That really applies on both sides. This is such a nothing issue - it defaults to what you’d expect for a cis character, so you can literally ignore it if you aren’t going to play a character whose pronouns and body type do not align.
But, someone modding their game doesn’t effect anyone else playing it, whether that’s removing the pronoun selector in Starfield, adding a pronoun selector to Skyrim (even supporting multiple pronouns with different frequencies for each), turning every hold banner in Skyrim into a pride flag, removing pride flags from Spiderman, turning Skyrim dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine, or adding the ability to fuck Skyrim dragons. All of those are mods that exist, BTW.
And this only makes the claims that “this is not a political statement” more absurd. There may be room to argue that the original decision to let players select their pronouns is not political, but both the mod that removes it and the removal of that mod from Nexus are just pathetic attempts to get back at the other side. Can’t get more political than that.
Of course this is political - because bigots made trans people’s existence a target of their politics. Defending them against that hatred and abuse is not somehow equally wrong, compared to that hatred… and abuse.
The part that confuses me a bit is that it’s a mod that removes functionality from a single player game. Usually features get added, not removed. When something is removed it’s usually to improve stability or performance. Or to rebalance the gameplay. This change falls into none of these categories.
Well I guess if the mod author did it to garner attention or make a point he/she/they succeeded.
Even that transcript was a bit too long, so here’s a < 150 word summary by ChatGPT:
Unity Technologies, known for its Unity game engine, has been facing severe backlash for its recent decisions. Unity adjusted its fee structure, now charging game developers per install with retroactive terms of service changes. This move is expected to negatively impact numerous game projects. In addition, Unity removed their transparency GitHub repo and reversed previous community-centric commitments, leading to widespread industry anger. The CEO’s past decisions to maximize revenue raise eyebrows. Unity rejected a $20 billion acquisition offer from AppLovin in favor of a $4.4 billion merger with Iron Source, a mobile game development monetization company. Tomar Bar Ziv, CEO of Iron Source and a Unity board member, has notably sold around $20 million in Unity stock following the merger. Recent aggressive pricing models seem to mirror those adopted by Twitter and Reddit. Unity’s shift seems aimed at promoting Iron Source’s Level Play service and could significantly harm developers, especially in the mobile sector. Companies like Azur, Voodoo, and Century Games have retaliated by disabling Unity and Iron Source ad monetization. Unity’s recent closure of two offices due to threats from its own employee underscores the depth of its internal and external crises.
They’ve been all in for about half a decade. If you don’t work in mobile, or play a lot of mobile games, you might not have noticed - but basically the most played games on planet earth are made in Unity, and are on mobile.
It’s sad to say this, but their actions this past week have kind of shown us that the folk at Unity don’t even seem to care about other platforms anymore; to the point that they did not even consider them on a basic level while working on their new pricing policies.
They should just either rebrand to a mobile first company, or at least split their products such that those making pc/console games can argue for their own price points and features.
Ridiculous to lump indie devs and mobile companies like hyper casual devs (who can have 5 million+ installs a game, thanks to their low CPIs and marketing optimizations) into the same category.
Unity Technologies, known for its Unity game engine, has been facing severe backlash for its recent decisions. Unity adjusted its fee structure, now charging game developers per install with retroactive terms of service changes. This move is expected to negatively impact numerous game projects. In addition, Unity removed their transparency GitHub repo and reversed previous community-centric commitments, leading to widespread industry anger. The CEO’s past decisions to maximize revenue raise eyebrows. Unity rejected a $20 billion acquisition offer from AppLovin in favor of a $4.4 billion merger with Iron Source, a mobile game development monetization company. Tomar Bar Ziv, CEO of Iron Source and a Unity board member, has notably sold around $20 million in Unity stock following the merger. Recent aggressive pricing models seem to mirror those adopted by Twitter and Reddit. Unity’s shift seems aimed at promoting Iron Source’s Level Play service and could significantly harm developers, especially in the mobile sector. Companies like Azur, Voodoo, and Century Games have retaliated by disabling Unity and Iron Source ad monetization. Unity’s recent closure of two offices due to threats from its own employee underscores the depth of its internal and external crises.
Unity top leaders selling stock before the announcement
they proposing “special” deal to not get the per install fee applied if the devs opt in to use only Unity’s advertising plaform in order to kill competition.
I can’t wait till the threats turn into promises. I’m so sick and fucking tired of the “elites” getting away with doing whatever they want. I’m hungry; let’s eat.
If it’s own employees are giving death threats, chances are high that it’s aiming up. Unless their CEO is threatening to kill those below him to save a buck?
Calling DA2 serviceable is probably some of the highest praise it’s received. The game is steaming dookie. It took out every single thing that made Origins a masterpiece and gave us a dialogue wheel and an entire game made of 5 copy+pasted rooms. Also a nonsensical main plot with no real player agency and the most forgettable ending of all.
DAI is mid af but it looks like a God damn masterpiece next to DA2.
If they hadn’t reused the maps it’d been remembered as one of the greats.
I also thought the balance on Nightmare or whatever was an atrocious mix of ubertank enemies and getting one-shot by rogues but the actual story and companions were fantastic.
What exactly do you mean by that? Like, he could have indeed been a well meaning mage just trying to live under templar thumbs? Instead of also being exactly the smoking gun?
The Orsino fight doesn’t make much sense if you side with the mages - there was no reason for him to go Akira monster when he did. Even BioWare acknowledged how little sense it made, in a conversation you can have with Varric in Inquisition.
Listen, it might’ve looked cheap as fuck, but I found a certain charm in the “every dungeon interior is just one of three dungeons with different parts blocked off”. Plus the combat flowed really well. I played that whole game through like… 5 times. One right after the other.
If you play it after coming off Mass Effect 1, the “every colony bunker or mine is one of three options” regardless of the planet just becomes part of that Old BioWare’s aesthetic.
Great ideas, cool combat system, great art style and graphics, ruined by writing that was somehow chaotic and utterly predictable at the same time and stupid ass kill ten rats/fetch 10 letters filler quests.
I used to play PD2 with international friends, but latency being what it was I could only really play loud missions. Here’s hoping modern netcode somehow solves the issue of being spotted by guards that are behind a wall from my perspective.
To re-iterate, Ubisoft has done nothing to curb the sexual harassment issues that were reported ages ago and, frankly, simply not requiring return to office would’ve solved that problem along with a boost to employee happiness and workplace attractiveness.
I’ll occasionally poo-poo efforts to unionize programmers, as the wrong level of abstraction. Software development is too broad to lump together sensibly across all industries, and too narrow for generally organizing office workers.
Game devs should’ve unionized twenty fucking years ago. Maybe forty. The horror stories about crunch were already commonplace in forums. Several major 90s releases have turned out to be corporate screw-jobs with no comeuppance. Mindscape straight-up fired the entire Lego Island staff the day before launch, probably to fuck them out of promised royalties.
Christ, third-party console publishing, as a concept, only exists because Atari treated developers like anonymous machines. Warren Robinet’s name appearing anywhere on or in Adventure - a game where he was responsible for every single byte - was a secret act of defiance. A handful of dudes responsible for half of Atari’s profits left to form Activision. Then Activision pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Accolade. Then Accolade pulled the same shit and a handful of dudes left to form Acclaim, are you seeing a fucking pattern?
It’s not enough to put people who’ve been screwed in charge, to prevent the company from screwing more workers. The incentives are miserable. And that was before the dominant strategy became bottomless money-pits that should be straight-up outlawed.
To confused people exploring from all Communities trying to understand what the hell is going on:
Bethesda is a game studio who does a decent job of giving people choice to do/be whatever they want in their games. Out of the box they included the option to choose your pronouns in a new game called “Starfield”.
They also make it possible to modify their games to make very drastic changes to the player experience.
Nexus is a site that hosts thousands of mods to all sorts of games. People make mods, upload them to Nexus and players download them.
Someone made a mod to remove the option to choose pronouns from Starfield.
Nexus decided they don’t want to host this mod. It’s hurtful to people and goes against their values of inclusivity.
That’s about it. Most of the people whinging about censorship don’t even play the game. They’re just here to whinge about how the world is moving on from old bigoted ways and they want to stay in the past and be jerks to people for merely existing. If they actually cared, they’d just download the mod from some other site. The mod itself is probably not much bigger than this reply.
In undue fairness, a mod to downgrade nudity or vulgarity would kinda make sense, if someone personally didn’t want to see that. (Or if they were concerned about it for streaming. Or they had kids in the room.) For example, there’s some racial slur graffiti in Bioshock Infinite that is used for highly effective shock value and characterization, and I could see someone wanting to tone it down.
The root issue is what’s being removed: the abstract possibility of characters being called “him” or “her” independent of their appearance. To people who won’t use the feature, it is literally nothing. It simply does not exist beyond a checkbox they’ll scroll clean past. The game part of the game will work exactly as they expect, from start to finish.
They’re whining about censorship because the real purpose of this mod is to signal that they’re against anyone else having that option.
They are performatively upset by this trivial separation of character model and branch condition. Because they hate trans people. There is no other possible motivation, because this pointless change is simple and direct.
This removal is a website telling those bigoted trolls: poop in someone else’s yard.
I’ll add that my understanding is that you aren’t even prompted to choose a pronoun in-game – it defaults to one or the other based on your character creation choices, and you can then change it if you want to. It’s literally a non-issue.
Happens all the time IRL to me. I use both he and she pronouns and ignorant people always ask why bother just pick one. Well, I did, they’re my PERSONAL pronouns and I chose both these.
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