The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.
While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.
I'm struggling with this question, because these days I almost do that backwards. I will get a game and ask "what's the device I'd like to use for this"?
I mean, I've been playing a fair amount of Monster Train 2. I have no interest in sitting at a desk for that, or to put it up on a massive screen. Been playing a bunch of Tetris the Grand Master, which is not a great fit for a heavy handheld. Donkey Kong Bananza? Mostly TV, felt off on the handheld screen.
I think when you go back to emulation there's a bunch of games that are deceptively better on the go. That was the Switch's original party tirck, right? Hey, turns out Mario 64's short star runs are a great fit for sitting on the toilet. Who knew? Random JRPG being played one-handed on a tiny Android device? Surprisingly decent.
But at this point software is just this weird blob, I just pick a controller/device combo that fits for each game.
Yeah, I'm gonna say this person doesn't hate to keep knocking on Veilguard, because that seems to be the one example they can bring up. I mean, there's a cursory name check of Dawntrail, but otherwise... yeah, not sure what games this is talking about other than Dragon Age.
Clair Obscur didn't do that. It went to absolute pains to not do that, in fact, to the point where I find the deceptive twist-building a bit over the top, in retrospect. I wouldn't accuse the CDPR games of going that route. Baldur's Gate does overexplain often, but in their defense the game has a million characters, plot points you go through out of order and a runtime in the hundreds of hours, so I wouldn't change that.
What else is even doing this? I feel like we're back in "AAA sucks" territory where AAA stands in for "this one game I didn't like". Writing in games runs the gamut. I would struggle to find a single defining thing to praise or criticise across the board.
I'm not gonna tell you this is impossible to set up for a worldwide online company because unlike the OP I have no problem acknowledging that I don't know enough about something to understand how hard it is.
I will tell you that it's absurd to propose that by working with the three biggest payment processors in the world, covering a huge share of all online payments, Steam has somehow been negligent.
That doesn't follow even a little bit. It's an absolute non-sequitur. It's someone trying very hard to be mad at somebody they know for a thing they don't fully understand.
Valve works with the same handful of payment providers everybody else does. Literally everybody else. I don't have a stance on how feasible it is to handle your own payment processing, but claiming that any company on the planet is negligent for not doing so is insane.
I am all on board for taking regulatory action against anticompetitive practices in this space from the oligopolistic few companies available in it.
My educated guess is that seems too remote for you to feel righteous by being angry at someone specific so we're talking about Valve instead.
Hell, I'm all for taking regulatory action against Valve for their own monopolistic practices. I'm just not here to posture ineffectual anger.
Hey, I'm all for creating a public online payment processor. An international one, even.
I'm not even pulling any punches. There are no reasons to leave this in private hands.
But this reeks of people being mad at the thing they know and feel have some influence with instead of with the actual problem, and it's a bummer because it encapsulates Internet outrage and why it's so often ineffectual.
FWIW, the piece here is remarkably light on its headline issue. The most I can see in there is:
Policymakers need to protect both players and the workers creating games. That means, among other things, rethinking release schedules, enforcing rest periods for development teams and holding companies accountable for the well-being of their staff. The overall health of the industry depends on it.
That is almost entirely meaningless. Rest periods for dev teams are already established in legislation, as they are for any other EU worker. It's called holidays and we got to that way earlier than to live service gaming. There are also maximum caps on overtime in the labor legislation of most EU countries.
The next console wars will be the Switch 2 vs the horrible sinking feeling in your gut.
People seemingly forget that the Switch moved as many consoles as the PS4 and Xbox One combined. I don't even mean people in online forums, because sure. I mean people in the games industry.
For the record, people also suck at selling new live service games despite (and possibly because) Fortnite, Call of Duty, CS and Roblox have all the players and won't let them go. Don't see anybody stop trying, for better and worse.
I'm sure Nintendo is very happy to let everybody ignore that they've locked in 150 million players and routinely tap into many millions of them for their first party releases, I'm just here to remind people when they forget and overstate the position of Sony, MS or even Valve.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out...
I don't think it's particularly controversial these days to say that Linux gaming is way ahead of Mac gaming, so I'm not sure that part is suprising, beyond the notion that in other metrics the OS split for those is more like 15% to 5%.
I mean, the Mac side was celebrating this month that Cyberpunk finally runs natively on it, and it is borderline unplayable on most of the hardware out there, gets comparable to what? A 5060? on the very top end.
I read in that two missed opportunities: One, Mac gaming should get so much better. Two, somebody on the Linux side should really start taking non-gaming compatibility seriously.
It's genuinely more complicated than that, honestly. Apple did a great job of pretending these ARM devices were on par with desktop PC hardware when they... kind of aren't, in absolute terms. I wonder how much of an incentive they have to keep doing this if the result is their top of the line five grand devices start to look like mid-range PCs and the bullshit way their naming conventions are designed starts getting exposed by widespread FPS counts on tentpole game releases. I genuinely don't think Apple wants to have that conversation.
So if anything it seems weird to me that they are focusing on this. Honestly, getting triple-A releases ported to phones and tablets seems like a much safer bet. I guess it's just hard to leave the laptop and desktop users entirely out of the loop for no good reason, but they have a lot of experience doing just that, so who knows.
It seems pretty obvious that unifying the software is the next step for them after unifying a lot of the hardware. what that means for gaming on their devices is anybody's guess.
And of course I don't particularly care because... I mean, macs.
You're not wrong, but I don't know if it should be a Valve thing anyway. For one thing, I am not comfortable with Valve owning all of PC gaming in the first place.
But from their perspective, it's one thing to own compatibility in a system they don't pay anything for and effectively can own and another to go do work for a bigger fish. If Apple wants big PC games to run on their hardware Apple can make it happen, presumably. I mean, Meta is keeping the VR market afloat single-handedly, and there's a chance you could actually make money with this stuff on Mac.
I do think it makes more sense for them to do that if and when all their hardware is running the same OS, or at least the same software. They don't seem to have made up their mind on whether that should be a thing, even though it's very clear it should be a thing.
But no, seriously, you can rage all you want about brands and corporations, but in cultural industries content is always king.
That's why you need regulation. You can't expect people to not play or watch cool stuff just because you're aware of and latched onto some particular moral, ethical or economical transgression. It's res publica to prevent the misbehavior so people don't have to have a stance on the extent of licensing for software/hardware combo services whenever their kid wants the cute gorilla game.
Those do typically come with the firmware update bundled in the cart.
Ironically this is a security measure because it also closes security loopholes and jailbreaking exploits.
Of course for that you need a cartridge that actually has something in it or whatever, but that's the idea. You're more likely to have a firmware update in a physical game than the full playable game.
Voting with your wallet does nothing. It's a neoliberal fiction capitalism uses to pretend regulation is unnecessary.
Voting with your wallet is dependent on everybody else with a wallet even knowing that there's something to vote about. Most people don't.
And voting with your wallet means you have a tiny wallet in a world with a TON of tiny wallets and a few very big, huge-ass humongous wallets, so your wallet vote doesn't count for crap compared with your one-vote-per-person vote, if you have access to one of those.
So no, voting with your wallet is barely useful at best, just the normal flow of the market ideally, entirely pointless at worst.
It's not a terrible example. You can have delicious vegan food and you can have moral objections to the process of eating meat.
But if your reasoning is to enact some larger impact on climate or the practices of industrial meat production your own consumption habits are mostly irrelevant and you should focus on regulating those things instead.
The difference is that food isn't a licensed product. You can have very sustainable meat at home. You can't source sustainable Mario Kart.
No, my suggestion is your buying or not buying stuff isn't a political action. Your political action is political action.
If you want to make sure it is not an option for hardware manufacturers to arbitrarily brick hardware you own for monetization or licensing issues what you need is a law that makes it illegal.
How you get that law is very dependent on where you live and what your political system is, so hey, I'm sorry if you need some sort of regime change before this becomes an option. But the "voting with your wallet" thing doesn't stop being a capitalist fiction just because you landed in a system where consumer protections have been written out of the lawbooks.
No, hold on, you get past the "other than get involved with politics" part very quickly there.
You can ABSOLUTELY get involved with politics. Go get involved with politics. Why are you not?
You can just vote, which is way more impactful than making purchasing decisions based on performatively affecting political involvement. That's getting involved with politics. If that doesn't do it then the next recourse isn't to spend money for posturing, it's to decide if you care enough about the issue to be activist about it or to break into the system in some capacity where you can implement change.
That's what you can do.
What you can't do is change how consumer protections work by spending money. That's not a thing. Nintendo has literal billions to spend marketing their products and the vast majority of people who will buy them as a result would not care much about the edge case you care about, would never encounter it and don't care enough about computing hardware to have an opinion in the first place You wanna change that? Go do politics.
This is why voting with your wallet pisses me off as a concept. It lets people say "but what else could I do besides getting into politics" and pretend they've done something by buying some shit over some other shit.
Nah, man, that's not how that works. You can do something or do nothing. Doing nothing is fine. You don't need to crusade for every single minor annoyance the legal system allows to enter the fringes of your life. You have no obligation to take on Apple or Nintendo or Google on any one specific crappy thing they decide to do.
But just to be clear, "voting with your wallet" is doing nothing. That's the choice you're making.
To be clear, I agree that you don't have to be into politics. Not caring enough is fine. Social media expressions of opinion are always black and white. AI is the end of the world, Nintendo's piracy stance is a war crime, Windows is the antichrist... You're allowed to be bummed out by any of those and not do anything about it because you're not bummed out enough. That's a refreshing degree of online moderation, if anything.
What I take issue with is confusing those sorts of market results with actual political action. A brand can decide something unpopular isn't worth pursuing for PR reasons, but they can also decide it IS worth it. To my knowledge the people I shared Netflix accounts with that were impacted by the location checks are still impacted by those. Your EA and Uber examples were barely impactful at all until regulators got into the mix, and regulators got into the mix hard about those issues. I invite you to go look up how both of them played out, because, man, is there a difference between how fast the companies reacted once there was someone in a public position going "hey, maybe we need to take a look at this".
Mistaking how a brand manages its public perception for effective political actions is dangerous. Letting corporations appease you through those means only serves to set up a bad precedent when those brands decide the time has come to squeeze and go hard on monetization. You need public institutions that are strong and vigilant enough to put some bite behind that public displeasure.
Can a boycott work? Sure. As a coordinated political action, the consumer-side equivalent of a strike. This takes just as much work and coordination as any other political activity.
But spending your money based on the outrage that reaches you through social media is not a functional way to generate change. It's just you being part of the mass of consumers brand manage with their messaging tools. You're a rounding error in a stat, part of the manipulation of the market that is built into every corporate action. When you do that you're a focus group data point, not a political actor.
We won't indeed. And that's why the neoliberal fantasy where the market self-regulates is bullshit.
We won't because our set of incentives isn't infinitely fluid to the point where every negative, hostile or illegitimate action is unprofitable. And we shouldn't have to, because there already is a mechanism to account for that fact, and it's the law.
We're not meant to judge our spending money in fungible commodities and entertainment based on political stances and larger considerations about long term convenience. We're not meant to weigh whether Nintendo has a right to disable our device remotely as part of the choice to play a cute racing game.
That's not the sphere where those choices belong. We've been told it is by neoliberal capitalists who don't want a government to tell them what they can and cannot do, so they keep insisting that they can be as crappy as they want because if they do something the public won't like they will "vote with their wallet" and the market will settle in the optimal spot of profit vs service. And if it doesn't a competitor will give people what they want and they'll buy that instead.
But that's a lie. It never worked that way, and it doesn't work anywhere close to that way in a global online oligarchy. You're meant to be able to buy whatever the hell you fancy because there is supposed to be a state regulating things to be safe, fair and protected when you engage in small commercial exchanges.
Because you need Office, Microsoft doesn't get to be the Antichrist. Because Netflix has the show everybody wants to watch it doesn't get to be the worst. The idea is those companies are supposed to be held to the level of being-the-worst-Antichrist we all deem minimally acceptable. Market forces can play within that space, and no further.
So you want Netlfix to not be the worst? Get a legislator to enforce it and watch Stranger Things to your heart's content. Because whether you like Stranger Things isn't supposed to be connected in any way to how Netflix conducts its business or how abusive it can be in the process of doing so.
That's why the intent matters. If your concern with meat is that you're unwilling to inflict any suffering to an animal for food, then sure, that's independent from the wider effects. If you don't care about the larger impact beyond the small impact you have then by all means, your individual actions are all that matters.
But if your concern is systemic: how the meat industry functions, the climate impact, sustainability and so on, those things are a bit different. One, because you can bypass those issues and still eat animal products, on a personal level, but also because your not eating animal products doesn't have much of an impact at all in the overall issue.
The other thing is misunderstanding how products, brands and commerce in general work. I mean, if you can go and fund the, what? Fifty to a hundred million dollars Mario Kart World must have cost, by all means be my guest. I have a couple of pitches I may want to run by you.
But even in that scenario I'm afraid people don't particularly care for your open source knockoff. They want to play Mario Kart. Because it's Mario Kart. For some it's branding, for some it's because their friends are playing and they want to play together, for some it's nostalgia from their childhood, for some it's just that they don't care or know and that's the name they recognize.
You could fund half the gaming industry to be free and open source and people would still play Mario Kart.
So if you want Nintendo to not be dicks about it you need to regulate them, not put your money where your mouth is.
Well, if noone cares, then your issue maybe just isn't that important.
I don't think that's the case, but we have to account for the possibility that your priorities just aren't particularly good priorities that other people care about.
I say I don't think that's the case because plenty of people do care about some of this stuff at least to some degree, or at least agree with it when asked.
People tend to be very down on the system or on politicians or on the ability or willingness to do anything in the common interest, and that's mostly part of the liberal lie as well. There's plenty to be done and plenty of people willing to do it. Those people need the power to do it, though. Sure, getting those people to where they need to be is hard, particularly with leftie types who will immediately get discouraged the moment their politicians aren't paragons of justice with a magic wand to fix every issue, but that's not the same as saying nobody cares.
I'd much rather have people get motivated than discouraged, and I don't need to win every fight, especially not right away. It'd rather move in the right direction than pout about it, even if the short term practical outcome is the same.
Look, I don't think anybody has an obligation towards constructive optimism.
I do ask that those who don't at least take care to not be destructive in their pessimism, or at least not to let those who are deliberately destructive to get in a position where they can be more destructive out of being despondent.
That's the thing, right? It may not be your turn to make things better, but if you are mindful in how you get out of the way somebody else may take things to the place where you can be. The part that worries me is how many people in that same spiral end up doing nothing when they get the chance, or so mad that they just want to tear things down without caring about what gets put in their place.
I mean, I would take a Burnout instead. I just wonder if it'd make sense to try that at this point with a completely different market and group of people. I guess we can see if they figure out that Skate reboot and go from there.
I think the Criterion Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted games are underrated. I get why, they're very Burnout-y for NFS fans but don't play just like Burnout, but man, are they sticky and precise and smooth.
Yeah, I skipped over the original and when I went back to it I genuinely couldn't see what the fuss is about.
My biggest gripe with the remake ended up being that it felt a bit weird after coming from playing a bunch of Hot Pursuit, but I ended up playing an absolute ton of MW once I got used to the way it drives.
I couldn't tell you why they chose to reuse titles for those two games, though.
Both MW and Paradise have very quirky handling built for their open worlds, but I honestly really love both.
Paradise is such a perfect little gem of a small open world that is entirely consistent and has super clear design rules, sometimes to a fault. MW is a super smooth, compulsive expansion on that. They both hold up amazingly well today, even visually.
Yeah, Paradise is built on you learning the map. I have a hard time wrapping my head around how hard doing that is fresh because man, is that map seared into my brain forever now.
Traffic checking is weird because I want to dislike it on principle coming from 3, but... yeah, I kinda really like the games that include it, too. Like, reluctantly. I see how it breaks something at the core of the Burnout idea, but also... it's really satisfying and makes the game more pleasant to play, even if acknowledging that feels wrong.
I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
Well, the missing context is that this is how a lot of gaming is tuned regardless. It's pretty basic economy tuning to look at how long a task takes to complete and tune based on that (for games with grind, anyway, think RPGs).
So if you're playing "Perfectly Fair Single Player RPG 3" there's a more than fair chance that the developers looked at the expected completion time of a quest, plugged in that time into some spreadsheet and assigned XP and other rewards to the quest based on that, just to keep the XP curve of the game somewhat predictable. This is a big rabbit hole with a bunch of nuance, but for these purposes we can assume they at least started by doing that flat on all quests.
If you have a F2P game and you're charging for things you can also grind I frankly don't see a much better place to start.
Now, if your premise is that all design for engagement in F2P is gross because it's servicing your business and all design for engagement in paid games is fine because that's just seeking "fun"... well, I don't know that gets fixed. I agree that pay-up-front games can benefit from getting the ugly matter of getting money from players out of the way early, but these days even those games are trying to upsell you into later content, sequels and other stuff, so the difference is rarely that stark.
I think there's a conversation to be had about whether "good", "fun" and "makes people want to engage more" should be seen as the same thing and, if not, what the difference is. It's tricky and nuanced and I don't know that you can expect every game to be on one end of that conversation. Sometimes a person just wants to click on a thing to make number go up, and that's alright.
I guess it depends on where your line for "gross" happens to land. In my old age I tend to look at old arcades as being pretty gross. Certainly worse than I thought they were at the time.
I'm also not sure if I have a problem with Diablo IV. I think their incentive is for you not to run out of content and bounce all the way off before they can give you more, which is why they retuned it much more generously later. In this case the version of the game that people like more is also the one that did better for them financially. Is that more or less gross?
So I'm not sure I agree on whether the incentives matter. I think the experience I get matters. There is definitely a bad place there in the middle where you feel frustrated playing but won't stop playing, and that's a place where a bunch of the sloppier, grindier games make their money. And I'm not gonna stand here and say that all the upsells in games with a big live service don't make the experience worse. They do, in my book.
But those impacts to the experience are what matters to me, not that they are made as part of a business proposition. Full games in boxes were also sold for money. Live games I enjoy are made for money, too.
I'm more concerned at how live games get to vacuum up all players and keep them on lockdown forever than I am about their moneymaking practices, to be honest. People are worried about the wrong set of incentives here, if you ask me.
That being said... man, do I wish people would put their money where their mouth is. It's all well and good to complain about more expensive pay-up-front games or about overly intrusive microtransactions, but this conversation would be a lot smoother if people actively spending hundreds of hours on those weren't currently spending like 70% of the time and 50% of all the money in gaming. Voting with one's wallet rarely does much, in isolation, but there are absolutely tons of games out there. It'd be nice to see people flock towards the good ones, as per their own standards, and ideally spend some money on those.
I think from the game development side there are pros and cons. There are games that struggle to demand a high enough sticker price that do better under a subscription service.
The problem is that, much like subscriptions elsewhere, these are deliberately underpriced and used as a loss leader to sink competitors and the direct purchase market, so they aren't priced reasonably and it's unclear what the money flow towards creators is supposed to be.
And it'd be one thing if the money was flowing at all, but in the current industry, with Microsoft shedding people left and right while holding a ridiculous amount of IP, both active and inactive... well, it's not a great look for the industry as a whole to be dumping content below cost for the sake of a speculative move. And to make matters worse, I don't think that many people know just exactly how much of a money pit Game Pass is.
And that's before the more fundamental issues with ownership and preservation. Which I have strong feelings about, it's just that they happen to be so strong that I'm typically the one to remind people you don't own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.
I know 100% of GOG games are DRM-free, on Steam not so much.
I think people believe that if a specific third party DRM vendor is not listed on the Steam store page then the game has no DRM, but that's not the case.
I wouldn't consider pretty much any Steam game DRM-free or yours-to-own at all by default in that they do not provide an offline installer. You can remove the need to have Steam running after the first download in some games through relatively trivial ways of bypassing Steam checks, but if you want to keep them independently of Steam you still have to store a loose files install of the game, which may or may not like to be portable. Utimately having easy to remove DRM and having no DRM aren't the same thing.
Also, no, definitely not a longer ETA than Switch 2 physical games. A longer ETA than Switch 2 physical cart keys, but you can also resell those, so I guess different pros and cons. I really don't like people jumping onto the idea that all Switch 2 physical releases aren't full physical releases. It plays Nintendo's game of blurring the lines between physical and digital releases. Full cart releases, including Nintendo first party releases, are full physical games and will work indefinitely with what you get in the box.
Some are full games, some are an empty cartridge with a key to download the game (which you can resell but not download if the servers go down). Some are a box with a code inside printed on a piece of paper (which gets associated to your account and you can't resell or download without servers).
There is a warning on the box for the two that don't include the playable game, but the fact that you need to know that or read the warning is a bit of a problem. And I don't particularly like the idea that Nintendo is deliberately confusing the issue to make people believe that buying the game in a box has no advantages.
I like the Switch 2 overall, but some of the weirdness they've done to make game licenses and physical games more complicated kinda sucks for reasons both intended and unintended.
Frankly, I don't think any of the originals are particularly good, and I was done with the new one just before the first one was over. They aren't terrible, but I've always found the praise and hype for the series entirely disproportionate to the content.
I don't particularly love the floaty, sloppy "just put some damage in this 180 degree arc" basis of the combat system much. I am also not at all on board with most of the early teenage edgelord narrative stuff in there. Maybe I was a bit too old by the time these came out.
The Harryhausen references are neat and some of the boss fights are cool set pieces that did set some of the groundwork for later AAA action games, but I would much rather spend time in the more expressive, free-flowing Devil May Cry side of things if I'm going for snappy, precise combat... or all the way into Musou slop, I suppose, although I'm not much into that, either.
They definitely moved towards... I'm gonna say better references later in the franchise.
Still, there's also a reason they moved to a whole different genre.
GoW's core combat premise is that you have absurd range and can deal damage in a wide arc. It was REALLY hard to tighten that all the way via iteration while keeping the way the game plays.
GoW 3 was a huge step above its predecessors in setting up big standout setpieces, and it played... I'm gonna say "better", but it was still limited by the core framework of the series so far, and my argument is that framework was fundamentally flawed.
I don't have much to disagree with there, frankly. I mean, I like GoW 3 less than you do. I'd genuinely play the Ninja Theory DMC, if I'm honest, but at that point we're splitting hairs.
To be clear, I don't hate these games, I just don't like them much and generally don't play them on purpose. We're coming at it from different angles but meeting pretty much halfway.
Just so we're clear, the first pass of localization of every game you've played in the past decade has been machine-generated.
Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it's been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it's pretty nuts.
Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I'm... kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn't clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.
As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I'm confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it'd be a bit of drama.
I guess I don't know what "AI generated" means anymore.
I haven't bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I'm playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn't have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.
That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.
For the record, the word as a general noun is widely recognized to mean what everybody thinks it means:
Luddite
noun
Ludd·ite ˈlə-ˌdīt
: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
One of the weirder annoyances of the AI moral panic is how often you see this spiral of pedantry about the historical luddites whenever someone brings up the word as a pejorative.
I mean, fair rhetorical play, I suppose, in that it creates a very good incentive to not bring it up at all. If the goal was to avoid being called a luddite as an insult or as shorthand for dismissing AI criticism as outright technophobia I suppose that is mission accomplished, disingenuous as it is.
It is also correct that someone disagreeing with me can be doing so because of a moral panic. Our agreement is entirely disconnected to whether there is a moral panic at play or not.
For the record, I think "AI" is profoundly problematic in multiple ways.
This is also unrelated to whether there is a moral panic about it. Which there absolutely is.
As a non-native English speaker, let me tell you, terrible localization was very much a thing that happened well before machine translation, so that by itself (and more subtle typos or one-off errors) was definitely not enough to infer that someone had forgotten to fix a machine-translated line once.
You can definitely tell when something has been machine-translated and not fixed, but the real challenge is lack of context. This leads to nonsensical localization even today, whether it's human or automated, especially in crowdsourced localizations, which are frequent in open source software. I contribute to some on occassion and maaaan, do I wish well intentioned people in that space would stop contributing to projects they don't use/lines they haven't seen in situ.
I hadn't clicked through to the Reddit thing (for obvious reasons). The example in the article proper is in a Portuguese subtitle, but now that you pointed me at it and I did check the Reddit thread... well, that text is not legible in game unless you really try, so yeah, I hadn't read it. I'm guessing that's the only English instance?
The examples people found include a monitor showing random technical text that someone asked a LLM to write (presumably the writer who goofed is getting paid) and some localized subtitles that were left with a machine localization (the rest of the localization was contracted out).
Even assuming a bunch of other stuff in the game was AI generated and just went undetected, which is likely, if it's all iterations on what people noticed it definitely doesn't fit your description.
Yeeeah, you haven't worked in gaming at all, have you?
I mean, I believe that you've been paid to code at some point and I'm hoping you're not just being a dick on the Internet for sport, but man, all these I'm-such-a-competent-software-engineer rants are not giving you the authority brownie points you think they are.
Whatever, if you know you know. I'm not interested. Just... in the off-chance anybody here reads this far down this thread, couple of things: one, stop it, what are you doing. Two, this is not what a person that knows what they're talking about sounds like. He'll try to tell you it is, but it is really not.
Dude I have never been or wanted to be a "seasoned senior software engineer". I mean, respect to them, can't get things going without them, but I don't think of that as an aspirational badge of honor thing.
Also, I'm shocked to find I've been mirroring your "rethorical approach". You really do overestimate how much of your posts I've been reading, because I could not tell you what that is. Is the "approach" to wonder if your callousness comes from not having first hand experience? Because let me tell you, I got there all on my own.
Anyway, it's good that we both find each other's opinion entirely irrelevant, because I sure have better things to do and not enough self-control to do them instead of this. Toodles indeed.
The Binding of Isaac Update adds Internal Item descriptions (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Also includes big balance changes.
What game(s) could you not get into but with a handheld device you started to like the game(s)
Title basically. Which games did you not like on PlayStation, Xbox or PC but once you got a handheld device you really liked it?
We can't keep making videogame stories for players who aren't paying attention to them (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
I’ve noticed a trend—particularly in some recent RPGs—of, well, let’s call it ‘Netflixiness’....
Steam can't escape the fallout from its censorship controversy (www.polygon.com) angielski
‘Stop Killing Games’: Demands for game ownership must also include workers’ rights (theconversation.com) angielski
Xbox Series X and S: Microsoft Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 30 Million Consoles This Generation (in.ign.com) angielski
For reference, Sony was recently boasting that PS5 sold over 80 million copies. This is terrible for Xbox.
Steam Survey for July 2025 shows Linux approaching 3% (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that this is about as much market share as Mac ever had at its peak, and almost twice as much as it has currently. Another is that, if you click the link for the site’s Steam Linux Data Tracker, you can see that English-only Linux market share (a crude way of filtering out...
Nintendo can disable your Switch 2 for piracy in the U.S., but not in Europe, as confirmed by its EULA (en.as.com) angielski
EA reportedly shelves Need For Speed completely to focus on other projects (www.notebookcheck.net) angielski
Predatory tactics in gaming are worse than you think (www.gamedeveloper.com) angielski
I want to shed light on a tactic that involves collecting data as you play, feeding this data into complex algorithms and models that then alter the rules of your game under the hood to optimize spending opportunities.
Founder of Arkane Studios: "I think Gamepass is an unsustainable model that has been increasingly damaging the industry for a decade"; impacts sales angielski
https://i.imgur.com/qEsdvgq.png...
Let's discuss: God of War (beehaw.org) angielski
The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!...
'Spitting in the face of your international audience': The Alters cops to using generative AI for background text and translations, despite not disclosing such on Steam (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
In a statement, 11-Bit Studios confirms that an instance of AI-generated text appears in The Alters due to an “internal oversight”...
Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content (fedia.io) angielski