A lot of us just treat this like the Superbowl and watch it just for the ads.
That is crazy to admit. Here we have people trying to do their best to remove ads from their lives; using PiHoles, AdBlockers and VPNs to get rid of as many ads as possible, but they would sit down and willingly watch ads instead of watching world-class athletes battle for supremacy on their grandest stage.
The closest thing we have in Europe is the Football World Cup. I reckon due to the nature of the sport, they play for 45mins each half and fitting in ads during play would be met with fierce backlash and boycotting. It’s insane to me that you’d look forward to ads instead!
I guess it depends on who you are, and if that’s why you’re watching.
CDPR has a disastrous launch but came through for their fans by committing to delivering a solid game that won them the “Best Ongoing Game” award, again, putting them in their fans’ good graces again for the mistakes they made.
Neil Newbon, the voice actor for Astarion in BG3, spoke in the past about how his face wasn’t a Hollywood face. Despite countless auditions, he was always turned down because of the way he looked. His voice acting and motion capture performance (i.e. actual acting!) in BG3 won him the “Best Performance” award, vindicating him from all those people who said he’s not good enough.
Neil is just one of the many stories of what it takes for individuals and studios to get recognised. This was the peak of his career, to finally be seen for what he can do, and not for what he looks like (I’ve no idea what anyone is complaining about with regards to his appearance!).
This isn’t a show where CEOs get jerked off. It’s not a celebration for the 1% at the top who get to smile and pick up an award after laying off hundreds of developers that earned them that trophy.
Developers make the games that are being awarded and shown off as “World Premiers”. They get laid off right after launch as they’re no longer needed once the crunch is over.
Acknowledging this would make the malpractice known to many of the viewers who are watching.
It honestly made my night to see Neil Newbon win the best performance for Baldurs Gate 3. With him talking about how he pretty much gave up on acting and went through some pretty rough times and discrimination before getting into voice acting, it’s amazing to see him finally be seen.
And let’s be clear, he wasn’t just a voice actor in BG3! He had to mocap as well as read his lines. His likeness was captured in Astarion perfectly. He was a full actor here and did an incredible job. Best performance was well deserved.
Honestly though, if they can allow me to play call of duty without the dumb launcher, I’d be happy. The launcher was only one of the many reasons I opted not to buy MW3
Yes yes we all know that big companies are going to do bad things, you aren’t revealing new information here.
You’re finding it extremely hard to understand the concepts of this conversation and still have the gall to be sarcastic and patronising. It’s surprising when you’re clearly misinformed.
We don’t really like this whole “big companies do bad things and we should expect that and not say anything about it” thing. should we just never talk about anything because big companies are big, so do what they want.
No one’s said you can’t talk about it? How are you so confused? I’ll break it down for you since you’re obviously struggling:
Companies sell products. Companies like Sony have a tighter control on their third party hardware. Companies like Microsoft are much more lenient, but it causes cheap knockoffs to flood the market and reduce their brand value and first-party profits. Microsoft will now implement a check to control third party hardware. People on Lemmy get upset. It’s hypocrisy.
You’re either upset with the whole system or none of it. Getting upset the moment Microsoft does it makes no sense. At no point is anyone saying that you can’t talk about it.
I’m not saying that that’s my stance. I’m saying Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world. You’re not going to change their mind by saying “I don’t like it”.
All I’m saying is “this is how businesses work”. If we don’t like it, we need to protest, vote with our wallets.
If you must know, my personal stance is the same as everyone else’s: it sucks that they’re forcing us to pay for first party/verified third party hardware which usually comes with a price rise.
But I thought I’d inform people what Microsoft’s position is in all this. They’re not going to stop taking massive losses just because some people on Lemmy said “that’s not nice”. Reality is that every company wants to make a profit and retain a positive brand image, especially now that Microsoft spent 69 billion dollars on Activision -Blizzard.
Absolutely! Who wouldn’t want to look at it purely from a consumer’s point of view?
It’s easy to just look at it from the consumer’s POV but the best plan is to check Microsoft when it’s actually being scummy, and not when it’s trying to just keep in line with every other company.
Sony issued takedowns of companies trying to sell PS5 faceplates, because they wanted to sell theirs at a premium. Apple is insanely notorious for proprietary hardware, to the point where the latest iPhone 15 even has its back glass fitted with a ribbon wire, so your iPhone won’t even start unless you’re using an iPhone certified back glass and it’s fitted by an iPhone tech that can enable the flag that lets your back glass work.
In a world like that, it makes no sense for Microsoft to put up with cheap knockoffs of its products especially if those products suck and are ruining its brand image.
Capitalism sucks but it is what it is. What we should do as consumers is vote with our money and not buy any accessories like this until these companies allow more third party developers to sell their parts. It just doesn’t work that way though. People keep buying this stuff no matter how high the prices go
I mean I get it, it sucks for third party developers to pay a fee to develop for Xbox
But if you look at the quality of third party hardware available on PlayStation, Apple etc, it’s usually at a much higher quality and that gives people a perception that the hardware is better overall, even though Xbox series X and the PS5 are direct competitors.
If Xbox controllers cost $70 and crappy Chinese knockoffs are retailing for $20 and have no quality control, have cheat-y turbo buttons and break easily, they’re losing money that would have done to official controllers and also losing their brand image.
They’re not outright saying that third party devices are no longer allowed, but it does seem they want to manage the quality a little more
I don’t think it’s as black and white as that. Not to say that Microsoft isn’t dubious at times, but it seems they’re trying to weed out dodgy devices here.
Give companies free reign to create third party devices and they’ll create things that can be considered borderline cheat-y, or create things that are so bad that they affect people’s experience of Xbox consoles.
All this error code seems to be doing is requiring third party hardware to go through proper checks to verify hardware.
I’m referring to the spoilers for the changes incoming in update 2.0.
Not everyone likes to read what’s changed and want to experience it first hand. MAXTAC was not in the base game and is a huge part of the consequences of your actions on the street.
I’ve tried to keep my spoilers to a minimum, but from what I’ve read, MAXTAC has their own siren. At 5* wanted level, when you hear their siren, a little bit of poo will come out.
Police are apparently relentless too - at all wanted levels. Oh, and straying into a gang’s territory with police on your tail can lead to interesting results lol.
I seriously can’t wait! I love netrunning, now I can be the netrunning demon everyone fears!
Unfortunately with games like Starfield inbound, keeping player retention means patching things the players aren’t happy with. They may be crunched but I hope they’re being compensated well for it and get a long break after