I played the first one but after that the formula felt pretty samey and I was bored of it. Would a fourth Borderlands game even be good if it wasn’t laggy?
Fuck Rockstar. I changed my email accounts a few years ago but forgot to change Rockstar first. This wasn’t a problem. Now, after buying GTA V on Xbox and Steam and sinking a lot of time into it over two accounts, they added some mandatory launcher on Steam that forces you to login to their Social Club. Mandatory launcher...
Unfortunately email is the only way they have to verify your identity. No email, no account.
That isn’t really true, I’ve restored access to multiple game accounts before in situations where I lost access to my email, it mostly involved providing information about the account that only the person using it would know, like the names of characters on it and some other stuff. If a company can’t handle this it’s because they don’t want to pay for competent customer support workers and just rely entirely on lazily coded automated systems.
“And at least part of that plan involves AI”, reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment....
I would like to see more games where the draw is novel and interesting gameplay concepts and proportionally more effort is put into that than standing out visually etc. Hopefully this brings things more in that sort of direction.
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process....
In the 90s I would go to the school library to print out walkthroughs from the internet, to supplement the occasional relevant walkthroughs I could find in magazines. Realistically there was absolutely no way I was figuring out most of the puzzles on my own as a child, games got way more user friendly and self explanatory since then.
Or if there is any possible ambiguity in the law. I’m thinking it’s possible this has something to do with the recent weakening of constitutional protections for adult content in the US, where censorship by states of somewhat arbitrarily “obscene” content can be deemed illegal. The quote in the article by Valve seems to reference the concept of offensiveness in Mastercard’s policies:
The sale of a product or service, including an image, which is patently offensive and lacks serious artistic value (such as, by way of example and not limitation, images of nonconsensual sexual behavior, sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual mutilation of a person or body part, and bestiality), or any other material that the Corporation deems unacceptable to sell in connection with a Mark.
So what I’m reading between the lines here is, there is now doubt among the lawyers of credit card companies or the lawyers of their middlemen that these games are for sure legal, and not in violation of obscenity laws that rely on hazy standards of offensiveness.
The precedent setting supreme court ruling I’m thinking of is very recent, and there are other recent significant changes to law that could also be relevant. My guess is that the phone calls didn’t make the difference on their own, but rather prompted internal conversations about legal liability given the new landscape and how they should be handling it to best avoid potential damages.
Yeah, but it wouldn’t be realistic to say “we accept crypto now and also are refusing to comply with credit card content policies” right away anyways, because that would just lose them all their business. The better plan would be to do what they seem to be doing; comply in the short term as best they can, while simultaneously looking to branch out with the payment options they accept, so that at some point in the future credit card companies might have less leverage.
tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms....
I wonder if the real reason credit card companies have been responsive to these groups is the potential for lawsuits that drag payment processors into them, which is a result of various shitty laws that have been passed to generally empower these sorts of regressive trolls to do so. If so petitions from the other side might not be as effective, because they can be sued for providing services to the wrong people but not so much for cutting off service, and there’s not much actual risk to them even if a lot of people are mad about the latter.
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
What are the criticisms? Genuinely curious, have no idea what problems anyone might have with it, other than some quotes from the Ubisoft exec trying to act like implementing user run servers is borderline impossible
Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The...
The article brings up good criticisms, like all the minors getting molested due to the platform being negligent, and manipulative in game spending options. Paying for online content creation work doesn’t seem as bad as that to me though.
For that you would have to completely change how currency is issued and managed. Money is created by being borrowed directly or indirectly from the central bank, and the reason it is possible for those loans to later be repaid is because even more money is loaned out later, so it’s not going to be a game of musical chairs where there isn’t enough money going around to pay them all back, they keep bringing in more chairs. There is always an increasing amount of money in the system, and they make it that way on purpose to keep things running the way they want them to.
Personally what I hate about this setup is, a person who meets the requirements to obtain a business loan can now take this money that was created out of thin air, use it to coerce labor out of people who have no way to get money other than working, and keep the profits. What if our lives would all be better off working a bit less? Too bad, that decision isn’t up to us, how much we must work is indirectly decided by monetary policy, which the average person realistically has zero influence over, and the goal is a high level of “economic activity”, ie. as many people as possible subject to financial coercion.
I have an idea for a game: It’s the usual “a princess is kidnapped by a dragon and a brave knight is on a quest to rescue her” story. But you (the player) plays as the princess, who is somehow helping the knight on his quest....
Here’s an idea: gameplay sort of like Goblin Cleanup, you have various chores you have to do cleaning and arranging the various levels of the tower at night while the dragon is home, and your work has to pass an inspection. Then during the day you are locked in your room, and have some ability to watch a prospective rescuer attempt the dungeon crawl without your direct input. But you can strategically arrange items, enemy spawns, and Dark Souls style hints to try to tip the scales during the chores phase. So kind of like a tower defense game in reverse where you are trying to lose.
Like can we make this a more vocal opinion that Triple-A studios/publishers are like legally required to offer a version… Or what is your take on that, especially if you have a similar opinion with a deviation in execution. let me know why if you dont agree too!...
If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.
The free internet as we’ve known it for the last 20 years is collapsing as the ad market evaporates and corporate media ownership becomes increasingly unhinged in response. As belts tighten and profits dwindle across all media–not just video games–that rising tide could begin claiming more and more sites that even ten years ago would have seemed immortal.
Why is this happening? The post alludes to Google and Meta hogging all the ads somehow, but why would advertising on things resembling traditional media now be worthless? Everyone started using adblockers or is there something else too?
These explanations make sense to me, but they seem to conflict a little with what’s being said in the post, where it’s implied that game journalism sites get a decent amount of traffic but it isn’t worth as much because media business models as a whole are collapsing somehow:
It doesn’t matter how many millions, or even tens of millions of people are reading a website if the means of financially supporting that writing are evaporating.
I disagree about Soma being an isolated setting, there are actually lots of characters, it’s just that they’re all insane cyborgs who mostly happen to have their own personal reasons for attacking you.
I can’t seem to find them, but before the game came out there was a series of live action video shorts made in association with it to help establish the concept and setting, I’d imagine a show being along the lines of those but fleshed out more.
There reaches a point with vaporware projects where it’s like, actually release something or I don’t care anymore, it doesn’t deserve to keep getting press
Even if they tried I don’t think they have the leverage to make that work. What games or publishers are big enough that such a move would go worse for Twitch than it would for them? Most of the time indie games make for better content anyway. Twitch could just ban games that don’t include an unconditional free streaming license in their terms of service and not lose much of any popularity, while the game publishers trying to extort them would absolutely lose popularity.
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Otherwise why would anyone use software they aren’t used to? Steam is really good, they’ve been putting massive resources into making it better for many years, and it has all the network effects.
I am skeptical that this is the main reason (even though it’s true and is a reason). I think people don’t like the idea of having their games library split across multiple services, and don’t like using/learning software they aren’t familiar with, or that other people aren’t using.
Each server would likely have to utilize a payment service.
Yeah but that would mean each server has to take custody of funds, have their own individual contractual agreements with game companies, handle refunds, bear all the legal and tax burdens of this, and get people to trust they won’t scam them. It’s just too much of a burden, these are all things that benefit heavily from centralization and economies of scale, due to the legalistic nature of payments. You would end up with one dominant instance and unused federation, if there was even anyone willing to deal with all that stuff to begin with.
I feel like you could solve this stuff pretty well with crypto, having payment go directly to the game devs, and a no refund policy or something to simplify things, but crypto is too hated so that wouldn’t work right now.
“The current obsession with nostalgia and remake culture is easy to understand when you realize that it’s a symptom of a culture that isn’t allowed to imagine a future.”
But I think the point is, the OP meme is wrong to try painting this as some kind of society-wide psychological pathology, when it’s rather business people coming up with simple reliable formulas to make money. The space of possible products people could want is large, and this choice isn’t only about what people want, but what will get attention. People will readily pay attention to and discuss with others something they already have a connection to in a way they wouldn’t with some new thing, even if they would rather have something new.
I know that’s how it works in the US, but the lawsuit is in Japan, which you always hear about having stricter copyright laws. Not really sure how this one will play out though.
I think framing this as “refusing” to use AI is kind of weird. They believe in doing things the traditional way, great, I think games that use all hand-drawn nondigital art are also cool for going against the grain like that, and making a point of supporting artists is laudable, but it isn’t like anyone is trying to force them not to.
By shutting down a studio instead of selling it off or even letting it buy itself out, Microsoft ensures that no studio it has ever owned can become viable competition.
They benefit by killing off art and culture that could replace or take attention away from the art and culture they already control and profit from. They don’t need to profit from it directly.
you get a lot of publicly traded companies that are in the industry that have to show their investors growth—because why else does somebody own a share of someone’s stock if it’s not going to grow?
I thought the way it was supposed to work was, a company starts out investing in its growth and during this period shareholders get gains from the price of the stock going up, and then when it has maxed out just switch to shoveling the profits into dividends instead? If the industry has stopped growing, I don’t see why there isn’t a path to acknowledging that to investors, what am I missing?
Shouldn’t that depend on the dollar amounts? Why would $X of dividends be worse than $X of stock growth? And if growth just isn’t in the cards anymore, it would be in reality a worse bet as the companies pour resources into a black hole of false hope and self sabotage seeking something that isn’t actually going to happen.
'My Advice to Users Is to Accept Reality and Tune, or to Not Play' — Randy Pitchford Is at the 'Get a Refund From Steam' Stage of the Borderlands 4 PC Performance Backlash (www.ign.com) angielski
Blue Archive, [an anime RTS], got hacked, but the hacker just spawned the same character everywhere without touching valuable data, Nexon confirms - AUTOMATON WEST (automaton-media.com) angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/35437141
(Rant) Don't buy Rockstar games. angielski
Fuck Rockstar. I changed my email accounts a few years ago but forgot to change Rockstar first. This wasn’t a problem. Now, after buying GTA V on Xbox and Steam and sinking a lot of time into it over two accounts, they added some mandatory launcher on Steam that forces you to login to their Social Club. Mandatory launcher...
At Gamescom, it felt like the industry now has a plan: make games quicker | Opinion (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
“And at least part of that plan involves AI”, reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment....
Final Fantasy X programmer doesn’t get why devs want to replicate low-poly PS1 era games. “We worked so hard to avoid warping, but now they say it’s charming” - AUTOMATON WEST (automaton-media.com) angielski
This happened to me in Roller Coaster Tycoon and The Sims. angielski
The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an "easy button", it's hard to not use it. It's sort of like when you're at work and see the "quick workaround" effectively become the standard process....
Mastercard release a statement about game stores, payment processors and adult content (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Itch.io are seeking out new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material | RPS (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Gamers Bombard Visa & MasterCard With Emails and Calls Over Steam and itch.io Censorship (old.reddit.com) angielski
Cheat Sheet Source...
"We approached payment processors because Steam did not respond" - Australian pressure group Collective Shout claims responsibility for Steam and Itch.io NSFW game removal (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
tldr: Australian pressure group Collective Shout has claimed responsibility for the recent Itch.io and Steam developments that have seen the platforms change how they deal with - and in some cases remove - NSFW games and content from their respective platforms....
Petition to tell MasterCard, Visa, and activist groups to stop censoring legal fictional content (www.change.org) angielski
Some notes based on frequent comments:...
Does anyone else find it suspicious that there wasn't any criticism on here about Stop Killing Games until after it hit 1.4M signatures? angielski
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
'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”...
Roblox Accused Of Allowing Sexual Exploitation In Four Separate Lawsuits (www.anapolweiss.com) angielski
Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The...
Dreamsettler, the follow-up to early internet inspired browser game Hypnospace Outlaw, has been cancelled (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
How could they do this? angielski
deleted_by_moderator
Game design question : how to make a "trapped" player character? angielski
I have an idea for a game: It’s the usual “a princess is kidnapped by a dragon and a brave knight is on a quest to rescue her” story. But you (the player) plays as the princess, who is somehow helping the knight on his quest....
I want a law for PC games to be offered in physical versions again angielski
Like can we make this a more vocal opinion that Triple-A studios/publishers are like legally required to offer a version… Or what is your take on that, especially if you have a similar opinion with a deviation in execution. let me know why if you dont agree too!...
18+ 'There Are So Few Of Us Left': Even Full-Time Games Journalists At Big Websites Are Feeling It In 2025 (aftermath.site) angielski
Jacksepticeye Reveals He Was Working on an Unannounced Soma Animated Show but It Fell Apart 'Out of Nowhere' (www.ign.com) angielski
Insane headline. I would’ve liked to see what a SOMA show would look like.
I don't tell you how to live your life angielski
Epic sues Fortnite cheater, donates his winnings to charity, forces him to publicly apologise, bans him for life, and all but sends him to his room without dinner (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
They as broke as I am? (lemmy.world) angielski
Beyond Good & Evil 2's troubled development due to "passionate managers" not getting along, says creator Michel Ancel (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
New report claims gamers spend more time watching videos about gaming than playing games (www.gamesindustry.biz) angielski
I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store (lemmy.world) angielski
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Nostalgia and remake culture (lemmy.sdf.org) angielski
“The current obsession with nostalgia and remake culture is easy to understand when you realize that it’s a symptom of a culture that isn’t allowed to imagine a future.”
The sino-soviet split of the modern age.
cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/3674063...
Nintendo files lawsuit against Palworld (www.nintendolife.com)
www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/…/240919.html
Sony announces the PS5 Pro with a larger GPU, advanced ray tracing, and AI upscaling (www.theverge.com) angielski
$700, and the side by sides look barely different, from my perspective. The chat seemed to have the same opinion.
The Star Fox-style roguelite whose dev refused to use AI voices to cut costs is adding an entire "anti-capitalist revenge" campaign about a cat-girl destroying AI (lemmy.today) angielski
Since the Link isn’t working for some:...
The Real Reason Your Favourite Game Studios Are Getting Closed Instead Of Sold (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Phil Spencer blames capitalism for games industry woes: 'I don't get [the] luxury of not having to run a profitable growing business' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Will Smith Zombie Game No One Has Heard Of Bombs (kotaku.com) angielski