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.
“One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s been a bit slower to happen [in games].”
I’m totally OK not owning Ubisoft games… but not in the way they would prefer… Where I hand them money and still don’t own anything.
I might do that anyway. I bought watchdogs on steam, and it was was really fun, but getting bitched at every time UPlay hiccupped or their servers went down in a singleplayer game was enough to make me never touch their shit again.
That and Watchdogs2 being infected with Denuvo. Ugh…
I don’t know what planets he’s on but I still have all my DVDs if I choose to stream stuff as well that’s my choice but is all the streaming services went down I’ve still got all my Star Trek shows.
Anyway what’s he talking about steam exists and is wildly popular so that movement has already happened. What they’re trying to push is live service games.
My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.
You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.
The AI has never been great in the series for various reasons, but for whatever reason it just did not know how to play in Civ6. I’d either get crushed by the bonuses early on if I played on high difficulty or have the game firmly in hand by the Renaissance otherwise. Easily the worst game in the series for me as a result.
Yeah, it seems at a certain breaking point in the difficulty curve it becomes “catch up with the AI boni”, which made it a completely different game for me. And as you said, usually by renaissance you know if this is going to be a landslide victory (which at that point becomes a chore), or if you’re screwed.
Yes pretty graphics are nice, but I have never understood why it seems like all effort to make better game ‘AI’ just completely stopped.
Like I get getting game ai to act ‘real’ is/was virtually impossible, but it’s possible to fake it enough to make it enjoyable and has been for a long while and yet is always an afterthought.
He keeps saying he worked at Blizzard, which is factually correct, but he was a game tester and not a dev; a position he got because his dad worked there. He keeps using his time at Blizzard as some sort of support for his “authority” on the game industry.
He has had a game in dev for like 8 years and the code is written poorly or heavily relies on AI(exact notation style used by AI), sometimes both. Any criticism of his code is dismissed by saying that it is part of the ARG for the game and intentionally done.
He tried to gaslight his dad about him not calling on his dad’s birthday by saying he did.
He doesn’t support Stop Killing Games from an anti-consumer standpoint.
He does “developer streams” where he puts code on screen and doesn’t actually do any coding(IMO because he can’t actually code with real competence, based on examples of his code).
He should just put the fries in the bag or pivot his meta.
I’m kind of done talking about him or thinking about him, honestly. But this video is good for getting an inside look at a decent sample size of developers’ opinions, especially on the technical side.
I'm honestly a little bit uncomfortable with how much of the discourse around SKG suddenly became focused on dunking on one person. It's a useless distraction from the cause, there's really no good reason to even be talking about him at all. This kind of 2 minutes hate is just never healthy.
I think the movement stumbled into two potholes almost simultaneously and everyone bashing on him got it out of both of them. His discrediting and rejection of the movement didn’t help but in my opinion the far bigger problem was just the lack of advertising.
Until all of the controversy I’d literally never heard about the petitions, nor had I ever heard of anyone involved with it. I was aware of the lawsuit around the shutting down of the crew but I believe that was the extent of it. Even the likes of Lewis Rothman weren’t talking about it until about 2 months ago, so how’s a random person on the street going to know about it?
A LOT of us olds pretty rapidly saw parallels between Gamergate and SKG from very early on. The same “This is obviously something everyone should want?” on the surface that quickly gets a whole lot more complex when you think of nuance and remember that The Bad Guys are actually human beings and not kid sitcom level villains. And the constant worry that it would become about hating and destroying individuals.
Which is why a LOT of us saw this coming when Thor was dumb enough to go on record (devil’s) advocating for developers. And it became even more obvious once Ross et al decided the answer was to make their consumer rights movement all about attacking a nepo baby with a high voice who pissed off asmongold and may or may not be a furry. You are either with SKG or you are with Thor and fucking nobody wants to be with that d-bag.
For what it is worth: I am friendly with a decent number of folk in various parts of the industry and this shit is terrifying. Yes, the EU is a lot better than the US (and a lot more toothless…) but it is still asking Old White Guys to legislate on gaming and… a lot of us remember when fuckers like jack thompson and even frigging Biden wanted to Fix Video Games. Let alone the reality that this is a massive industry and bad legislature could destroy the lives of thousands of people (millions once you consider knock ons). But basically all of us agree that that is just not something you can talk about on The Internet without getting a hate mob sent your way.
Why does anyone care about him in the first place? I really don’t understand why anyone gives this dude any attention, he seems like a loser that’s never accomplished anything.
He’s a conman and very good at selling his reputation. (Artificially) deep voice, fancy words, and distracting audiences with a blackboard. It’s all it takes to project a strong and attractive image that gather audiences.
He also sells a lot of his “good side” via short form videos on Tik Tok and YouTube etc. So when you only get a snippet or two of him talking or answering questions, and he seems like he’s encouraging people to learn to code or do game dev etc it sounds nice. It sounds like he’s being supportive of his audience. It seems like he’s just a dude. But when you get right down to it, that doesn’t bear out who he is, even his actual online persona in his long form content or streams.
Oh God the thing he does where he just draws random circles in ms paint drives me mental. I was trying to watch some of his videos in order to be able to form my own opinion of him, and that tendency drove me mad there’s literally no point to it.
The problem I have with him is that he just announces things, like with the stop killing games movement, he just said the movement is bad and he doesn’t support it but he never explained himself. Even to this day I don’t actually understand what his problem with the movement is. He isn’t a publisher, so I don’t understand why he cares.
Probably people who are losers and haven’t accomplished anything are his audience. You know like teenagers. His loser vibe resonates with these type of people and at the same time he puts up this fake authoritative personality and people with low social skills or little life experience can’t see it’s a facade. So they treat him as some sort of expert in the game dev field, because they can’t see it’s all just lies.
Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.
Click baiting video. Other devs don’t care. As long as they can make money pumping out mediocre games then they will continue to do so. Acting like this is the first good game to come out in a decade or something.
Looking at how many games have stood in Dragon Age: Origins’ shadow over the past decade, I get the sense that lots of studios wanted to create the true spiritual successor but couldn’t come up with the resources to do so.
The managers who make the decisions don’t. Doesn’t matter if they are a publisher or the development company itself. It’s a bit blurry these days anyway, what with how easy it is to self publish and how many publishers have their own internal development studios.
The managers who make the decisions is also unclear as power differs on the company. They could care all the way up to the CEO but if the CEO puts an unrealistic deadline, the game has an unrealistic deadline
It’s gonna take twice as long as Starfield all to contain the same jank in an even larger, more barren, world where nothing is interesting and you’re just going through the motions because that’s what Todd Howard thinks games are.
People have actually made it through Starfield? I tried so hard, but couldn’t make it past 20 hours (which isn’t a lot for a Bethesda RPG). The story is just sodamnBORING.
Oh boy, you’re lucky. I trudged through for 70h out of sheer morbid curiosity. The boring main story goes straight into “icecream on forehead” when the starborn show up. The ending is just a shit cherry on top of that, with Emil Pagliarulo’s best “fuck you for asking questions” ever
It really does feel like Starfield completely killed any excitement for Bethesda games, everything since Oblivion has been a step in the wrong direction IMO.
Including Oblivion. I enjoyed it but it was a huge disappointment to me coming out of Morrowind. Bethesda reputation for me has been on Morrowind credit this whole time.
Even Morrowind was a simplified version of Daggerfall, even though it was groundbreaking when it was released. They decided that the direction to take was to simplify the mechanics progressively, to make the series more appealing to more people, as opposed to adding interesting complications back as their tech develops. They succeeded in their mantra of “keep it simple, stupid”. I don’t have any hope that the next game will be more interesting. It will look prettier, of course.
It’s smaller but I would not say it was dumbed down like Oblivion was to Morrowind. Morrowind feels more or less the same as Arena or Daggerfall, except in how character progressiom works and that you didn’t have to swing your mouse around trying to hit things with your weapon.
It literally still has all the deeper mechanics like performing rituals during certain times of the day/months/year and what not. Just not a procedurally generated world with RNG quests or dungeons. And thank God for that because Daggerfall and Arena both could literally break by generating a dungeon you couldn’t actually finish.
Idk, having only played Oblivion and Skyrim, I feel like (generally speaking) the simplifications in Skyrim were for the better. Take custom spells for example. Only a few spells really even made sense to make and it was better to make them in very specific ways. It’s not like the games are super difficult. Fucking around with spells and more complex enchantments was cool but too easy to cheese.
Oh, and the leveling. Holy fuck what an over complicated mess. Where you could accidentally over level but also under level. Insane. Good riddance.
Complex systems are not inherently good. They’re good if they provide meaningful choices and are fun to use. But ES has always been about the story and exploration more so anyways (in my opinion).
Oblivion had quality of life improvements that made it a better game IMO. Yes Morrowind was bigger and deeper, but it was also a frustrating game that didn’t age very well.
They would have to also start charging to save scum. Why would I pay $5 for a crit when I can just reload my save and try until I get one? Every new save is $0.50 and every reload is also $0.50.
Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn’t “vague enough to also include live service games”; it purposely includes them.
Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.
If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.
Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.
A few things. People use MMOs as an example of a thing that cannot be run by users, and the FAQ calls out that this is demonstrably false. Second, there’s the idea of a good and a service, and games have been happy to blur this line over the past decade and change. When you pay a monthly subscription fee, there’s no question that you’re paying for a service; your service ends when that month is up. The problem comes from selling you things as though they’re goods but then revoking access to them at some unknown time in the future as though it were a service or lease that you had no idea when it would expire. So this campaign also demands that if you’re selling microtransactions like a cosmetic mount in an MMO, you need to be able to use that mount after the servers are no longer supported, and as we’ve already proven, it is definitely actually possible for ordinary people to run MMO servers, even if they’re hosting them for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
The question on the FAQ is asking if it’s possible, which it is. But in his big video on this topic, he says that subscription based MMOs really don’t count (even if he’d like it to).
I agree with that. That’s what I meant in my original comment that applying this to all games is ridiculous. Subscription based MMOs are a game but this initiative shouldn’t apply to them.
I’m being specific because this is being intended as a law everyone must follow. “All games need to be available forever” is very vague. How will this vague law be applied in practice? People brought up the idea of eternal code preservation. Alright. How does that work?
I’m not picking a fight. I want supporters to explain in vivid detail their expectations because it’s clear not even all the supporters agree on how it would be implemented. Some said it doesn’t apply to MMOs. Some said it does. It needs to be one or the other. That’s not being pedantic, it’s being realistic.
What the petition says is what it’s asking for. What we want may be different. What European parliament drafts, if we’re so lucky, will be what’s actually the law. The concerns in the petition are quite clearly about how this applies to EU consumer protections, and many of us are interested in that plus the bonus that this will grant to preservation by proxy.
A game's code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder's rights
And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection
Is that repository required by law? Is every author and director required to follow it or be punished? What if an author only publishes it on their website and then takes the website down and it never makes it to the archive are they in trouble? It’s a nice thing, but mandating it as law is ridiculous.
Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records
An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.
Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: www.stopkillinggames.com/faq(apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony ‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios ‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom ‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB ‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
Because they can be sued for that. Have been sued for that. And while it is possible to reverse engineer this stuff it is incredibly hard to do. So games with smaller fanbases might lack the manpower to achieve it. Or the game was made in such a way as to make reverse engineering impossible.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It’s not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game’s server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
You found the point. It’s not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It’s about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don’t need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won’t work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don’t allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won’t get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That’s unrealistic.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Also, tell me you’ve never worked with scalable infrastructure without telling me you have never worked with it.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of games, including MMOs, that are privated hosted, and by that I don’t mean hosted in a basement potato.
Look at Ragnarok servers, there are hundreds of them, DEDICATED servers, with all the newest technology, for an old game nonetheless.
Have you ever seem how massive the infrastructure are for those big minecraft multi-servers? Thousands and thousands of concurrent players.
Im not asking you to research what you’re talking about or anything, but if you clearly dont know what you’re talking about, refrain from sharing your opinion so you may not negatively influence a similar minded person.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Before attacking me with such an arrogant rant, maybe read what I wrote.
I said:
Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
So of course it’s about releasing anything (!) at all.
I simply said that you can’t compare a small fan project like a WoW self hosted server with Blizzards infrastructure and the requirements to have a high available setup for millions of players.
ArenaNet is quite open about their infrastructure and you can see that this is far from trivial, but also allows them to have zero downtime updates. That is a huge feat, but also means that self hosting that thing will be a pain in the ass. Yet I would not want them to not do this just so it could be easily (!) self hosted some time in the distant future.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.
Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.
To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.
Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.
Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.
Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
Ross wrote a response to Thor’s in the comments of this video, but it’s a bit buried. I’ll include Thor’s for context as well:
Thor:
I’m aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It’s entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It’s a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can’t agree with.
Ross’s response:
@PirateSoftware I actually wasn’t planning to write to you further since you said you didn’t want to talk about it with me and I’ll still respect that if you’d like. But since you brought up what I said again I’ll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:
I’m 100% cynical, I can’t turn it off. I wasn’t trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they’ll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I’ve said before I don’t think I’m the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can’t just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren’t huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren’t the target audience, but you’re in complete opposition to the movement also.
I’m literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won’t be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.
In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it’s manipulation, but I don’t control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.
It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we’re in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it’s kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.
Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I’m concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don’t like it.
How is it vague? If I buy a game, it should be playable for all eternity. Just like how I can pop in Super Mario on NES and play it just like how it was in the 80s.
Or how I can still play Half Life deathmatch more than 25 years after its release.
I’m aware that exists. But the experience of an MMO on a community server must be pretty different (but I don’t know).
If the desire is to not lose the experience after the company shutters the project, I’m not really sure that’s possible. Maybe it is for WoW. But I can certainly imagine a game like Pokemon Go or something being developed by an indie dev that works by orchestrating live real-time events depending on players locations. Would this game even be allowed in the EU following this law? They can’t allow users personal locations to be released, they can’t create a game they can’t eventually fully release to the public. Even if they found a way to strip out users locations, the experience would be completely broken. So what’s the answer? Just don’t innovate in that space?
I don’t think the intent is to maintain the exact original experience forever and after. It’s to ensure it’s possible to play the game at all even if the developer shuts down their servers.
It’s becoming more and more common that games stop functioning completely when the developers no longer want to support the game anymore - even games that are perfectly playable single player.
Yeah I agree with the single player bit. And even multiplayer if it’s as simple as releasing the server app. But I think Thor’s point and what’s being debated here is that live service games often aren’t like that. So why is this law seemingly including them?
If you don’t like live service games and don’t feel like they should exist, then don’t buy them. I can see some legislation around clear marketing. But if people want to pay for an ephemeral service, that’s up to the consumer.
The answer is to allow people to host it themselves. If you’ve got a Discord server and people who want to experience a game with you, you could get 40 people together to do a WoW raid long after it stopped being profitable for Blizzard. In a case like Pokemon Go, either that stuff is determined algorithmically or there’s a game master with their finger on the button to trigger the event; users could run that too.
I agree. Louis brought a good point when he talked about Gran Turismo licensed content (like Ferrari cars and etc), that some companies have licenses that will expire for content in the game. But you know what? THAT’S NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. You buy a game, you should be able to run it until the end of time.
First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.
It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.
It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.
And a few more.
That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
I don’t think he have any soft spot for mega corp, is just online figures/influencers can’t never be wrong type of thing.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative.
Spoken like an idealist. Video games is probably the biggest thing that will gain traction. Sure, it would be great to tackle the entire issue, but the people making this initiative aren't using other software that does that shit. Saying "care about all the people" dilutes the issue.
… to the extent of killing off live service games.
I mean… Nothing of value was lost? In my opinion, so far, the only decent live service game to have ever come out is still Warframe. Everything else that cane after is either a pale imitation or straight up cow milking garbage.
We could certainly do with a lot less “live service”.
Honestly him calling Ross a “greasy used car salesman” really hurt to see. I didn’t take Thor as the type to insult someone like that simply for disagreeing with him.
Kind of makes me wonder if his whole nice guy thing is an act. Either way it calls into question the person I assumed he was.
It was on stream, so hopefully someone recorded it and uploads it.
In this video though, at the very end, this guy shows another clip that I haven’t been able to find of Thor reacting to one of Ross’ comments and… well I can’t think of a better word than melting down tbh.
I wonder what the public response will be when Silksong releases and turns out to be just a good game and not literally curing cancer and resolving world hunger.
Half-Life 3 was already made and it was a VR exclusive. And it was REALLY good. And nobody cared.
People like to meme. They don’t like to think. Silksong will probably have a wave of “is it as good as it was supposed to be” or “DISAPPOINTED BY SILKSONG” and then just go back to being like Hollow Knight: a REALLY good metroidvania with souls-like aspects (also souls games ARE metroidvanias but…).
Personally? I am more excited for the chuds to lose their mind once they figure out Hornet is fem.
I’m just hoping for some good games moving forward that aren’t trying to milk us for everything we have with slop we don’t want.
… There is plenty of that?
The thing to understand is that influencers pretty much always fall back to the “us vs them” mentality. We could see it with early youtube where they accused magazines/websites of all being corrupt and getting paid for reviews (never forget Jon “It’s about ethics in games journalism” Bain…). And we saw it in twitch when they instead said it was the youtubers and their sponsor deals who were doing the same. And we saw a huge rise in “I need to watch tiktok because that informs me about things that mainstream outlets don’t want me to hear!”
Some outlets go political. Most are aggressively “apolitical” and all that entails. But that means that “the game devs are trying to screw you over” is a solid talking point. It is why everyone and their mother needs to say they hate live service games (with the added bonus of avoiding any chance of having a regular game they arer expected to stream) and so forth.
But if you actually PLAY games? It is still a golden age where basically every sicko gets their fetish in game form (and Microprose and Kitfox are apparently the sleazy club I slink off to…). We are in for a pretty bad drought after the past two years or so of funding drying up and studios being gutted. But if you actually are looking you are gonna find a LOT of games that know what you want.
I’ll also add on that “game devs want to ruin gaming” is a great excuse to play “retro” games. Which drastically reduce operating costs for the part timers because… even IF they are showing you their console and cartridge, you can bet your bottom dollar they are running an emulator with a game they grabbed from their local internet library.
Standing and Seated VR are both a thing that are both supported in Alyx.
To be clear: I am not saying everyone should go buy a facebook quest 3 (I would NEVER say that… even if that is usually my begrudging suggestion to anyone who wants to try VR) and that everyone needs to play Alyx.
But if the obsession over Half-Life 3 were anywhere near as big as the memes pretend they are… people spend more to play a tweaked re-release of a game they already have on a new console. We buy new GPUs when we find out our performance will be too low on fricking Dragon’s Dogma 2.
But spend 300 bucks (usually closer to 200/250 on sale) to play their “dream game” ? Oh, nah, I’m washing my hair that… five years. Uhm… oh, I don’t like the head strap. That is why I can’t play it. Yeah…
And… for those of us who really ARE Half-Life sickos? Alyx is GOOD.
It’s not “nobody cared” it’s “not enough people can afford to keep a roof over their heads, let alone afford an extra holodeck room in their house with an expensive holodeck setup”
I’d love to play HL alyx. I didn’t and don’t live in a place where I can have a perpetually empty room I can drill holes in the wall of, or drop $1k on a valve index (after shipping and imports) plus a new $2k gaming rig.
People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.
Can EVERYONE? No. But this is a luxury hobby and plenty of discourse online is “I bought a PS5 for Demon Souls” or “I love Welcome Tour” and so forth.
Nah. Alyx was just completely ignored. Likely due to a mix of chuds not wanting to acknowledge women and… people don’t ACTUALLY care all that much about a new Half-Life. They just love meming about it.
People are buying entire consoles for one or two games. If folk can afford a 450 USD switch 2 for mario kart they can afford a facebook (ugh) quest for 300 bucks that regularly goes on sale.
The difference is that you don’t need an entire room to play the Switch 2 (hell, you even need a TV). It’s easier to scrape together the $500+ required for a console than it is to afford a down payment and a mortgage, or the extra rent for a two-bedroom instead of a one-bedroom apartment.
Consoles and VR are both luxury goods, but the barrier for entry with the former is much lower than with the latter.
Space will always be the most expensive peripheral of all.
Sitting and standing VR are both a thing and are both supported in Alyx. All you have to be able to do is rotate your chair 180 degrees away from your desk and you can play it. Hell, you can play it AT your desk but I would not recommend waving your arms in front of a monitor…
And if you can afford to walk one step away from your computer chair? Now you can do Standing VR which, honestly, I have always preferred over room scale because I can never get comfortable walking around. But moving with an analog stick (or teleporting) and then moving my body to dodge things and interact? That is the shit.
Or, to put it in Nintendo terms: If you can play Welcome Tour and the game that is totally not wheelchair basketball, you can do seated VR.
Not that it invalidates your points at all but I played HL Alyx sitting down on an original oculus quest on a computer with a 1060 and an r5 2600. It was great but it and Beat Saber were basically the only two VR games that were fun enough for me to play for more than a few minutes at a time.
That quest has been collecting dust since I beat Alyx.
Really hard for me to recommend spending several hundreds of dollars on hardware when there’s really only one game worth playing. But if you can find a cheap used quest or WMR headset it might be worth picking up and then selling just to play Alyx. Alyx is probably one of if not the most well optimized VR games out there. You really don’t need that powerful of a rig to play it.
Ooh can I suggest games? There are definitely a bunch that are great to play sitting down, or standing up but in place. I haven’t bought new VR games since alyx came out, but I def have plenty
I’ve said this plenty of times but this stigma of VR is a REALLY REALLY weird one, especially since I keep seeing it. There are so many arcades and whatnot you can try VR where it’s just tethered in place. So many VR experiences are designed such that you can absolutely play them sitting down in a chair. The idea you need a “holodeck room” breaks down the second you look into it all.
Not only that, but the Quest can play VR games, and it’s running a phone processor. You don’t need top of the line hardware, just enough to run a normal video game, which I’m willing to bet if you’re a pc gamer, you literally have more than enough.
I beat Alyx on a $250 headset and a laptop with an underclocked 1060. In my shitty 800 sq ft apartment’s dining room. And it was still an absolutely phenomenal experience. Was it top of the line? No. But it was still plenty playable. These days my pc is in my bedroom and I just hook it up and play in the empty space in front of my bed. You absolutely CAN sink thousands of dollars and a dedicated space into it if you really want to. But it’s hardly a requirement.
Definitely agree with everything you said… Except that Souls games are Metroidvanias. Backtracking is really the only thing that most souls-likes share with Metroidvanias. Unlocking gameplay abilities that also function as environmental keys is the main defining feature of Metroidvanias IMO.
Alyx honestly lived up to the hype. The only things that bugged me were that enemies were too slow (the fast zombie was removed entirely) and certain objects like coats weren’t able to be picked up like they could in Boneworks. I wanted to throw a coat over zombies and beat them like a pinata with a crowbar. :)
Spoilers for Alyx for all those without VR headsetsHonestly, all it’s doing is retconning the ending of Episode 2 in a slightly different way while still presenting that cliffhanger. It made me lose a lot of faith in their writers, and it will be hell to explain such a janky twist to non-VR players.
It's definitely not going to live up to the hype. We already know what Hollow Knight is like, and we've seen a demo of what Silksong will be like from last year's E3, and... it's really not that much different. Not that that's an inherently bad thing, since Hollow Knight was already really good, so any improvement on that is only going to be better.
I worry that it'll suffer a similar fate to Duke Nukem Forever. In a vacuum, DNF isn't necessarily a bad game, but it suffered from being overhyped for years. So when it came out and just turned out to be "okay", that was the final nail in the coffin for the Duke Nukem franchise. I hope I'm wrong, though.
Overhyping aside, I’d say that not being much different from Hollow Knight is exactly what people want. HK was amazing. If Silksong is just HK but with a different map and enemies, I’d be ecstatic.
This is my take. I have ~50 hours in Hollow Knight, which is insane for a platformer. If all team cherry ever did was expand the map and add new enemies/bosses I’d be stoked.
Sinking ship or not, word was that Wizards’ cut of BG3 was over $90M. $100M was the entire production cost of Baldur’s Gate 3. If you could fund an entire other massive video game for the cost of what you paid your partner for licensing, I’m sure anyone would be rethinking that deal. At this point, they don’t need the D&D license any more than BioWare needed the Star Wars license after KOTOR.
I agree, but Piazo seems like much better partners. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d let them make the game for no fee, just license out the rules to try to make the system more well known and popular. Pathfinder 2E is the better system without a doubt, but people are used to D&D5e, so having something out there to bring new people in would be huge for them.
I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2, and Planescape: Torment on 2nd edition rules. I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 on 5th edition rules and started playing tabletop 5th edition. I’ve played Pillars of Eternity 1, as I understand it largely inspired by 3.5 edition rules, and the first 10 hours of Pillars of Eternity 2, which I assume is now iterating on its own offshoot. I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. If that’s the case, and it’s in the ballpark of what Pillars of Eternity 1 is, I’ll take 5th edition any day of the week, but if you’d like to explain to me briefly why I might be wrong, I’m listening. Compared to how the 2e games and the Pillars games handle spells of different levels, 5e’s upcasting seems like a godsend, for instance.
I understand Pathfinder to largely be D&D 3.5. Pathfinder 1E is essentially an improved D&D 3.5 that came to be the last time the licensing for modules became an issue. 2E is it’s own thing, and a large improvement.
One if the best changes for Pathfinder 2E is how actions work. D&D 5e has its a weird system of movement, action, bonus action, and then abilities that can add actions, but you can only cast one spell per turn regardless of if you have actions to use, except in some situations, and you can only use actions for some things sometimes, sometimes only once per turn. It’s just filled with exceptions because that’s not the original design intent but it’s tons of patches to make things function halfway decently.
Pathfinder 2E you have three actions per turn. Those can be used for anything always without exception. Every ability has a cost. For example moving is 1 action and can be done multiple times per turn, which makes things that displace enemies useful as they have to consume actions to get back into melee. Some spells may cost multiple actions, some very large ones can even require channeling multiple actions over several turns. It’s a very simple and intuitive system and you don’t need to remember thousands of exceptions like D&D5e.
Almost everything in Pathfinder 2E works like this. Things may be more complex to start with (which allows for choice), but you don’t need to remember tons of exceptions, so in total it’s simpler.
It doesn’t feel like a bunch of exceptions to me. It feels like you have a bonus action that’s basically always class-related, and everything else is an action. What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of. I don’t really find 5e to be unintuitive thus far such that I’m looking for another system to remedy it, I guess.
What you describe for Pathfinder doesn’t sound bad at all, but if some things cost multiple actions, that sounds like every bit the type of exception that you make 5e out to be full of.
The issue in D&D5e is that they are dependent on a bunch of other circumstances. In Pathfinder 2e it’s only dependent on if you have enough actions. It’s clearly listed how many actions anything you can do takes.
For example, here’s magic missile. The “Cast:” is the action cost. The squares are how many it takes. It can take anywhere between one to all three of your turn. Each action spent is another missile. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already cast a spell that turn or done anything else. As long as you have the actions available you can spend them on anything you want.
I started playing TTRPGs on Pathfinder 1e, but the vast majority of what I played is D&D5e. I never had too much issue with it, because I never saw a better option, but after seeing how Pathfinder 2e works it’s so much cleaner. Learning about how the action system came to be in 5e it’s pretty clear it wasn’t meant to be the way it is today. Because of that there’s stipulations to almost everything. I didn’t notice the issues until I was made aware of them, then you see them everywhere. For example, the Critical Role cast constantly fuck things up despite having played the game professionally for however many years it’s been now. If the rules were intuitive that wouldn’t happen, at least not as often.
I’m a recent convert to Critical Role as well, and even moments ago, I witnessed one of those fuck-ups (I’m still a long ways from catching up on campaign 3, so it’s an old episode), but I can’t seem to recall it having much to do with what’s an action or not an action and instead more about what the range of a thing is or what type of creature it can be cast on. I don’t know if there’s some equivalent solution to that in Pathfinder, but that would strike me as a harder problem to solve via systems changes to make more intuitive.
Another thing I respect about what 5e does compared to other D&D or adjacent games I listed above: they rebalanced the hell out of magic. In those other games, someone casts a spell that paralyzes your entire party with an AoE or massive cone, and you just have to watch with no recourse as everyone dies. In 5e, the equivalent spell has a finite number of targets, they scale intuitively with spell level by adding one extra target per level, and if it has an ongoing effect, it would require concentration so the person can’t steamroll by casting a bunch of them concurrently. Again, I haven’t played Pathfinder, so I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible), but 5e isn’t the first RPG system I’ve played. It solved tons of problems with ones that I’ve played before. Advantage rolls another D20. Upcasting adds another die or another target. You get to move, and you get an action; everything else is an action, but your class gives you bonus action options. Resistances and weaknesses are simple halves and doubles. Armor affects your ability to hit or not, with no extra junk slowing down the calculations. That sort of thing. They’re all very smart changes. If I was going to nitpick things about 5e, it would be like how your ability scores are all out of 20, but your modifiers are every other point; and that’s something I seem to recall hearing through the grapevine that Pathfinder 2e does address, correct me if I’m wrong.
The action economy is just one example of the improvements of it. There are many. As for range and target types though, yeah I don’t think there’s a good solution to that. You either just have to get rid of it (which I think can and is done with some spells) or deal with the complexity that makes spells more useful only in the right situation.
As an example of making things simpler with spells, P2E’s Detect Alignment you choose an alignment to detect and can detect it. It comes out of older D&D’s detect good/detect evil which became the generic Detect Good and Evil in 5e which does not actually detect anything with alignment anymore in 5e. Pathfinder 2E generalized it to be more useful and simpler, D&D5e generalized it to be not what it says on the can anymore. It’s really strange what 5e decided to do with so many things. It just makes things not make intuitive sense.
As for the magic scaling, PF2e is similar. I don’t think you’re going to find many situations where D&D is more balanced than PF2e, at lead with the rules as written.
I definitely can’t knock it, nor do I have any negative reaction to the systems you’re describing (except for the part where some spells take longer than the actions you have in a single turn…that sounds terrible)
You can back out of the channeling if you need to. It’s a nice system for really powerful spells requiring a lot more risk and investment. Keep in mind, this applies to enemies as well. If you see them powering up something big, you will have time to try to interrupt them.
This is a good video for some more information about the three action economy. That channel has tons of other videos about the system too, a lot of which is focused on how it compares to D&D 5e. He has a lot more knowledge than I do, and he probably has a video on every question you have. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested.
Additionally, if you want PF2e content to consume, Tabletop Gold is a podcast using PF2e. I’m just over episode 100 I think and it’s pretty good. They aren’t the most knowledge about the system, most of them haven’t played TTRPGs at all before I don’t think, but it all flows very well, which is a testament to the design.
How about Wrath of the Righteous? Does that use 2nd edition? Is the game any good? I know it was built primarily for real time with pause, but is it any good in turn based mode? I don’t have the time for another tabletop podcast in my life, and I don’t see any world where I play it myself until at least my current D&D campaign reaches a conclusion. And to be totally honest, your pitch still sounds like it’s a cure for problems that I don’t have, but a video game would be a decent way to sample it.
I don’t know. The Owlcat games have a really deep system that Divinity and BG3 don’t have. Is that just because of the pathfinder ruleset? Or does Larian do better with simpler systems? I don’t have an answer to those questions. It might be cool to see a BG3 “version” of Pathfinder, but I think it would lose something in the process.
The visuals out of Larian run laps around Owlcat. But that comes at the expense of depth, as each asset takes more time to develop.
It’s two different design philosophies creating two very different kinds of experience. Owlcat makes more of a complex digital board game while Larian has muddled a strategy format with a dating sim.
Moral of the story: run proxies. Speculators and investors ruined the market, WotC just let them do it. (Also, fuck the secondary market and the reserve list. It’s cardboard. Some of us just want to play)
This is why I bailed out of Standard, finally. I’ve moved entirely into Limited.
I’ll still do pay-to-play with drafts of new sets here and there, but proxy Cube is where it’s at. My fun-to-price ratio with the game has never been better.
Ah, that kind of price churn has been the norm in (lower case “l”) legacy formats for as long as I’ve been playing the game (25+ years now). It’d be reprints, bans, or just plain old power creep. Those formats have been too expensive/volatile for me for a very long time now.
Reprinting some things, neglecting to reprint others, power creeping the stuff they did reprint out of the game, banning some stuff that was too powerful while printing other stuff that’s just as good for the same reasons. You know, standard card game stuff.
The rate of bans has dramatically increased since 2020. They even had to errata an entire new mechanic in the Ikoria set because some of the companion cards were crazy broken with the original design.
An extra wrinkle to this is that they are making bans due to how cards perform in online play, as best-of-one is a widely played format now.
Yeah, I’ve been moving over to Call of Cthulhu with my tabletop group. I find it far more enjoyable when the players are more careful about dying or worse.
I don’t believe, they’re actually 6 years into the development. Back then, they just announced that at some point, there would be a TES6, but they’ve been busy developing Starfield since then.
As part of Starfield, they did do some engine upgrades. You know what that looks like…
Their announcement for the 30th anniversary implies that it is in early pre-alpha right now. Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
Wonder if it’ll be ready for the 30th anniversary of Skyrim
Anyway
Chances of it running on the same exact engine as Starfield are practically 100%
You can still make improvements in pre-alpha for sure. Not massive overhauls of existing systems, but there’s no reason you couldn’t fix bugs, incrementally improve existing features and add new ones.
Sure, you could, but given beths track record in that regard, why would they? They have been perfectly happy shipping Skyrim to new platforms with the same bugs for nearly a decade.
Who knows, honestly. I’m not holding my breath for this game anymore. When it comes out, i’ll check it out, but if it’s in the same pitiful state as Starfield, then idk
Elder Scrolls especially Morrowind will always have a place in my heart but I’ve moved on. If they ever release a better game I will come back. What ever is running Starfield won’t be it.
I’ve found New World and as far as MMOs go, it’s the best I’ve played in comparison to Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 (in depth) and a few others (<40 hours).
But New World has the lore, baby. That’s what seals the deal. Superior gameplay: check. Great art design: check. The lore is the final block and New World is so interesting. I didn’t think a fantasy setting could have new and interesting lore but they succeeded.
How the Lost came into creation from
Tap for spoilertrying to cure the Corruption
is so tragic. I’m still learning what Angry Earth is all about tho.
And it’s just fun! Like, I would have never guessed that I’d enjoy running around in a pilgrim hat getting killed by a giant turkey with laser eyes. And who would have guessed you could successfully merge the giants from Nasusicca Valley of the Wind with 1500s Caribbean aesthetic?
But if you’re thinking: “We’re talking about single player games, dumbass.” Yea, I know, I like New World so much that I wish the same dev team would make a proper single player game in the exact same setting.
And on the other hand, Karl Jobst has always been very well researched in his videos, so I’m a big torn here. Definitely going to keep an eye on this and see where it goes before making my own conclusions.
He’s also someone who hangs around with nazis which is wild. He backed away from them when it all came out but then got chummy again so I got the fuck away from his content. Which is decidedly in the outrage bait genre these days.
imgur.com/a/X7qLRXa his friend who he promotes in his videos, nazis fuck off, fuck you if you support this
I mean… Goose is still prominent in the Goldeneye speedrunning community, and was only banned from The Elite for about a year before he was welcomed back. Jobst made his name speedrunning the same game, even managing to get some uncontested world records.
Lemmy isn’t supporting Nazis, you’re being downvoted because making accusations without sources is just yelling into the wind. “Just Google it” and “do your own research” is synonymous in practice and adds nothing to the conversation and only is rumormill level gossip.
Provide links to some sources if you have some legit concerns, because that’s definitely news to me.
Firstly, these screenshots are from The Elite’s and RWhiteGoose’s own Discord servers. He was part of the site’s council that effectively moderated Goldeneye speedrun records and set precedent for new rules, hence why they didn’t do anything until this all came out.
none of that is debunked, he’s just trying to worm his way out of it. the correct thing to do when you find out someone is a nazi is to cut them out. he doesn’t, then he tries to say i’m just trying to help him be a not nazi by promoting and featuring him in my videos.
you’re a fool to believe that for a moment, especially when it comes from him.
i want to be incredibly clear here, nothing is debunked. he said what he wants to say, you choose to believe him at face value.
You have been incredibly clear, and so has he. He is clear on his disgust and why he chose to help him rather the cut off all ties and whilst I would not do the same myself I do not condemn others who try to.
But so far there has been no evidence that he supports or sympathises with any Nazism ideals or ideas which to me is the breaking point.
If there is something I have missed then please show me but I have not seen anything to the contrary.
At the same time, Mutahar and Karl are very well respected content creators who do their research. They wouldn’t drop a bombshell like this if they didn’t have good sources.
Easy to check the filings yourself. The research presented in the video is legit. There is no reason to have zero donations to charities since 2014. Zero
What “actual evidence” are you waiting for? The filings are public (you can confirm literally right now) and Jirard admitted to the accusations himself? What else do you need?
Welcome to the cult of personality. You could show them the guy’s fingerprints on the bloody knife at a murder scene and they would still ask for more conclusive evidence. 🙄
Speaking of the cult of personality, you see a one-sided YouTube video and automatically assume this has been through trial.
What about 2023? Was the money then donated? Where the tax forms filed incorrectly? Almost a year has passed since this supposedly just came to light for this guy. What has been done to fix it?
I’m not sticking up for him, seems like this was a huge fuckup either way, but I’m not ready to burn someone at the stake for “being a personality”.
The accusation is not that the money has not been donated now, however. It is that the money has been sitting around since 2014, while happily paying themselves “expenses” from it.
It’s just a mix of an externally paid expenses account + a tax writeoff for the years 2014-2022, so even iff the money has now been donated, that doesn’t excuse the previous 8 years and in fact, you can’t shirk legal responsibility that way.
There wouldn’t necessarily be legal responsibility. Things have been reported to the IRS with the money sitting there. If they’re paying themselves “expenses”, that would need to be reported on their personal income taxes. If that’s all there is to it, nothing illegal is happening. As of now, that’s all the evidence tells us.
Bad way to run a charity, but not illegal. That may change with more evidence, like if the money was paid out more than is actually reported.
Jirard’s Open Hands charity is a nonprofit so you can see their books through their tax filings.
The most likely explanation is that Jirard is incredibly busy running a successful YouTube channel and so he had no idea how the charity is being run.
When being made aware in 2022 he said he stepped in to make sure the money is being donated the way he believed it was. That wasn’t reflected in their 2022 tax filing but it still can be true for 2023, the public will find that out when those filings are made public.
Karl Jobst is a really good content creator but he has a bit of a dramatic flair and tends to call things “illegal” when they actually aren’t and he did in this video again. Still I think that it’s important to make call outs like this. And I think that Jirard will make it right, now that he has been made aware. It’s clear from the filings that they aren’t committing fraud or skimming off the top. They just were sitting on the money probably because the task of running a charity was beyond their capabilities
I feel like your comment is the most reasonable explanation. The charity sounds like it isn’t actively being run. It is probably a misunderstanding. I can see the charity paying for a group to run the charity, but because their income is very small, they want the charity ran frugally, and are paying the minimum required for management. The management is running the account, making sure taxes are filed, etc, but Jirard thought they were dispersing the funds too. They don’t talk much, other than a quick review at tax season, and the issue is never addressed, because both sides don’t interact enough to see the difference.
This video really frustrated me, because Jobst is claiming things “Fraud” when the evidence he provided looks nothing like that. It isn’t great PR, but nothing so far looks remotely illegal, or even unethical. The internet just loves ragging on a “bad guy,” and are eager to get mad at the bad guy of the day.
The one thing that does lean more towards malice is the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired long before the charity existed.
That said, I otherwise agree. If the IRS forms are right, the money is just sitting there. That’s not illegal in itself. It just looks bad.
Jobst also doesn’t always know US law, since he has a legal background in Australia (and I’m not sure what his specialty was, either).
He particularly mentioned in the video that the IRS isn’t an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, which is true. I’ve seen the bullshit US tax protesters sometimes get away with. Irwin Schiff, for example, once signed a blank 1040 form and sent it into the IRS. He almost made it to the statue of limitations until he went on The Tomorrow Show (a nationwide NBC talk show) and bragged about it. That said, people in the US do tend to think of the IRS as an all-knowing monster ready to pounce on unsuspecting taxpayers, and that’s why the response with the guy came back that way. Jobst doesn’t seem to be fully cognizant of how people in the US view the IRS.
Yes, their quoting of the guy who was fired before they filed as a non-profit was very deceptive. And soliciting with the list of other organizations that the money supposedly goes to is as well. It is probable that they donated funds to these places when it was just them raising money for their mom before they decided to organize as a non-profit in 2014 (when Jirard’s YouTube channel started to really gain popularity). The problem lies in that these donations can’t really be proven just based on public filings and so they create the appearance of impropriety if not proving actual impropriety.
Over half a million dollars isn’t “very small” for this type of charity in my opinion.
Not to mention, they seem to admit they’ve known about the issue for a while, but have continued to fund raise and present the charity as if it’s been running along doing good this whole time, but they’ve just been hoarding the money so far.
I’m certain he’s very busy. He’s busy with his channel, and he was also one of the cast of G4 for the short time it returned, and they were being overworked I think there, and he was still running his channel. This is why you hire people to handle these things though. It’s bad that it wasn’t handled properly, but not necessarily malicious. I’ll forgive a mistake, but if it turns out it was a scam that’s unforgivable.
Based on the reported expenses being around $10,000 a yea; I don’t think they were trying to run a scam or trying to be malicious. I think they wanted to honor their mom, but didn’t have the time to run the charity or donation volume to justify hiring someone to run it. Not an excuse for how they ran things of course, I think it wasn’t fair to the people who gave them money that they solicited donations on how they wanted things to be rather than how they actually ran it. Whether they knew or not that the money was just sitting there isn’t an excuse. If they were soliciting donations then they have a duty to inform themselves.
…did you watch the video? You can see their contributions have been $0 year after year with their tax filings, and Jirard admitted they haven’t donated anything.
I don’t know who this guy is or anything about the situation other than what’s written here, but if he’s naming specific charities supposedly receiving these donations, it makes zero sense that they’d be “looking for a good charity to donate to.” If that were the case there’d be zero reason to name the ones they did.
you should watch the content in the post before engaging in discussion about it. What you’re saying is kinda the whole crux of the issue. Jirard has been caught lying, saying his fund has donated to specific charities when in reality the fund has donated nothing. You’re right - it doesn’t make sense to lie about something so easily verified, but here we are.
He’s already caught in a lie. Even if his unbelievable story that he, the director of the charity, was unaware the charity never did anything charitable for as long as it has existed (this already makes him guilty of failing the donators by incompetence), he still lied about knowing where the money went for all those years to the donators and CONTINUED TO DO SO AFTER HE ADMITTED HE KNEW ABOUT IT.
Now he claims that he has been looking for worthy charities for over a year while he could easily just donate the money to the charities he has been talking about for years already.
The fact that he kept naming specific organizations where the money was being donated after he was made aware that the money was just sitting there is quite the red flag. This whole situation is very weird and I must say, I’m really curious to understand what is happening.
Also worth mentioning that the Charity organization tried to take the video down, another red flag
It points to something hinky, but it’s not complete proof. If it’s correct, then the money is just sitting in an account. It’s not going into anybody’s pockets (although the interest might?). The open question is if the IRS form is accurate to the amount of money just sitting there. If not, then this starts to look like criminal tax fraud.
This could still come down to incompetence rather than malice. That said, the quote from the UCSF guy who was fired years before the charity existed does lean more towards malice.
One other thing to note is that while Karl Jobst does have a legal background, it’s in Australia. The US is also a common law system, but there are enough differences that Karl might not realize what is and isn’t illegal.
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