beginning! I never played the other populous games but I have some very fond memories of this one. As a kid I just loved using spells to reshape the worlds and mess with the enemy AI. Dropping a volcano in the middle of their village and watching them go nuts was always so much fun.
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Aktywne