Fun fact, The Suicide Squad (2021) was a box office flop, whereas Suicide Squad (2016), the only academy award winning DCEU film, was a box office smash hit!
While Helldivers 2 and Baldur’s Gate 3 might look like sudden jackpot successes
This article is funny. It’s like the feel-good inverse of a rage-bait article. It’s stating what we all want to be true and cherry-picking two games that only sort of provide evidence towards it, and only if you squint really hard.
Both games are sequels backed by huge publishers with tons of cash.
BG3 is a Dungeons and Dragons franchise title; a franchise which recently received a massively successful film, a huge boost in popularity during a pandemic, and a boost in cultural relevance in Strange Things.
Helldivers 2 fits the claim a bit better, but it is still a sequel to a well received, well selling title. The extraction shooter genre is also exceedingly popular right now, and the fact that it has Games as a Service bullshit built in says that publishers weren’t as hands-off as the article implies.
So the more realistic take-away from this is that good games with huge budgets for development AND marketing in reasonably popular genres can make a ton of money.
Which isn’t saying much. And it certainly doesn’t look like a sudden jackpot.
Very true. Though I would click that bait so hard!
I still prefer this type of article to lots of others in the bait family. Obviously they want people sharing this article and saying “See! That thing I believe is proven!”
Just like the UK variant, this is an official government petition to look into the issue. Unlike the UK variant, the only signature threshold is 50 signatures - that said, more is better in this case....
This petition is worded in such a way that it almost feels like lying.
Most games that shut down aren’t doing so because they had an arbitrary ping home that breaks them, it’s because hosting servers is fundamentally part of the game’s multiplayer-oriented experience.
You’re trying to use the former to backdoor in a way to force the latter to give you all of its server code.
Assuming this law were to go forward with even the most rigorous knowledge of the problem-space, and an intentional push to require multiplayer or server-based games to give you their server code after the game is shut down, all that will do is increase the risk involved in creating any multiplayer games.
Most likely this will reduce the quality and variety of games that get created going forward, which would ironically make preservation much easier.
relase the server software to allow players host them themselves
patch the game to not require company’s server (even if not all features would be functional)
allow people to create their own servers after official ones are dead (think private MMO servers)
Your petition doesn’t allow for the second option (exactly how much functionality is allowed to be missing?), fyi, but let’s ignore it for the moment.
Let’s take a not uncommon case that causes games to shutdown: a company that ran out of money.
How do you do any of these things legally without paying your now jobless employees?
You need to either release the servers at the same time as the game, which has cost associated with it, or you need to hold funds up front to handle paying for the costs on the backend (i.e you need to pay an insurance premium).
So those things are added risks and costs that will have to be factored into deciding which games to fund and which to not.
So it will reduce the number of multiplayer games that get made.
I am a single player gamer so I selfishly am Ok with that, but less Ok with it being handled in a way that could have other unintended consequences.
As an aside, I don’t know how these petitions work, but would it be helpful to give concrete examples of software that has had this happen and what your perceived solution to it could be?
It feels like developing the problem space through examples and situations would be better than trying to think of preferred solutions and working backwards.
It might also be a decent exercise for someone to go through this separately from a consumer protections policy perspective vs a culture preservation perspective, which you mention.
For instance, if the law only applied to corporations that continue to exist past the end of the product, that would be a reasonable consumer protection, but would miss most games that disappear to time from a preservation perspective.
And if preservation is the issue you want to solve, then is this the highest priority in gaming? Maybe this could be solved through a non-profit funding the transitions of server code to the hands of the consumers, or through reverse engineering efforts to rebuild servers for games that have shuttered.
But yeah, it would be nice for this problem to go away, I just hope that attempts at regulating it don’t have bad unintended consequences.
This proposal doesn’t solve any of the issues in your second paragraph, and I wholly agree with you that those should be solved. Those would be much easier to regulate, as truth in advertising is kind of important.
The first paragraph probably feels good to think about, but right now, you don’t have any right to any of that. Perhaps start there if it’s important to you to change things?
I am unimpressed by the nonsense articles like these coming out about early tech.
You won’t convince me that AI can’t exceed “taking an arrow to a knee” quality dialogue repeated over and over, and that shit is still the best immersion we’ve got!
People are expecting this to take people’a jobs so they’re picking apart the tech instead of paying attention.
Making an NPC be run by AI most likely will require more writing than it does now, but the end result will be worth it for games that strive for immersion.
Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
But I would honestly say that the only things I liked about Starfield are the things you’re kind of dismissing. The story and ambiance pieces worked really well, and I ONLY wanted that part.
Every time I had to do anything space travel, combat, space combat, or inventory management, I died inside.
I also felt like the cities and locations were tiny and didn’t feel lived in or real. Basically the immersiveness of the game which thrives on immersion was not handled well so I was left with a terrible shooter.
Microtransactions annoy me, sure. But the season pass, live service, bullshit stuff pisses me off more. It’s just a step towards what I hate about apps on my phone these days. There are so many apps that require a subscription but have no recurring fees or content updates. I’m talking calendar apps, or apps for taking notes, etc.
Ubisoft guy recently implied he wants to take things this direction but it’s not that far off with their games already.
While breathing is cool, I have some hope that it will start correcting this year or next.
The big thing is that the raised interest rates have helped to prevent a real recession. So the real question is when can they come back down. I hope it starts this year even though it’ll likely take years to go back to what they were pre-pandemic, if the go that low again.
Not that there’s anything wrong with other people romanticizing that era but I’ve always found it kind of a lame one. So if this wholly relies on that to get around it’s flaws then it’s more reason for it to be a pass for people like myself.
No offense but maybe you didn’t pay close enough attention, since I got all of that but it relies on what I said for it to be true wholly.
This is my rough summary of what I watched yesterday, as I’m not going to go back and watch it again:
The video starts with him stating that objectively the game, in context of its development is a complete mess.
Then he stated that he found he was enjoying the 20 hours he spent with the game and asked himself why?
Then he stated factually that the game was fun because it is just flat out cool to be a pirate.
He described the things he thought were cool about being a pirate all of which I found to be lame.
Then he used those lame pirate things to justify the argument that in a vacuum the game isn’t bad.
He lost me at “it’s cool to be a pirate” which was the foundation of his argument that the game is OK.
Plus even if I had turned it off, that’s like most of the way into the video. So it’s kind of far to expect a person to watch something to get the “the game is fine, don’t pay much for it” result.
Payday 3 launched for Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S in September 2023 but has seemingly struggled to win over players. The title currently has a ‘mixed’ rating on Steam with over 36,000 user reviews, although the vast majority of recent reviews have been ‘mostly negative.’...
“Ethics in games journalism” was a phrase invented to make gamergate’s sexist attacks on women in gaming sound legitimate and I cringe every time people use the term now. Nobody used the term “games journalism” before then.
This is pedantic, but journalism is a specific thing and it is not generally considered to be what we see in writing about games.
As an oversimplification: Opinion pieces and reviews aren’t journalism. Reporting on facts and information with research and sources is.
While there may have been a few pieces here and there that qualify, the industry around writing about games has never been heavy on facts and research, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s like any other entertainment section writing.
Inventing the phrase “games journalism” was done to try to legitimise a movement that was about sexism. We just didn’t use that term before and nobody was bothered by that, because it doesn’t really apply.
Anita Sarkeesian’s amazing work as an academic theorist is not journalism just because it involves words. Not all writing is journalism. This isn’t a value judgment of her incredible work that I am fully aware of and found very educational.
Maybe take a step back and realize you’re being incredibly rude to a random internet stranger who has a different opinion than you on what constitutes the term “journalism.”
If after you take that break you can come back without hurling insults at me, then we can have a conversation about it?
I don’t see how you got “negging anita” out of me complementing her incredible academic work. I was a huge fan of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, as well as the content she was writing at the time. I am sure she’s done other work that I’m not familiar with, too. I am not claiming to be an expert on her entire body of work, but I definitely have seen and read her academic-oriented work.
It’s not journalism, but one could argue it’s more important because it has a thesis and provides evidence through careful academic arguments and research.
None of what I’ve said has warranted how you’re treating me, so I have to ask, what’s going on? are you OK? Why does my definition of journalism threaten you this much?
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Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
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