The difference here being that the swastika was used as the official symbol of a fascist government that conquered a substantial portion of Europe and perpetrated the holocaust. Outside of contexts where its religious significance overshadows this, it’s pretty universally associated with Nazis, and even in the places where its other uses are overshadowed it’s presented differently than the black, tilted swastika in the middle of a white circle on a red field. There are swastikas on the sign of a local Indian restaurant down the street from me, but nobody confuses them with the very clear nazi version. Pretty unambiguous.
Meanwhile Pepe, a relatively recent creation, was coopted by a handful of fascists who don’t use it as their primary symbol and haven’t done anything nearly as drastic or impactful with it, and has since become a widely used emoji character with a huge number of variations that’s used by all sorts of people. Have fascists made use of it? Yeah. But most of the people using these emojis in their discord posts have nothing to do with alt-right fascists and aren’t even especially likely to be right-wingers in any sense at all.
It simply doesn’t have the same connotation that the symbols it’s being compared to here do. It’s easy for people who aren’t versed in spaces where it’s used regularly and innocuously to assert that it is, but that doesn’t make it any more true.
What it does do is make those people seem incredibly out of touch to people who are accustomed to seeing cringespin and sleepypeepo and grabbyhands in their discord chats posted by literal queer leftists.
Get rid of actual fascist imagery and references? Yes please. That shit is rampant.
Get rid of fucking Pepe? …Are you kidding? Way to make yourself and your argument seem fully out of touch. Yeah, sure, there was a point when Pepe was being coopted by right-wingers, but at this point? Like… have you been on discord once ever? Everybody uses Peepo. Moreover, half my trans friends use D&D emojis derived directly from Peepo.
People pointing fingers at Pepe are literally taking the bait and making themselves look less credible, which was presumably the point of it being adopted by assholes to begin with. That fight is over and we won and took it back. Yeesh.
How exactly are you presuming to accurately estimate future sales that don’t exist yet? They increased their cost of operation substantially by relying solely on servers they themselves host, and tie the future viability of their product to hosting those servers. That means there’s a clock on how long it makes sense to make the game available to the public.
If they allowed for private servers, that small initial batch of players could potentially grow. Especially if they build in the extensibility of allowing players to mod the game. As it stands, the game now won’t make them any more money, and creating the opportunity for it to ever make them money had a continuous cost. There would be no incentive to shut down access to the game itself if it didn’t carry a cost to the company.
If they happened to be one of the few successful games in their genre, then sure, hosting their own servers exclusively is a potential means of revenue. But if they’re not? It makes much more sense to leave the thing out there for people to fool around with. You never know when one streamer with a following might pick up a game and decide they like it. Can’t happen if it doesn’t exist though.
These companies really need to learn the private server model. How is your game ever going to get up enough players to be popular when you’re financially incentivized to bail as soon as possible? Put up some public servers for players to hop on, put out a private server, and let people do their own thing. You can still monetize DLCs or even go the route TF2 went and release paid items and loot crates.
People are still playing TF2 and still spending money in the item shop. They definitely wouldn’t be if Valve had bailed on it entirely the first time they had a slump in their playerbase.
Honestly, I think the bar for games these days is totally warped. People expect these cinematic masterpieces with ultra-realistic graphics in gigantic 3d landscapes with massive autonomy, extensive character creation options, full voice acting, juiced up complex mechanics, and zero bugs, and they want it yesterday. If it costs more than a full tank of gas they’ll say it’s too expensive, and if it isn’t fully patched on day 1 they’ll call it unfinished.
It seems almost obvious that simpler 2D games are a better and more satisfying alternative in this landscape. No wonder AAA studios seem like they’re racing to the bottom.
How are you supposed to get all that and also have a decent story or a sense of cohesion? We need to simplify.
Having played Palworld a bit, some of the monsters are distinct from Pokemon, but some of them are incredibly obvious clones.
But like, looking back at some of the knock-off toys I remember seeing in the 80s and early 90s? It definitely seems like copyright has gotten more robust in its attempted overreach.
This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.
You’d be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don’t really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it’s made with passion and emotion.
Honestly I mostly just know because I have a big stack of old Game Pros and Nintendo Powers from the 90s and I only ever remember seeing Game Informer in Barnes and Noble once those became a thing.