I suppose this just means that piracy of the Pizza Emulators themselves is going to pick up, unless there are better GB/GBA emulators for android out currently.
The thing I find most interesting about the Zoe Post is that the response would have been **radically **different had it been a woman making similar allegations against a man. That Quinn herself made much less detailed allegations against another man 5 years later that led to his career imploding the next day and his suicide 4 days later and she’s seen as being in the right for it I think demonstrates that notion pretty well.
Collecting lists related to a disenfranchised group
Didn’t know a consulting company was a disenfranchised group.
4chan lost the right to complain about anything related to D&I in gaming and be treated as anything but subhuman slime after Gamergate.
Amusingly, one of the people Quinn cheated on Gjoni with works for Sweet Baby, just to tie things together. The one that was involved in doxxing and trying to DDoS that crowdfunded game jam project thing that the Vivian James character was created for.
I actually had no idea bout this scandal until yesterday, when it was talked by a streamer while playing Cyberpunk 2077. The guy complained how other games are ruined by SweetBaby. What is golden for me is that he said he loves Cyberpunk 2077, that it’s very fun game, but in the game you have straight, gay, bi, trans NPC characters. You can even be gay, bi, trans yourself.
Notably, Cyberpunk 2077 is not to my knowledge a game Sweet Baby was involved with. So clearly it’s not simply anger at non-straight characters existing in games.
I know more people who are angry that a character in a repeated murder mystery visual novel game isn’t actually trans like they want him to be than I know people who are angry that characters in games are occasionally trans. Or people upset about Kaine from Nier Gestalt/Replicant in general.
I feel like you need to be introduced to mods. There are…a lot. Even if you keep it to just relatively high quality ones that add content (rather than mechanical overhauls or graphical overhauls), there are still a lot.
I’d suggest Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, The Hanging Gardens, The Maelstrom and vicn’s mods (Vigilant, Glenmoril and Unslaad) as a starting point.
Actually, that’s not true, I’d recommend Legacy of the Dragonborn as a starting point, then grab mods that require it and mods that require those until you have all the content mods that can have displays in the museum (which includes all the ones I mentioned before, but is not limited to them).
They literally just need to add a way to “repackage” a game from your library into an inventory item and then they could use the Marketplace they already have
Actual Sunlight. It has one achievement, “Actual Sunlight”, whose description is “Thank you.” It’s awarded at the end of the game. 37.8% of players have the achievement.
It’s a short RPG Maker game about depression that probably resonates a bit too much with a bit too much of it’s base. It’s bleak, and inane, and all the other sorts of ways that life generally sucks, especially for lonely, introverted, geeky 30-somethings. And the ending of the game is
spoilerchoosing suicide.
I wouldn’t be shocked if a good half or more of players can’t bring themselves to drag through it, and some number further just shut the game down and quit when they reach
spoilerthe prompt: “Go to the roof of the building and jump off?” and both options are Yes.
<span style="color:#323232;">Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative
</span>
Apart from existing in a sea of capitalist companies than can ruthlessly outcompete them. Co-operatives don’t stand a chance.
Why not? Why do workers and owners being exactly the same set of people make it impossible to successfully develop games? This is an extra-important question to answer because a lot of these indie dev companies are a dozen or so people in total.
Could it be that the upfront costs, and the delayed nature of turning any profit at all (along with no profit being assured) means that getting paid a fixed amount to do game dev labor regardless of success is a safer option for most developers, rather than actually being a stakeholder?
<span style="color:#323232;">paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
</span>
That would only be feasible in a very small company, with sufficient profits to spread among the workforce.
Most indie game devs ARE very small companies.
<span style="color:#323232;">But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
</span>
Yep, like I just said.
That’s the nature of dealing with a market economy - you make a thing or provide a service, there are costs involved in doing so, and if you earn more in revenue than your costs then you profit. If not, you don’t. Either way in a typical company it’s the owners that benefit or lose as a consequence, as paying employees to do a thing is one of those costs. In a co-op, those employees are the owners, and win or lose accordingly.
<span style="color:#323232;">The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor.
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I’d frame it as: you need money to live. Therefore, you suck it up and let someone exploit you so they can profit from your work, and give you scraps out of that profit.
You don’t have to - you could go into business for yourself. Make a thing and sell that thing, and reap the full profits of your labor. This is an especially possible thing to do in the game development world where some of the largest games ever literally started as someone’s pet project or as soe other project that got trashed and repurposed. The Warcraft franchise (as in WoW) for example, started as an attempt at making a Warhammer RTS that Games Workshop wasn’t interested in. Sierra Online started as a couple making PC games at home. Notch sold Minecraft to Microsoft for 4 billion dollars, and it literally started as a one man project being sold on a cheesy looking website for a few bucks.
<span style="color:#323232;">You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks.
</span>
Those “business risks” only exist as a result of the same system that necessitates wage labour: capitalism. The risks generally have to do failing to increase growth and therefore going under due to lack of owner capital. A democratic economy has no owners, only a collective workforce who will together use their resources to fund the company and pay their own wages - this means there is no need for growth. That huge risk no longer exists.
Yes, yes, once there’s a communist revolution that actually results in “real” communism and thus utopia get back to me. But, umm, we’ve had several attempts at communist revolutions and they never seem to actually turn out that way, largely because of a combination of people being greedy (good luck fixing that) and communist revolutions tending to create the sort of power vacuums that lead to authoritarian takeovers in relatively short order. Although, under that system good luck creating games that don’t glorify the Party, because that is of course the purpose of all art.
Failing to increase growth is not necessarily a problem. Failing to generate revenue in excess of costs is a problem. The need for endless growth is specifically an issue for publicly traded companies, because the charter almost necessarily says the function of the company is to increase shareholder value, and shareholders are going to do whatever they have to do to increase both their dividends and hypothetical sale value of their shares as much as possible, because that is what most benefits them. The incentive model is a bit different for a co-op.
<span style="color:#323232;">If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op
</span>
That’s not even worth thinking about. We live in capitalism. Of course working with a capitalist model would work best - it’s the only way to ensure profits for the owners.
Of course it is worth thinking about.
You’ve got basically two scenarios - one in which a business owner assumes the risks of operating the business and pays workers an agreed upon wage regardless of the revenue that results. In this case the worker gets the same benefit for their labor no matter what, and the owner is attempting to get more value from the worker’s product than he paid for it in wages, supplies, and materials. If he does, he reaps the benefit and if he doesn’t he eats the loss.
In the other scenario, the workers and the owners are the exact same people. Meaning the workers assume the costs of operating the business and the risks that it won’t result in revenue in excess of those costs but also reaps the benefit if it does. Sometimes this occurs as a co-op, but more often as an entrepreneur in which someone starts a small business in the hopes that they can generate revenue in excess of their costs and thus profit.
<span style="color:#323232;">(because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk)
</span>
You’re still assuming an owner. A democratic workplace wouldn’t have an owner - they’d all share responsibility for the business. And pay would be agreed democratically.
I’m assuming a free market instead of a centrally controlled economy. I’m specifically talking about the reason why we trend towards wage labor over entrepreneurs or co-ops, even in fields where the barriers to entry are as low as can be. Most of the workforce is unwilling to accept the financial risk of failing to generate revenue in excess of costs, and so sell their labor at some agreed upon fixed rate that they will receive regardless of month-to-month revenue for better or worse.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative, and paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor. You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks. If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op (because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk), but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.