I’m a game developer. No game developers are panicking about this game. I’ve not played it but I’ll probably play it soon. It looks great but even if it blows my mind it doesn’t cause me to panic. It inspires me. I don’t know of a game developer that gets panicked at the sight of good games. I know monetary goblins that might realize they can’t push heartless games anymore but in the last decade we’ve started to see games really take shape as cinematic masterpieces. Experiences that truly top movies. This is the inevitable next step. Games with more interactions and more meaningful choice out of those interactions.
I think by "some developers", they're referring more toward the AAA studios who have spent the last couple decades baking MTX into every nook and cranny they can find in their games, and not indie devs.
There are even great AAA studios out there that aren’t pushing mtx. I just played uncharted 4 and I can’t believe that is almost a decade old. It still holds up. Far better than Rockstar’s red dead redemption 2. That said there is room in the industry for everyone. The indie team that takes 6 years to make high quality games to the AAA studio pushing games out every 2 years. Including small indie studios of 5 people making huge hit survival games and indie games that were made in 9 months but have a lot of heart.
Quality is subjective and I think we’ll start to see our genres break down as people go towards more and more specific definitions. We’ve already seen this a bit with the fps reverting back to doomlike with games like prodeus.
Even so they won’t be panicking. They can just pull a trusty piece of IP out and slap some microtransactions on it and the core target group will be all over it.
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
AAA games are very rarely as innovative as indie games, it’s all just the same rehashed stuff I feel like. Just whatever is “safe”.
So, I very much agree, the typical AAA stuff from studios like EA, Ubisoft, etc. Don’t interest me.
Although maybe Starfield will be interesting, we’ll see. I didn’t really like Fallout 4 though, I wished the RPGs were a bit more like the more old school ones lol.
I’m willing to be surprised by it, but I’m not optimistic for Starfield. What I’ve seen of it so far looks mainly like they grafted chunks of No Man’s Sky onto a Bethesda Fallout game and are trying hard to pitch it as The Next Big Thing. Frankly, I’d much rather have the next mainline Elder Scrolls game instead, but at this rate I’m going to be 40 before I get to play a sequel to a game that came out in my 20s.
About $500 of the ~$600 million they’ve raised is mine, dating from the original crowdfunding campaigns and the first year or two of development. I still check in every year or two to see if they’re any closer to having a complete game, and every time I do, I come away with the sense that they’ve put vastly more effort into developing and selling spaceship JPEGs than they have into making the game those spaceships are supposed to be used in.
Whenever I play I just assume there’s a reason no one else has tried to make star citizen before. Though they def have a problem with management and scope creep though
I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they’d ever played. You know what didn’t appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are “old”
They’re taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers
Honestly, nowadays it feels more like an indie studio is more of an indicator of quality than AAA. Most of the games I buy and enjoy are indie/small studios.
Larian is about as indie/small as Bethesda was when Skyrim released.
I also question how much that bar has truly been raised. I’ve not played Baldur’s Gate but I have seen people treat games like generation-defining games for them to just kind of not exist outside of their bubble. Like Uncharted 4, Last of Us, Spiderman, and God Of War. I just finished Uncharted 4 and it was truly amazing but for a lot of people, it did not raise their standards for the entire industry. I feel like, if anything, Baldur’s Gate 3 will raise standards for AAA RPGs. Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
See, that’s what I am talking about. Mass Effect 1 didn’t have a huge impact on the industry as a whole. Doom only had a huge impact on the industry because it was very small and they started licensing out their engine with groundbreaking tech. The industry is huge now.
I remember a lot of people were saying Half-Life: Alyx was a huge industry changer and that it would prove that games are far more enjoyable in VR. It is the best-reviewed VR game on Steam. Yet, now, VR is essentially dead.
I remember when people were saying PUBG just changed the entire industry and we’d never look at it the same again. Which honestly, PUBG did have a large but temporary impact on the games industry. A lot of battle royals came out after. Now though, you’d be lucky to find a successful battle royal release in the last 2 years.
I’ll certainly play it when I can but a 20+ hour game commitment is not what I am honestly looking for anymore. I like far shorter experiences. So overall, it feels like counting the chickens before they hatch. Is Baldur’s Gate 3 really going to stay in people’s minds? Is it going to influence the next games that come out? Are AAA studios building more classic isometric-inspired RPGs because of it?
Doom did have a significant impact on the industry but only because the industry was small. Doom 2016 was released and people said it was “industry” changing but realistically counter-strike, valorant, and other FPSs are the same as before. I am just cautious between the whole industry changing and realistically only transforming a small subset.
True industry-changing games can be felt today. I will say that Doom is industry changing but again because it was so small. Half-Life 2, was that industry changing? Frankly, between Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the first feels far more influential to me. I’d say Doom’s offshoots are more influential than actual Doom at this point. Minecraft feels industry changing and was around that time indie game development got huge. In part, because of Minecraft’s success. Mass Effect though? I remember it being called a fine RPG with terrible combat mechanics. I think people far remember more about Mass Effect 2 and 3 rather than Mass Effect in 2007. Your article was written in 2021 and the only other one I found was written in 2012 and talked about Mass Effect 3’s ending and how it changed the industry because Bioware listened to fans and caved to change it.
Actually, let me put it this way. An industry-influential game is a game that any game developer should absolutely play even if they are making a console or PC game or mobile game. It doesn’t truly exist anymore but even if you cut off the mobile game developers and stick t just console or PC, BG3 is probably not industry-influential because someone making Slime Rancher or Survival Crafting games doesn’t really need to have knowledge from BG3. BG3 will probably influence RPG games and probably solely RPG games. That’s a subset of games that a lot of developers do not need to worry about. I do not need to go rush out and play BG3 in order to build any game.
I’m literally not disagreeing that Doom was industry-changing. I said it multiple times. You seem to be just reaching through any hole to continue to argue about something we both agree on.
Doom only had a huge impact on the industry because it was very small and they started licensing out their engine with groundbreaking tech. The industry is huge now.
So I said 1) doom had a huge impact on the industry because it, (the industry) was small and they started licensing out their engine. Now that the industry is bigger it’s not really a good comparison to any game.
You then said:
Let’s say that didn’t have a big impact though, to say Doom didn’t? I don’t even know where to begin. Doom + Quake basically shaped the next 20 years of FPS’s with goldeneye being one of the other major iterators on how MP was handled.
I literally said the opposite and said Doom had a huge impact on the industry.
So I made that clear:
I will say that Doom is industry changing but again because it was so small. […] I’d say Doom’s offshoots are more influential than actual Doom at this point.
This is absolutely true and you agreed by saying:
You would not have doom off-shoots without doom. You’re really reaching here to disagree with me over something that is pretty much consensus. 
We agree Doom was industry-changing, but Doom is currently not as directly influential to the industry today. We both agree and you state that’s somehow a point of disagreement.
So I fail to see why you are pulling at this small nitpick part that we both agree on when I’ve made a slew of points in the comments above that you ignored. If you want to engage, try to do so in terms of having a conversation rather than just trying to point out something you feel is wrong. Take into context the things I’ve said, don’t just focus on one little thing you think you disagree with. If you actually disagree with what I said, please be clear in how you think I’ve said something because it might just be a point of clarity rather than actual disagreement.
When you said we wouldn’t have the games that influence the industry today. The argument only works as a point if you don’t think the argument that doom directly influences the industry today. Otherwise you would have argued that which is a stronger point.
Not even close. I’m playing it right now, well into act 2, and while it is THE ultimate example of what a cRPG should be, that doesn’t necessarily mean the breadth and scope would work in other genres. You’re WAY overestimating the impact this is having on the gaming industry, and that’s evidenced by how other developers are responding to it.
Also. I’ve played through all the Mass Effects (even Andromeda, which I actually enjoyed more) and to say that it was industry-defining is a fanboy take. Full stop. From where I’m sitting ME1 did not introduce anything groundbreaking that hadn’t been done already by that point, and to be honest the early Fallout games had way more gravity when it came to choices and decision-making. I’d say of games in that era, the original Borderlands was more ground-breaking given it kind of kickstarted the looter-shooter genre, and that’s a stretch.
You are free to disagree, but to hand wave me away as having “fan boy takes” is pretty rude and does not make me want to engage further. Thanks and have a great weekend. 
Then again, it might have just preemptively killed Starfield.
They're pretty different games. They're both RPGs, and there's some overlap, but turn based is ultimately very different gameplay than action, and one isn't going to scratch the itch for the other to a lot of us.
Yeah, honestly, I doubt BG3 is going to cover the same ground for a lot of players. I don’t think people are going to play BG3 and expect more from Starfield. People will understand that they are far different games and BG3’s influence is probably going to stay in turn-based CRPGs rather than being an industry-wide influential game.
I'm fully expecting to go pretty hard at both, and BG3 might have me engaged enough to not jump straight into Starfield at launch, but I need immersive 3D games, too, and except Elden Ring which is it's own thing (even if it does pretty comfortably check the boxes of ARPG), I've been waiting for something of comparable scope to Skyrim that doesn't have a fatal flaw for a long time. Even as old and janky as it is now, it's still a scale that's only matched by a handful of games in the decade since.
The beauty of Bethesda’s flagship titles (namely Fallout and TES) is even if they end up as buggy messes upon release, or have empty maps, the modding community corrects those flaws relatively quickly.
It’s one of the reasons that I, a long-time veteran of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., am not worried if GSC Game World fucks up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Today, the best part of the first titles is the mods that fix, improve, and add content to the games. It’ll be the same with this one, and I’m excited to see what people do with A-Life 2.0.
I sware that’s happened with all big games of late, Elden Ring, TotK, etc. A few Devs decide to be contraian to the praise and then the media decides it a huge backlash.
Absolutely what I noticed too. The tweets didn’t seem like they were even “panicking” but just saying to players “Don’t expect this because most studios aren’t going to devote the same resources and ability to the party-based classic isometric-inspired RPG genre because the genre is fairly niche.”
Real talk. I don’t game on console anymore, but Metal Gear Solid is the crowning jewel of console game plots.
Ever tried explaining the series to someone unfamiliar with it? You end up sounding like a fuckin meth head coming off a binge, and to me that makes it a narrative worth diving in to.
Sure but I am talking about games as a whole. You see more cinematography today in most games than you saw in MGS 1998. In fact, MGS 1998 has cutscenes and it has gameplay. Games today are removing that divide. Your gameplay is in your cutscene. In MGS1 you’d hit a video and walk away for 10 minutes while listening to it and it’d be fine. Today you hit a cut scene and you stay because you’ll have to shoot someone as the conversation breaks down or the building collapses and you have to jump out.
That’s what I am talking about when I say cinematic masterpieces. They don’t have jarring cuts between a cutscene and gameplay and they feel like cinematic moments while you are never taken out of the gameplay. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where you could show a game in a theater and people wouldn’t know the difference.
Man, parts of Death Stranding were so interesting they should have won movie awards. Brilliant supporting character/mocapped actors. Couldn’t agree more on that front.
Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.
I hope they’re using this time to learn lessons from their Starfield flop and gather the talent and budget needed to improve upon Skyrim. A modern engine probably wouldn’t hurt.
However, my expectations are very low at this point.
They haven’t learned from Oblivion, Skyrim, or Fallout 4. Probably others.
Or really, they learned they can just keep releasing games on a hacked-up Morrowind engine, and make huge piles of money. So that’s what they’ll keep doing.
Yup. ES6 is going to sell like condoms on an STD themed swinger convension no matter how many bugs are going around.
And the saddest part is that too many have learned nothing about AAA titles, and will preorder the game, making the game a massive financial success even before releasing anything of quality.
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
I think it’s safe to assume they know that and would bear it in mind when choosing or building an engine. Their games are famous for modding, after all.
That's a years if not decade+ long project though, including major investments of time and money that you could pour into actual games. You can't just stomp a new game engine out of the ground, especially not with how complex video games in of itself have become, and if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Dude... You are the one missing the point here. lol
We were talking about them making a new actually modern engine, instead of sticking to their old gamebryo trash heap. And then you come along, claiming that they already did that, even though they literally did not. Please stop playing daft.
They had a turd. They polished it up a little. It’s still the same turd.
Their ‘modern’ engine is only modern to them, but it’s pathetically behind everyone else. I can only imagine the spaghetti code that thing is at this point.
It would be nice if the game speed and physics interaction were not tied to a inconsistent variable such as frame rate. And it seems that the more they pile on the gambryo engine the less receptive to modding it gets. But i can also accept that the cracks in the games that grow over time may not be the engine, but Bethesda prioritizing MVP centric development over hammering out the problems. Modders are carrying an auful lot of load to even get the games running.
You can’t just stomp a new game engine out of the ground
I don’t know what you mean by that, but creating new game engines and migrating from one to another have both been done before.
Is either of those tasks fast or cheap? Of course not.
Are they worthwhile? Sometimes.
Are they possible? Absolutely.
especially not […] if you want it to be as moddable as their current one.
Well, I can understand why you might assume that if you don’t have a lot of experience in software development, but it’s just not true. Making an engine that allows for very moddable games is mainly about planning for it during the design, and either building good tools for the game data or publishing the specs so other people can. It’s not arcane magic.
(And for what it’s worth, while Creation Engine is quite moddable, it has enormous room for improvement in that area. Actually working with it can be a very frustrating experience.)
I’m not suggesting that a big budget alone is sufficient to make a good game.
However, enough budget to keep the team employed (note the many gaming industry layoffs lately) and appropriate budgeting (in terms of both money and time) affect things like code, art, and writing quality. It’s kind of important.
I think it’s going to require the people making the most high-level decisions to come to the realization that their old way of doing things is outdated. I don’t have faith that they’ll come to those conclusions.
at the end of the day they are going to make the game they want, whether we like it or not, microsoft is now involved as well so who knows how that is going to affect them with their decisions
I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.
What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.
Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.
Friendly reminder that the original “loremaster” of Elder Scrolls left Bethesda before they released Elder Scrolls Online, and they replaced him with someone who has apparently been making pretty questionable decisions with ESO lore.
I mean, they always have the out of dragon breaks rewriting reality/making multiple conflicting timelines simultaneously canon (see the events of daggerfall as referenced in later games) to handwave away retcons, but overusing that just means that no lore actually matters.
I think of it as a pool from which to draw and connect story elements, rather than rigid canon. If good writers were given the chance, I think they would find plenty of material to work with.
I think I counted 6 quest designers in Starfield, which was a spot in the credits I was specifically looking for given how many quests they had and how many of them would have been better off not even existing. You can’t talk about having 1000 planets and then make quests that aren’t interesting to populate them.
There are more than 50 quests unless you’re getting creative with how you count. There are over a dozen in each major faction, and those ones are mostly okay, but the ones I really take issue with are the nothing quests that aren’t part of any faction; the ones that basically just have you go to a location and then report back. Those are awful. There should be zero quests in there that the quest designers themselves aren’t excited about. Even the bounties that you pick up for a given faction that have you go to a place and kill an enemy mob should be more exciting than what I’ve already described in this sentence.
Perhaps “you’re right”, “you’re wrong and also short, here’s why”, or even “I don’t know”. These would all be things you could tell them and a better response.
It’s a tricky balancing act. They need to recover the investment as early as possible to pay less in capital costs but doing that will mean that later on when the product is sub-par it will cause problems and extra work.
Since the engine, game logic, art, story, testing is so heavily coupled together changing the engine a little bit could cause a month of work down the line.
I think personally the best way is to start by making an engine or taking one off the shelf and then write a mini version of the game with shit art that has a lot of bugs.
At the same time making models with hitboxes that all have the same physical properties otherwise, dialog content and recordings and all other content that can be done separately.
Once that is fun to play then you can start working creating a slightly bigger system with a single short storyline to have a cohesive experience and will have the genaral feel of the game.
Once everything above is done setting up a closed beta is the way to go. Take some feedback, add features and redo the small story to be more fun.
Then once everything is a fun experience but people just want more you do the whole everything.
I’m replaying Starfield, and on my second playthrough, I’m noticing the depth they put into this game. Sometimes a single dialogue line you said days ago will have an effect on NPC attitudes through an entire side story. I’m not going to argue that it’s not a regurgitation of their lame formula they’ve milked for the past 15+ years, but they do need to reevaluate where their money/dev time goes to.
Replaying as well, doing side quests I put off and surprised they actually go interesting places. Just did the one where zero G kept turning off and on at the space station that got taken over.
Damn, TIL you can come across these locations on accident just exploring. I thought that place was weird to be randomly floating out there with no real good loot. 😂
I misread your comment and now seem foolish lol but that is hilarious, I think Bethesda needs some work on their world engine and random events. Saw a mod where people are making custom towns now and man would random encounters within that environment…would take it to the next level.
I’d go even further: developers ought to be required to submit reproducible builds to the Library of Congress in order to be eligible for copyright in the first place.
(And copyright ought to be shortened back to its original term length, by the way.)
Sadly, even if I’m moralistically in favor, there is so much insane computer science logic (and proprietary mechanisms) behind the process of compilation, especially on certain embedded systems where this issue comes up, that I doubt that could ever be pushed into law.
I understand it’s easy for a layperson to have that opinion, but I don’t think it can be hand-waved away as too difficult when people are actually doing it.
It being possible for some is quite literally you using an anecdote to try and prove a norm. I sincerely hope you have enough logic skills to understand why that is stupid, incorrect, and bad logic…
You would maybe not be surprised to know that there is way waaaaay more in common from one software project to another. Especially games which essentially all use one of a handful of game engines and asset sources.
I think proper codifying engineering standards for software would also help… maybe even should happen first.
This doesn’t make sense as the compilers would also be included in this new copyright scheme and would become public property after so much time.
There are open source compilers for all major CPU architectures. In fact the open source compilers regularly outperform the closed source ones. It’s also not exactly that difficult to add on more architectures to an existing compiler these days thanks to the modular way modern compilers are built. Once you build a backend for LLVM you unlock not just one language but about a dozen.
Others have mentioned existing efforts to form reproducible results. So, this might be irrelevant now; but I’m fairly sure if the mindset was “open source compilers are always better than extremely expensive ones”, the expensive ones wouldn’t have a reason to exist.
That could be an old mindset. (Of course, binaries made way back in that age are part of how we got in this mess)
Others have mentioned existing efforts to form reproducible results. So, this might be irrelevant now; but I’m fairly sure if the mindset was “open source compilers are always better than extremely expensive ones”, the expensive ones wouldn’t have a reason to exist.
Actually their reason to exist is that some software and hardware platforms don’t have a real open source alternative.
I have a friend who works with some of these compilers, and also with low level assembly language and stuff. He tells me most of the closed source compilers he works with are way behind the open source ones including Microsoft’s compiler. I’ve seen some evidence of this myself too. The reason people use the Microsoft one is because it integrates better with the Windows APIs and Visual Studio, or just because they don’t know better. I believe Microsoft even have an initiative to integrate LLVM into Visual Studio because they know how bad their compiler is in comparison. Since it’s by a large company specialising in systems software theirs is probably one of the better examples.
In the Apple ecosystem they use LLVM for C and C++. The only stable Rust compiler afaik is LLVM based, though they are working on their own alternative which will also be open source.
This reminds me of warzone 2100. After its publisher (punpkin) ceased trading, some dedicated ex-employees and community members managed to liberate the source code in 2004.
Now it’s available in some of the major distros and is still updated to this day.
Every line of code needs to be Open Source. The people or businesses responsible can buy a subscription to keep it from the public. No more money => Publicly overseeable sources + FOSS licensing.
There definitely is already a resale market for Steam accounts, mostly used by cheaters or scammers who want a legitimate-looking account with no game or trade bans.
Debit card is tied directly to your bank account with no rollbacks. If somebody gets that info and decides to clean out your bank account, that money is gone, period, and you’ll never see it again.
With a credit card, you have a degree of separation and the ability to contest or roll back charges. Debit cards don’t do that.
Want to do a chargeback with American express or similar credit cards: call the toll free number and do it in less than 90 seconds, instantly approved
Want to do a chargeback with a debit card: you need to go to the police station and report the seller for fraud, then find the chargeback form hidden somewhere on the bank website, fill it and send it back together with the police fraud report via FAX (no email) to the bank, which might or might not approve it in 90 days. If it approves that, they will take a 30 euro fee from what you will get
I just emailed my bank, that was literally all it took. When I log in to my banking website I can do it right there, too. I just emailed them because I was afraid there might be consequences, but they called me up saying they’d already done it for me and I should have no worries
Happened twice, so it’s not a one-of, and since I could even do it myself right from the summary of transactions… All direct debit. I don’t even have a credit card, so it can’t be mistaken.
I guess it might vary depending on how much we’re talking… If they’re correct that credit card companies are requried by law and banks are not, then I can imagine a bank deciding to refuse to refund a purchase if they feel as if it’s too much money. At which point, it becomes much more of a hassle (lawyers getting involved, etc.) to get the money back.
Here’s the thing, I hate the debt obsession in the US, however it’s also really not that difficult to not get into way more debt then you can manage (barring medical expenses) and having a high credit score (even though it is stupid) absolutely does help in a ton of ways here.
I would encourage Americans to play the game smart, use credit as if it were debit, do not intentionally go into debt unless absolutely necessary, and if you’re in that position you should start seeking help, because getting crushed in debt is fucking awful.
I learned a lot of what NOT to do from my parents and paying attention during the 2008 crisis.
Plus there’s extra protections for credit cards, at least in the UK. Spend a certain amount and if the company goes bust you get your money back. Saved my ass with two different airlines that got into financial trouble once they’d taken my money.
I think fraud is required to be refunded by banks as well as credit issuers, but I’m sure most people would rather have money to spend on food and bills while they investigate, and you’re not going to get that if your account has been drained.
Don’t most debit cards (the ones that have the “Visa” logo) get processed as credit cards online anyway? Unless you’re entering your pin number (which, I would highly advise against ever doing on the internet), then it is processed as a Visa purchase.
They might get processed via the visa network, but the money is still leaving your bank account. Visa never really had it.
So now you gotta deal with visa and your bank to get something back that was stolen, and no, you aren’t ending up with the same protections. They aren’t as motivated as none of them are out the money.
If it was a credit transaction, the credit card company is out the money, and if you say it’s fraud and refuse to pay them, well now they are on the hook. They’re now motivated to determine if it was fraud or not as their money is on the line. Also, they now lose out on a potential customer that gives them high interest on debt if they dont undo it (because most people don’t pay off their credit cards). There’s no debt when it’s a debit card and transaction fees are smaller so they earn less from you.
Edit: and even IF you get the money back, it’s going to take a lot longer, and that money is gone in the meantime. Needed it for rent? Sorry the fraud investigation takes 2 months. With credit, your rent money isn’t gone.
When they were asked to implement age verification in Germany, they simply pulled anything off their platform in the country that would require it instead. Mind you Germany has a system that makes age verification anonymous so if privacy concerns you, you could just implement it. (Almost no platform does because they want your data though.)
Valve doesn’t want to touch age verification with a 10 yard stick and that tells me it is probably the way to go here. Because once they have it, the path for more regulations is clear.
In this arena, more regulation is needed. Anonymous age verification is a good idea, but I question the actual anonymity. It usually depends on trust of some entity. And I just can’t fathom an entity that can really be trusted.
It uses the government ID, which has a built in NFC chip. You can use a phone in combination with your ID and it’s pin to verify your age online. The ID scanner app will tell you which parameters the website requests from your ID, and its possible to only request the birthdate.
I don’t like the system, but it is truly anonymous
Sounds like it is only anonymous if you fully trust the app. That app has all your information, and the site you are trying to access. And I bet it is completely closed source. It also likely has logs about what sires it is giving information to. Not who’s info in that log. But elsewhere it probably has logs on who’s id it verified. Get access to both, and software can start to crunch the numbers and figure out who went where. That if course is assuming they don’t decide in the future that it is worth just keeping that data together in one spot. There is just no entity that could manage that app which wouldn’t have a motive to use the data and power it has.
No, the app is completely open source and has reproducible builds. And the site you are accessing only gets the information it requested, and you see which information it requested in the app before scanning your ID
Now you are starting to sound like you know what your talking about. But I’m not convinced yet. So when the app sends just the requested data to the site, how does the site verify that the data is legit. A person could fork the app and hack it. I am sure they thought of this, I just don’t know what thier solution is. And I can’t read german.
Yeah, something like that. But while your device can validate the cryptographic sig for the app, the site requesting proof of age can’t, since it isn’t running on the same device as the app. The best I can guess, the app could request verification from the state run site, and specify what information it wants (based on what the requestor site asked for). The state site could use a private key to encrypt the response and give it back. The app could use a piblic key the state makes available to decode and confirm that only the intended information is present. Then the app can pass that to the requestor, who can get the public key from the state site and decrypt the information. But, the gap there is how does the requestor know the app it is talking to hasn’t been modified. I don’t think there is a way that it can. Only the device the app is on can verify that. And the requestor can’t trust the device either.
Some Authentication that I remember has a component where the requestor would then talk to the state to confirm the info it got from the app was requested from the state by the same app the site is talking to. This prevents using someone elses response as your own. But in this case, that would tie the site to the request which means the state would have both peices of info, who and what site. So I don’t know what there solution here could be that wouldn’t result in the same problem.
They could (but didnt) do it with zero knowledge proofs as well. Then the website could go back and verify against the state site and no private information would be leaked.
The state would know the site requesting it via IP, but they wouldn’t know which proof they were validating.
It’s often talked about in the blockchain crypto space, but it’s not the only way to use them. You could use it in a centralized system like this too.
I looked deeper are read up. Everything I can find says the age verification function is not anonymous. There is an anonymous login function, but that doesn’t seem to include age verification.
As long as the part asking for ID trusts the part verifying the ID, there is no need for anonymity to be broken, since the verifier just has to confirm what the asking part needs to know.
Think of it like someone owns a bar and needs to know if a patron is old enough to drink, and the bar owners brother or best friend says “I know that guy, he is old enough”.
Foreign corporations are much more aggressive about harvesting data than the German government so you should think twice about using their products in the first place. Most of the time the German government is under fire for privacy concerns it’s because they trusted products from Microsoft or Huawei and the like.
My bad, I had the german government mixed up with probably the brits who are constantly saying they need to be able to read everyone’s messages. That said. It’s hard to know what the intelligence arm of a government is really doing. So if they give themselves a backdoor, it’s hard to ensure only they come in. And the government is always only one election away from dramatic policy changes.
Not going to happen since Valve doesn’t want to manage a database of IDs. It’s why sex games with real life actors aren’t allowed on Steam since that would require Steam to have IDs and consent contracts of all the actors stored on their side.
And Gaben is a hardcore libertarian, probably despises government IDs.
Previously, I had mused over vague ideas about whether blockchain technologies could go into a “proof of real person” system, by one-way-hashing information used to verify only basic details about a person. Eg: They exist, are a unique person, and are over a certain age. Ideally, it could be set up in a way that cannot easily correlate them between company databases.
That said, no real need to poke holes in the idea, because…that was the easy part, and it will probably never happen (or be far more draconian than I describe)
It absolutely can be done with zero knowledge proofs, but it needs to be from an authoritative source.
It could prove you are over the age of 18 (or 21) without having to divulge any other sensitive information, and be untrackable between sites or any outside agency (e.g government doesn’t know and can’t know you visited a site or location that verifies your age)
They could add it to our drivers licenses or passports or whatever which would cover the authoritative part. Your ID is an NFT at that point, and could be fully digital.
Edit: they might even tie generating the proof to requiring a biometric verification (fingerprint) so you can’t give your ID to someone else.
No one has ever denied the math wasn’t cool. It’s just that the usecase (NFTs) were terrible. I guess the hype has now died down so we might see some actual uses, like land ownership information.
NFTs in general are still cool. Concert tickets, tokenzied stocks, land ownership, car ownership, digital keys (that can open digital or physical things), digital IDs, it’s endless what can be done with them, but it’s a long way until some of these things get adopted.
It’s one thing to put those into the blockchain and it’s a completely different challenge to have a software infrastructure which incorporates the tech end2end. Example - someone put a random image of someelse else’s ticket into the blockchain. The ticket checker needs to have a checker app on his phone which can verify this in real time. It’s trivial using centralized DBs.
I don’t even think the business software side is that problematic for a lot of good use cases, it’s the general non user friendliness of wallets and having to guard your seed phrase properly and just general technical knowledge.
As soon as your concert ticket is an NFT people can risk losing their ticket, and people will lose tickets.
Making the ticket and scanning the ticket for entry isnt too difficult a problem, and it’s entirely fraud proof.
Edit: and so many people get scammed out of their seed phrases while trying to get help because they just don’t understand.
That’s not a solution at all. First of all, depending country, you will need a gambling license. This is a PITA as gambling laws will differ per country. In my country gambling is heavily regulated and you would need to check ID and keep track of how much a person gambles. You have a duty of care and if you notice a person’s gambling habits are becoming problematic you have to refuse them.
With the plethora of great games getting released every month on PC, it’s very hard to feel any excitment for a game that will probably release in 2027 on PC. It doesn’t help that GTA Online left a sour taste, and even the single player story was only great for the first few hours then you just start doing heists for the fbi for the rest of the game. Considering we’re only getting a cinematic trailer after all this wait, I’m expecting already multiple delays or cyberpunk-level of disaster at launch
Yeah that’s my question. Like many others, I grew up with the single player only GTA experience. I have so many core gaming memories just fucking about in GTA 3/vice city etc. I just really hope we get a decent single player experience.
The shark card whale bonanza killed any excitement I had for the franchise. I know they are gonna just milk the shit out of it, and it will probably cut into the quality of the game/experience. On the plus side, smaller games like Last Train Home kick ass and are a ton of fun, and I’m looking forward to another indie game coming out next year.
I suspect given the success of GTA online their priorities have shifted and they’ll want this on as many platforms as possible on release. They’re a GTA online company now, units sold are a secondary concern.
It really was a good ole’ internet argument where he was just obnoxiously wrong in his interpretation and remained just as confidently incorrect the entire time.
With any luck they’ll single handedly keep “AAAA” from catching on, because nobody with a shred of pride would want their multi-million dollar project connected to anything that was said to be AAAA.
I don’t think a lot of people are going to double dip this time. This game will sell consoles, but it’s not going to make up for the deficit the console market has compared to how many PS3s and Xbox 360s were out there in 2013.
I really hope this is true. The only thing that will stop Rockstar from the delayed PC release nonsense in the future is actually stopping the double dip.
I ended up with a PS4 just for Red Dead 2. But I still haven’t bought it on PC and have no plans to do so.
The thing is, the PS4 kind of made sense because I also wanted a Blu-Ray player. I still have it for that, so a PS5 would be an impossible sell to me. It’s like Rockstar tries to sell consoles but this time around is one of the worst ever console eras.
I’m with them; my 1080p TV still gets the job done and looks great to me. Maybe I’d be more invested in cinema if cinema cared more about what I want. I can’t even walk into brick and mortar and buy a movie anymore, and it’s not like there’s a GOG for movies.
Yeah if you care about cinema you definely want a better resolution and considering to buy your UHD versions whenever available, but I could say the same for some modern videogames.
My tv is 4k, but I exclusively watch 1080p movies and series on it. I’m not going to double my subscription costs just to get 4k streaming, and most piratable files are 1080p.
Piracy has been on 4K for longer than streaming has been charging extra for it. New releases on the scene have actually started skipping FHD unless explicitly requested.
There’s a time and place for 4k. It is not all the time. But some things are treats with high resolution and pixels-per-fov of your vision. Also oled looks so, so good.
That being said, 1080p for older stuff looks perfectly fine, and I’d argue audio quality, audio stereo image, and accurate frequency spectrum resolution is game changing, and arguably more important.
RE: gog for movies: that is a fascinating idea. What would that look like, to you? I’m very curious.
I just need to be able to buy and download DRM-free movies. Outside of that, I don’t care what it looks like. Movie studios put so much DRM on my Blu Rays that they’re a pain to rip (but notably, not impossible to rip), and “digital copies” of movies are just long term rentals. Meanwhile the movie industry is on fire while their old revenue streams dry up, and they’re scratching their heads as to where they went wrong.
I’ve been a PC player for 2 decades now, but it’s getting so expensive! I can’t go back to consoles after being so free, but high end PC gaming is probably over for me. I feel one of my biggest mistakes was buying my first 1440p monitor, everything gets more expensive and I put myself in that position.
As a “game purist” I’ve a 1080p desktop setup for PC and retro, I’m planning to build a full 4k space in the future for this/next gen; 2k is a particular spot, more work oriented, but it can be used to play better well-optimized PC games that don’t need a 4k gamepad experience (I think it hardly depends on the screen size and how it’s placed). I would also really like to buy a real CRT in the future!
I own a NEC CRT and I use it even for modern games every now and then. I beat Silent Hill 2 Remake on it last year and it looks great. I can’t remember which resolution it was, but I only lost a bit of screen on top and bottom so it was playable even if the game didn’t come with 4:3 support.
I’ve always been a midrange gamer. It is getting expensive. But a mid range PC is still as powerful as a console for a roughly similar price. I’m in for the gameplay, not so much the ultra high graphics.
I’ve always enjoyed trying new technologies such as Ray Tracing or HDR, but all in all I agree with you, gameplay comes first. That’s why I’ve been falling in love with indie games more and more.
I’ve always been a mid-range gamer. When I was younger, that’s just what I could afford. As I’ve grown older, I didn’t see the point of spending more for high end. Mid-range already feels too expensive. But luckily, the parts last for 5 years easily.
Just play at 1080p on your 1440p monitor. Also take solace knowing that everybody is in the same boat and complaining that studios are putting too much time into making things look real rather than good or be fun. So we’re in a sort of pre-renaissance with socioeconomics and tech business. Something’s got to give, and it ain’t Valve, hopefully. That would be a disaster, as they’re a lot more important than any of us know. They lead the gaming sector and business in the gaming sector, which leads the tech and entertainment sectors, which ultimately translate to the rest of society. And they lead with… Integrity and consumer friendly practices.
Also, tell AAA to fuck off until they get their acts together. Stop playing live service games, and just play other, better games high-endedly. They don’t have to be brand new, either. Look for independent studios, smaller studios, and/or non-American studios. It’s okay to play big titles when they’re good, but the actual good games haven’t been in AAA or big American published studios now for like ten years. Every once in a while in that space, an anomaly appears, but those are the exceptions to the rule.
If you want, you can focus on peripherals like nice headphones or steering wheel or a good controller for your pc. Those, combined with playing more genres and exploring different things (keep an eye on humble bundle, too! And epic store free games!) can really keep your libraries full and feeling fresh.
The lucrative and naive kids stay the same age for studios, but we all grow up eventually, and if we still love gaming, we need to demand better from studios by speaking up and not buying garbage. The older, experienced demographic that has realized the bullshit is just going to grow bigger, we aren’t going away, and we WANT to buy games. It’s only a matter of time before more studios realize this and cater to us rather than make the same garbage that only the inexperienced can play, just slightly shinier each year.
I’m watching things in 4K and playing in 1080p. It’s exactly four times the pixels, so it’s pixel-perfect scaling and it looks fine. (58" TV and the sofa is about 3 metres far, so a bit on the smallish side. I’m sure a 65" would look just as good.)
Woah 3 meters is really far for a 60 inch. I have a 60 inch at about 1-1.4 meters and it’s great. Perfect for two people on a couch with some nice bookshelf speakers heavily toe’d in. It’s not great for entertaining, but for watching things it’s honestly better than some theaters.
It’s all about how much it fills up your field of vision and how closely your retina’s resolution matches the display’s resolution. I don’t want to have to turn my head at all to see things, and still be able to use my peripheral vision to have good awareness of the entire scene, and not see individual pixels if I can help it. But, still have it fill as much of my vision as possible while within those constraints.
Been wanting to upgrade to a 70-80 inch screen, too, at the same distance.
Another big variable is height placement of the tv in relation to one’s head height and angle while comfortably sitting where you’ll sit. Sit, close your eyes, sit comfortably, play with tilting your head forwards and back until you find a comfortable and sustainable pitch angle, with your eyes still closed look directly out from your skull, open your eyes, and that location is where the middle of your tv should be (it’s usually about 10-20degrees down from directly ahead, but is different for everybody and your seating position and body). So if your tv is 3meters away, your optimum tv height might be on the literal floor. (And also speaker woofer and cabinet size for the volume of the room (bigger speakers for bigger rooms), and placement, depending on viewership location and count, go for an equilateral triangle between your seating position and the two speakers and default to having the tweeters at ear height with no obstructions and pointing at your ears for the most accurate imaging and least amount of comb filtering, and keep the woofers and tweeters vertically aligned to minimize time variance, which is good for stereo image, and try not to have you or speakers too close to walls or especially corners).
Very true. Cinema rooms and living rooms can be the same, but I absolutely agree that most cinema rooms absolutely compromise on social entertaining. It can be done, but it’s difficult and has to be done consciously. I’m of the belief that they can both be done, well, together, and in a single space.
Back in 2013, I bought an old PS3 + GTA5 for £150 or so just to play the game, then once I had it, picked up two more exclusives, before never touching it again pretty quickly.
Getting a console for GTA6, plus the game, this time may set me back more than my expendable income after rent and bills. It will absolutely sell consoles but I’d wager people are actually able to buy a console much less than in 2013.
Again, it’s coming to PC. Every GTA game comes to PC eventually. Rockstar purposely waits 6+ months to announce the PC version, because they know people like you will double dip. It happens every single time, and you keep falling for it.
I’m not saying that Rockstar is in the right for doing it this way, but they keep doing it cause you keep forgetting that they do this every time. The downvotes prove it; none of y’all ever learn. That’s why I’m so annoyed.
It’s a double dipping technique.
First all players are hyped for GTA6, some even buying a console to experience it on launch day.
Then the PC release get’s out 1-2 years later and everyone with a capable rig know it will run better there and buy it again.
Assuming it will be a 80€ game, they now made 160€ in revenue instead of 80.
I don’t know how to say this but corporations suck. They turn human spirit into profits and excrement. Anything led by a corporation will inevitably suck if it doesn’t right off the bat.
What even is the point? The stock market is just a ticking time bomb and when it fucks up, somehow people lose their job and their house and anything else thats sustained by income. This makes sense how??? How is the stock market not considered a crime against humanity? It doesn’t benefit anyone except maybe rich people but rich people are already rich so who tf cares.
I’m sure there are. But, at least in the states, many tech people are also right-leaning libertarians. Co-ops are unpopular with them because they want to be the kings in the castle, not equal with their peers.
Co-ops are quite rare in Europe as well. I can’t name a single tech co-op.
In fact I’d say it worse over here. In my experience stock options are a very rare kind of remuneration, whereas as far as I understand it’s common in US Big Tech companies like Google or Apple (though of course non-voting shares are a far cry from actual co-ownership of the company).
On the other hand corporate profits are taxed pretty high in many countries (for the smaller tech companies that aren’t based in Ireland). It’s 30 % here in Belgium IIRC. So at least some of the profits make it back to the people, in a more general sense.
Tbh mainly because of dumb content. I grew up with free TV so i understand and can life with some ads if the content can be used for free. Also tbh i still sometimes use it for music and that one video gaming magazine’s channel that i really like.
I feel like I’ve become somehow allergic to youtubers and such.
The video pretty much describes why Fandom is so bad and why many games are moving their wikis to alternative services, and why you should stop using it in general. Some examples include:
Ads everywhere, including autoplaying video ads that play another ad when they’re done. There are also ads sneakily inserted in the middle of articles that are related to the wiki, like a Gamespot review (Gamespot is owned by Fandom)
A sidebar you can’t remove that promotes their content
Fandom hijacked the community’s Mcdonald’s wiki to turn it into a giant advertisement
Accounts that are 4 days old can bypass restrictions and easily vandalize pages
Fandom sometimes introduces things nobody wants, such as AI generated answers that are usually wrong, take up the top half of the page, and with no way for wiki admins to remove it. They removed it after a lot of backlash but still…
When people fork their wikis to other sites, fandom refuses to let admins delete their old wikis. This makes new wikis difficult to start because Fandom usually ends up as the top result on search engines, even if they’re old abandoned wikis.
And then you learn about Fextra’s embedded twitch player that artificially inflates their twitch view count and pushes out smaller content creators who are actually trying to engage with a game’s audience.
God, I hate constantly seeing their channel with 50k+ views on Twitch. It’s insane that embedding the player throughout their entire website isn’t against TOS.
Oh yeah… Gamespot, that place existed and it was terrible always. Then you look at the other things Gamespot own and realize they all got butchered in terms of reliability and impact.
Seems like on that last one someone could go through and change all the content in every page to a link to the new wiki. A PIA? Certainly, but at least it would get the ball rolling and use the built up SEO from fandom to help your new site get views.
Unfortunately they just use a bot to revert those. You’re not allowed to truly migrate off fandom, all you can do is fork your own data and try to out-SEO the fandom wiki, because as soon as you put it.on fandom, fandom owns it too.
I wonder if you could use a bot and AI to write fake information and post that instead. Seems like fandom wouldn’t have enough game specific info to judge the accuracy, especially if it happened over time.
The video also calls out that one of the challenges in moving off of fandom is SEO. The fandom sites often are above the new sites even when the fandom site becomes a pile of unmaintained, vandalized garbage. This suggests that vandalism actually helps fandom.
The best thing we can do is not visit the sites and don’t link to them, instead using and linking to their new sites.
Fandom is a wiki farm, meaning it hosts a bunch of wikis. Also they run on freely available software mediawiki.
Fandom has a couple main problems:
Barriers to entry are super low, verification for users takes place 4 days post account creation, with no other steps needed by the user. Paired with the limited options that moderators have for editing access on wikis and you have a wiki that is much tougher to moderate.
Ads. Fandom is for-profit. And that means super obtrusive ads that we’ve come to expect. But fandom also shoved ads in the middle of wiki pages, with admins having no control of where those should be placed. There’s also the matter of sketchy ads that are served to minors. Also, some of the ads are outdated but are for subsidiary companies of Fandom.
The Grimace Incident. Basically Fandom took over and turned the McDonald’s and grimace wikis into huge advertisements, wiping out the hard work that the actual wiki maintainers did. They also put in a bunch of factually incorrect information, literally going against the whole purpose of a wiki and really worrying other wikis, because what’s stopping Fandom from getting paid again and repeating the event with their wikis?
I’m sure I glossed over a bunch of the details but that’s the best I can do from memory.
It is called individious, there are many hosts you can choose from. In any instance, a youtube link you paste in the search bar gives you that video in individious. If a certain video is not working, you can use “Switch Individious Instance” to quickly jump to another.
For sone of these games piracy would solve nothing. How wouldI run an 8vs8 PvP mission in DCUO that players are required to do if there aren’t 16 players on the server? If Im hosting it offline that content is still dead.
Private WoW servers thrived. Much of the endgame content required 40 players to collaborate for hours at a time, and they have kept their own dream running for well over a decade.
You should have the option to find and play with others long after corporate servers are abandoned. Whether or not there are other players immediately available is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Edit - and you’re all over this thread licking boots and saying “you signed the agreement!”
Thanks. We know how license agreements work. They are included in the thing we want to change, when we talk about changing the industry. We want to stop allowing bullshit license agreements. The exact same way many of us want Right to Repair for people who bought tractors with proprietary software.
It also allows the game to revive itself. Those 40 players playing pirated WoW could introduce more people to the game. And at the very least, it allows it be run in the future if ever historians should need access.
Nice use of the word “entitled” - really sums up your stance on the consumer/business relationship.
The consumer is “entitled” for protesting predatory or unethical business practices.
The consumer is “entitled” for opposing the ongoing enshittification of entire industries.
The consumer is “entitled” for wanting businesses to not be able to legally hide behind unsustainable licensing practices that provide no value to society and further entrench the ever-growing rent/subscription model that is squeezing people dry for no reason.
The entire point - the entire fucking point - is that these licenses are not okay. So, no, I don’t pay for these licenses, but I don’t think anyone should be able to pay for these licenses, because I don’t think anyone should be able to “sell” these licenses.
These licenses - like many unethical business practices - put the corporation that offers them at a financial advantage over the corporations that don’t.
Regulations - in every industry - should level the playing field. They can allow ethical business practices to be viable and competitive, instead of being liabilities and risks. The copyright/IP system is an example of those regulations instead being weaponized against the consumer, and needs a massive overhaul.
And guess what? In a functioning society, consumers areentitled to get what they want. They areentitled to oppose unethical business practices, and use their collective power to try to stop it. Why the fuck would we want it the other way around? Why are corporations entitled to get whatever they want?
We have every goddamn right to protest those business practices whether or not we do business with those companies - just as we have every right to protest unethical or discriminatory hiring practices by companies that we don’t work for. Even if plenty of people applied for those jobs and signed those contracts, we have every right to protest anyway.
It is entitlement. When I signed up to play Fortnite BR I agreed to a limited license to play the game as they intended to run it. If Epic kills Fortnite do I have the right to force them to make a version of BR be playable offline? No, because that isn’t what we agreed to.
Nothing about this is predatory. You simply aren’t getting what you want and are throwing a tantrum over it
Everything about the “rent/subscription” model is predatory, but we weren’t even talking about the truly fucked up stuff, like deeply unethical microtransaction marketing to children ala Fortnite.
Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!
(Lol inb4 “it’s the parents job to monitor their kids at all times in case a predatory corporation sneaks capitalism and FOMO advertising into their apparently harmless child-friendly free-to-play game or app”)
But sure, keep on defending predatory corporations! Enjoy the taste of boots!
I’ll be over here advocating for stronger consumer business protections! Sorry, I mean, I’ll be throwing an entitled tantrum lol.
“ Amazing that you think its okay for children to sign contracts where they agree that any money they give to Epic is gone forever, and that any worthless digital assets they are manipulated into purchasing can be voided and deleted at any time without any recompense!”
At no point have I said anything that would lead to this conclusion.
For the record Fortnite is rated “T” for teens because of the microtransactions.
Your “inB4” is moronic. It IS parent’s job to do this. If they don’t have the energy then dont get them a system.
You as an adult are responsible for the agreements you make. It is childish to pretend otherwise.
You absolutely said everything that leads to this conclusion.
People sign agreements with Fortnite that give Epic the right to sell them microtransactions that don’t belong to the purchaser. They also give Epic the right to take down Fortnite and therefore remove access to any of the content that they paid for. This is the license that every player agrees to when they play the game.
You claim that protesting the usage of that license is “throwing a tantrum.”
Lol I forgot that teens aren’t children, apparently. That makes the microtransaction okay, because the players are (supposed to be) teenagers. As if teenagers aren’t vulnerable to manipulation, or as if the ESRB actually does a goddamn thing anyway.
Just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You just have to defend the corporation’s right to advertise to children, and blame everything on the parents. We already had this fight with cigarrettes, you know. People would say that it’s the parents’ fault if kids were attracted to cigarettes.
How did that turn out? That’s right. Nearly every developed country in the world agreed that advertising that shit to children was not okay. Full goddamn stop.
“Oh but it’s on the parents to make sure capitalism doesn’t poison their childrens’ bodies and minds through cartoon villain levels of social manipulation”, you say.
Corporations advertising harmful shit to children should not be tolerated under any circumstances, and functioning societies are entitled to make that a goddamn law, which they have done before, and can do again.
No I claim that agreeing to those conditions and then complaining when they do not alter those terms in ways you want them to is childish entitlement. Do you see the difference? If you have a problem with the license you do not agree to it and you do not play the game.
The rest of your post is just more of the same whining about why you can’t have things the way you want them when they are not being offered on your terms to begin with.
Finally, you are complaining about video games. You should keep that in mind so you have better perspective on this.
So… exactly what I said, then? You think Epic’s licenses are okay, and it’s entitlement to complain about them. I genuinely don’t see the difference you’re trying to describe.
Lol but enjoy defending unethical business practices, I guess. Keep imagining that I’ve bought these licenses at all, and keep imagining that it’s entitlement to want things to change for people’s best interests.
I hope the corporations thank you for defending their right to walk all over consumers. Manipulating children into gambling and renting worthless digital products is “just video games” after all. I’ll try to keep that perspective in mind.
You sound mad now, too. I don’t need to explain anything, go re-read the conversation. I can’t make you see someone else’s perspective, but I can mock you for being so obtuse.
Ahh, the pinnacle of internet discourse - pretending that one wins an argument by minor differences in tone, rather than content. Only… suggesting over and over that someone is throwing an entitled tantrum certainly sets a tone, don’t it?
Strange, that I am the only emotional one here. Perhaps if you take a deep breath, and read my comments slower? Maybe ask a chatbot to read them in the voice of David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman?
Maybe you’re right, and I’ve just gone deaf from all this blind rage. At this rate I’ll never achieve my dreams of being acutie…
Right, and the way licenses work should be illegal. If I purchase something, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, for as long as I choose to. That’s what purchase means.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Sure, I’m not entitled to get things the way I want, but am entitled to get things the way they were advertised. If I buy a game, I should be able to play it even if the publisher shops selling it. They have options on how to handle that, either by releasing the server code so I can self-host it, removing the server bits so I can play offline, or continuing to keep servers online for existing owners.
If I rent/subscribe to something, that only lasts for the duration of my contract.
Just to reinforce your point, if you rent/subscribe to something, the duration should be known at the time. The fact that they can pull the plug at any time without a prior warning is what makes it a scam.
You know you bring up a really great point. We’ve finally hit post-scarcity in an industry (information) and look at what it has done to us. Are we really ready for this in other areas yet. Should we use this as a chance to figure out how to integrate such a creation into society such that the next time this happens it doesn’t kill us all.
Blame gamers for embracing every single greedy move and asking for more. If you shout how fucked up this is and still open your wallet, you are the problem.
Another issue, those people aren’t on here. Or reddit. We’re preaching to the choir and idk what to do outside of standing outside of a Gamestop and trying to lecture people about MTX, but that seems like a good way to get ignored or beat up.
Gamers aren’t a monolith. I’m not going to blame the people who appreciate gaming as an art form when the problem is the people who will buy the latest Madden and Cod games every year
I’m sure there are cases where someone is spending money they shouldn’t, or they know better, but we have to acknowledge that a lot of tactics used are the same predatory strategies that take advantage of human addiction. I don’t think people should gamble, or bet on sports but that shit is everywhere, and it’s normalized. It’s no wonder why so many people fall into it because they don’t think it’s dangerous.
We can scream at people and tell them to stop, but that’s not a real solution, at least I don’t see how that really works. A predatory studio puts out a game that people want to play, then if it fails because people don’t buy enough, they just shut everything down and cancel the content, even when people want it. I think there examples of this happening now.
The biggest portion of people buying this stuff aren’t “gamers” in the way that it’s often used around these circles. It’s the millions of people who buy coins for their Bejeweled clone of choice and have never owned a console in their life. And there’s so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world. I remember a Twitch streamer talking about how heartbreaking it was when AC6 came out and gave you the full color wheel plus multiple channels to customize your mech, and their chat was full of kids shocked that you didn’t have to buy skins or color packs. That’s how it used to be. You’d unlock skins by playing the game, not buying them in the store, but that hasn’t been the case in decades now.
And the often touted story of the whale with more money than sense is a myth. Do they exist? Sure. But the vast majority of money coming from mtx from gamers is from people who are psychologically vulnerable to addiction/gambling and people with a poor ability to comprehend finances like kids. These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way. From lootboxes to battle passes and seasonal content to daily quests and washing money through funny money currencies, it’s all been designed to prey upon people with addiction issues, ADHD, training young kids into gambling addicts, etc. It’s the Lotto tickets and pumping extra oxygen into the air of casinos and making sure there’s no natural light in there so you don’t realize how long you’ve been playing slots of the gaming world. Look at WoW, with its daily quests. They train players using Skinner Box techniques to continue logging into the game and paying the monthly subscription long after they’ve stopped enjoying it because it’s become a habit and they are afraid of falling behind.
Voting with your wallet isn’t going to fix it. You’ll never get your average Facebook mom to care enough not to buy Farmville tokens or whatever, and these companies will never stop abusing psychology on their own. Only industry regulation will stop this.
And there’s so many new kids entering gaming all the time who have never known a better world.
That’s the real big issue here, IMO: The North Korea approach. Kids are starting to become able to spend money who were indoctrinated with this. Because to them it’s the north. It’s just a part of this entertainment that you continuously spend small amounts of cash. To them it’s normality.
What’s the saying? Something like, “There’s plenty of fools in the game, and there’s a new one born every minute.”
I feel like the casual mobile gaming crowd falls into the same category. Regardless of how old they are, spending money on mtx is normal because they never knew a world where you just bought a game rather than downloading one onto your phone and putting up with both ads and mtx.
It’s like how words like “unalive” have entered common usage - people have gotten so used to obeying what advertisers want on the internet that it’s started dictating daily life, especially for younger people.
The unregulated gambling aspect designed to exploit human psychology to target vulnerable people to spend money that they probably can’t afford to spend is also a huge issue, but that at least would be easy enough to regulate, if politicians cared enough to do something about it.
Thank you kindly for your good write-up. If you were to permit it I would like to use excerpts of this in slightly rephrased forms in similar future discussions.
These companies have hired psychologists to tell them how to best extract money from your wallet by probing your brain in just the right way.
Those are the real criminals! With all the good they could have done in today’s society, choosing to use their knowledge and training to manipulate people against their best interest is just the worst!
Don’t forget that they were hired by companies looking to make a profit off of exploiting the psychology of people and that the blame also lies with those who hired them for those jobs.
The same companies who have fought tooth and nail to prevent regulation to protect those exploited by these practices when politicians have actually cared enough to try to do something about it.
The „gamer“ label has become sort of redundant given the industry is much bigger than movies and music combined now. They‘re just consumers and no matter what silly decisions some of them make, they need protection from certain practices for the good of all of us. Just blaming a small portion of them doesn‘t help us out of any mess.
Vote with your wallet means people with more money get more votes than you do. MTX does not target people at large, they are fishing for the small amount of whales for whom money is no object. It ruins gaming for the rest of us.
There is a reason industries get regulated. Swill milk killed a ton of babies, and sold like hot cakes.
I played multiple supercell games (coc, bb, cr, be) for years, each, without paying a dime. They were well polished and fun games, and I got to play them for free.
I also really enjoy foetnite. Again, well polished. I play for free.
Will I ever compete at the highest level? No. And omg I’ll never own all the skins! Lol But I’ve had plenty of fun, because other people will pay the game makers for me. This is fantastic, as far as I’m concerned.
Sure, mtx can be implemented terribly, but I’ve also benefitted from it’s implementation as well.
You playing for free illustrates my point perfectly. You are there to provide entertainment for whales who actually pay for the game. The deal is that you get some entertainment of your own so that you stay around. But the game is not made for you, and that becomes apparent every time the owner puts the screws on to extract some more money.
I get your point, but I disagree because they need me for the whales, so the game has to also be made for the non whales as well. The payment system is made for extracting money from whales.
But really I was responding to the claim that it was ruined for me. And I find that to be the exact opposite: I care about having fun playing a well polished game, and now can do that for free. It’s like the opposite of being ruined.
Up to a point. I mean they have to get a large player base still and if by and large gamers just didn’t pre-order and buy the latest fucking re-hashed, yearly version of COD, I doubt just the whales would be enough to sustain them since whales only get gratification of pay to win against other people.
I mean look at some of the latest rounds of shitty GaaS. Suicide squad, Marvel avengers. No playerbase, not enough whales to sustain.
MTX is also aiming for kids stealing thier parents credit cards and charging them up. At a minimum they ask ONLY for game credits for Xmas/bdays to burn on games so they have cool skins to brag to friends about.
Let’s blame the consumer for buying something they like, and not the system of capitalism for it’s inevitable march to enshittification which happens across all industries amirght?
Yeah I love Gabi but it hurts that she doesn’t even seem to question whether or not she should stop buying these games. Like, I get that you love Pokemon but you acknowledge yourself that this shit isn’t going to change if people keep buying this shit.
The gamers?! I don’t hear anyone saying they want loot boxes. This is 100 percent the devs and the companies that put all the best loot behind the loot boxes. Good games such as FFXIV, does not.
Alanah is a great creator. She worked for IGN as a reporter for years, then at Funhaus as a host/editor, and finally broke into games writing, which was her goal for a long time. She also hosts an excellent cross discipline gaming podcast with gaming actors/musicians/devs talking about all things gaming.
Shes seen the industry from every angle. Its telling that her conclusion as a whole is “this is fucked.”
I don’t think you need that much insight to see that the whole institution is fucked.
Rampant “frat bro” culture
Frequent cases of sexual harrassment, and assault
Cases of suicide
Cases of burnout
Layoffs like clockwork
Often deliver rubbish products
Frequently employs consumer-hostile and manipulative tactics
What is even the point, really? Maybe I’m an outlier but I don’t feel like the AAA gaming industry provides enough good to warrant all the crap they put their workers through, and the way the sentient wallets customers are treated.
The point is to make as much money as possible while paying the workers as little as is possible. Same as it ever was.
They could always pay us more, but we’re just supposed to be happy they aren’t sending the Pinkertons to shoot our women and children anymore, I guess?
By asking “what’s the point” I meant less “what’s their goals” and more “what benefit do they serve?”
I’d love for some big swoop to just upend the entire industry. Create better conditions for the workers. Stop the companies from stealing from artists. Have actual consequences for nepotism, corruption, and abuse of power. Like crunch and all that BS is just expected as though it is because of the job, but it’s not, it’s because of the system.
I guess the “benefit” they serve is to increase the payout % for the people at the top of the ladder and their goal is to do that until the breaking point that some higher up takes the blame and they fall with a golden parachute before landing at another company exactly the same as the last one.
Rinse and repeat until you’re Summering on a yacht? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Yeah, all that you described? That’s what a union does. points at WGA They did it against some of the biggest multimedia companies. The only people who are going to fix the gaming industry are the workers and that takes a union.
She’s been great for a long time. One of the few people with public comments on the industry that has a really great intuitive grasp on the business side of it.
I mean honestly it makes sense. If we assume that the average game dev is similar to the average “hardcore” gamer, then we can only assume that they’re toxic little shits 😆
She has a great deal of respect for the devs/writers/artists/workers. Its the system itself and the execs that are fucked. The toxic atmosphere they cultivate keeps churn high so profits stay high. They build a bad place that attracts bad people that stay and good people that should leave, and they dont give a fuck as long as “number goes up.”
Give the video a watch. It’s a very candid take from someone immersed in all the layers of the field.
Over the years I have learned to pay attention to certain keywords that made me be extra careful about games advertised. So when I heard of AAAA, I immediately knew that CEO was on ketamine and the game will start as a dumpster fire.
See you again in six months. Maybe it will be in an acceptable state by then.
Its all about money and development team size. A is generally indie, AA is a small-medium teams, AAA is large teams. AAAA is marketing terminology because everyone thought that AAA just meant better.
My understanding is it’s mostly just the advantage of not having windows running hogging resources, so it should be a bigger gain for CPU bound games.
**Edit ** There can be performance gains from using vulkan over DirectX too, so there probably are GPU gains as well. It will depend on the game though
Yeah you’re right, I had mostly been looking at the difference between the steam deck and legion Go S on that chart and barely even noticed the difference between windows on the legion Go S there.
Windows uses a lot of power just existing, so you can’t get any of the windows handhelds down to a low power consumption. I remember when the Rig Ally first came out, the verge tested it using 5-8w of power on the steam deck, and using 16-22w of power on the Ally. Some of that is the hardware (the Deck has a really power efficient chip for low power games), but a lot of it is windows.
It just indicates that Dead Cells itself isn’t very demanding, so the power draw in that game converges against idle draw where the issues are most apparent
Do we know if it’s entirely coming from SteamOS? Iirc the advantages it had over Windows on the Steam Deck were not even anywhere remotely this pronounced.
Who would have predicted, a decade ago, that the path to the actual year of the linux desktop would be taken first through the linux handheld gaming PC?
… Also LoL at SpiderMan 2, the only one that does a single frame worse, which basically at this point is just a solid indicator that game is still unoptimized as all hell.
Old man Gabe has been playing the long game, for all these years.
Ex-MSFT employee on a mission to apparently save us all from MSFT this whole time hahaha
It’s not like all the alternatives to Linux aren’t that good. Mac is a walled garden and Windows keeps introducing AI slop feature after AI slop feature that actually publishes your personal information
Every time I look at Macs I just can’t get over how ridiculous they are in terms of pricing. Combined with the inability to upgrade after the fact. Buying one would just doom me to buying another a few years down the line, much better to just never get stuck in the ecosystem in the first place.
Without context that graph isn’t brilliant because it depends on the hardware of the PC. Pretty much every game I run will be better on the steam deck than my PC because my PC is terrible.
This screenshot is also slightly misleading since the color scheme suggests that 5 out of 5 games run better on SteamOS then on Windows. But if you check the numbers it is only 4 out of 5 games.
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