The defunct Consumerist used to run a poll. forbes.com/…/ea-voted-worst-company-in-america-ag… . It was always strange how EA beat out the companies that I think do more harm to society for several years. For some reason it’s entertainment companies that draw a lot of vocal ire from consumers, despite financial institutions, pharma, telecoms, oil, factory farms, etc. doing more explicit and literal harm.
For some reason people seem to experience the most rage, vocalization frustration, etc. when it comes to having their entertainment fucked with (whether pricing, content itself, etc). Companies can cause global recession or market crashes, be responsible for child labor resulting in death and dismemberment, or engage in flat out fraud, but those companies will never bring out the toxicity, death threats, entitlement, and communal anger like a video game or film/tv company that impacts the entertainment of the masses. When people used to think of the most evil company in America back in the early 2010’s, EA was more hated than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, or AIG. That never made sense to me.
I have no problem discussing political opinions. I hate how every thread gets co opted by un critical hot takes for the circle jerk of up votes. It’s frustrating that any post about digital media has the top comments all saying “Yarrrr, time to sail the high sees.” Or anytime there’s any news about a corporation, the top comment seems to be “fuck capitalism and those greedy greedy share holders.” Those kinds of comments aren’t critical, aren’t contributing to any meaningful conversation. On reddit I think it succeeded when you had communities of enthusiasts having conversations about the thing they are enthusiastic about. Lemmy seems to have a lot more people enthusiastic about a political position just try to spread that on any and all communities.
For me it’s the over representation of self described communists that take over every thread to poetically or unpoetically just keep saying capitalism=bad and then do shit like justify bad behavior because capitalism=bad or pretend to care about making sure employees get paid while advocating for piracy of everything being justified.
I think the other thing you need to highlight is that during that rapid growth phase 2 years ago it meant building up teams. In tech it really became an job market where employees had lot of the power in negotiation which drove up the cost of labor to fill this surplus of openings. I worked at a company where team members were being offered 10k to 25k annual retention bonuses to not quit (if you want quit within a certain time you pay it back, but if you quit hopefully your new employer spots you a signing bonus to cover it). But with all of the factors you mentioned in this cool down, you end up with a problem that you now have too much staff, but also too expensive staff that you can’t afford. Employees are definitely losing now with the layoffs, but for the ones that were able to make job moves and survive the layoffs, they’re probably are doing much better because of it (at least from a compensation POV, not sure about anxiety worrying about being laid off next).
I’m wondering if it’s a touch screen to help with that. I prefer steam controller track pads, but I could get by with a touchscreen for portable in some games.
There’s not really a good answer other than convenience. Folks view Steam as the benevolent convenient monopoly. They want it to be their store for everything, their launcher for everything, their friends and social networks for all gaming on PC and what not. Epic is behind on feature parity and function, but even if it did have parity, I think gamers still want the convenience of one store/library/friends list.
Curious. Does this strangely help game devs avoid crunch? If the stories and acting can’t be completed, does that buy them more time to just make the gameplay?