I wouldn’t say its that bad. Various forms of collectibles/cards have been around for a long time. Asking for gametime for a game like WoW isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
I think it’s just that there are a few specific examples that stand out. Some aspects of Roblox can be pretty concerning.
But if a kid just wants some money for a skin for Fornite, or to buy a specific world setup for Minecraft, I don’t necessarily see that as some scary new thing.
Super Mario Bros 3 is probably the first game that comes to mind as I was finally old enough to really get excited for specific games, and that one was hugely anticipated at the time. The whole game blew my 7 year old mind (think thats the math at least). Up until that point it was mostly grabbing games based on their box art at the rental place, or based on what looked cool in those displays in Toys R Us. And you played those whether they were good or not. That wasn’t the case with SMB3 though.
Super Mario World is probably the next example, for similar reason as above but even bigger and better. Then into the Donkey Kong Country games. Final Fantasy VI was another game that blew me away when I first saw it. That intro was crazy when you still considered the SNES a new platform. Pokemon Blue for the Pocket I got specifically to play it.
Played lots of the original Diablo, though I was terrible at it back then. Actually didn’t like Diablo 2 that much when it was first released, but got into it again years later. Baldur’s Gate 2 was fun for a while, but never beat it (and didn’t play the first until much later). Lords of Magic was a game I played the crap out of but was terrible at the game as well.
If we are just talking about time played then games like Baseball Stars, Excitebike, Track and Field with the Power Pad, etc. You just played the shit out of every game you owned back then. Because you only got them once or twice a year.
I think for that title to accurately reflect the overall complaint it would be something more like “I Don’t Really Understand What This New Movie Release Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It” or to use the lower level comment’s example “You Can Finally Fall for Your Favorite Character In This Dating Sim Based on a Popular Recent Release”.
Where the title is intentionally vague so that you need to read it to even understand what they are talking about. The original titles could be easily summarized as “Opinions on Five Nights At Freddy’s movie” or “Dating Sim based on character from Armored Core 6” just based on the title alone. So if you are aren’t interested in either of those topics, you can easily skip reading.
I keep going back and forth on this game on how much I want it to resemble the original. If it’s too close it might not feel I’m playing a new game, but I also don’t want it to be so different that it loses what I enjoyed so much about the first one.
I think that’s the issue with this “janky” games. There are obvious problems with the game, but it’s very easy to lose the positives when you are attempting to smooth out the rough edges.
Over half a million dollars isn’t “very small” for this type of charity in my opinion.
Not to mention, they seem to admit they’ve known about the issue for a while, but have continued to fund raise and present the charity as if it’s been running along doing good this whole time, but they’ve just been hoarding the money so far.
I don’t see where it’s trying to make it sound controversial. Switching game engines isn’t a “normal” thing developers usually do very often, especially after releasing such high-profile games with an in-house engine.
And with how often you see gamers demand developers “just use a different engine” to solve some specific complaint I think it’s reasonable to remind people why that isn’t usually a good idea.
The only thing the charity has done with the money donated has been to pay for it’s own expenses. The rest has just been sitting in an account somewhere. No grants or anything have been made with the money so far.
It’s tuned for a specific hardware platform right now. Choosing specific hardware platforms for support is just an extensions of that.
However the “PC” platform is basically an amalgamation of any possible hardware combination that currently exists, and is a whole different target for a project like this.