We’d be in the same place. It’s not any better or worse for a private versus a public entity to do harm.
Also, the government is already part of this. If the DOJ told Visa, “hey, stop fucking around with that, you don’t need to be trying to control legal agreements between parties, that’s our purview” (or if they even thought the DOJ might), they’d drop this behavior in an instant. They are doing this in large part because they believe it is in line with the government’s ideology. Preemptive compliance.
Every company is headquartered somewhere, or has some market that it cannot afford to withdraw from, and that makes them all ultimately subject to said governments. No business decision is made free from pressure when it comes to governments.
Again, the issue is this is an American company setting American content policy internationally.
That is not the issue. That may be the subset of the issue that you have a problem with, but the actual issue is a payment provider setting purchase restrictions period. That it is happening in the US is not uniquely bad; it would be equally bad happening anywhere else.
Interpreting the international impact to be “the issue” would mean that if this were only affecting Americans, this would be fine, which is absolutely not the case.
Storefronts and brands can set up local branches and sell through those using the local digital payment provider without getting in trouble with their headquarter’d country.
To set up and sell in that country, they then have to comply with the local payment providers. Which shouldn’t be deciding whether people can purchase something, just as Visa shouldn’t be.
Is this a criticism of the quote, or a response to it?
Once again, you’re not actually just stating your issue, and your responses are ambiguous enough that they could be interpreted either as an objection to people treating Hunter Schafer in a way that you perceive as negative, or an objection to Hunter Schafer.
I didn’t check Kinetic, but Larian’s is good. This is the full termination section of the EULA:
TERMINATION
This Pact shall remain in effect for as long as you use, operate or run the Game.
You may terminate the Pact at any time and for any reason by notifying Larian Studios that you intend to terminate the agreement. Upon termination all licenses granted to you in this Pact shall immediately terminate and you must immediately and permanently remove the Game from your device and destroy all copies of the Game in your possession.
You understand and agree that certain Services connected to the Game, and the support and access to such Services are provided by Larian Studios at its discretion and may be terminated or otherwise discontinued by Larian Studios at any time, for any reason or no reason, in its sole and absolute discretion.
The first block is termination by the user, and specifies removal of the game if the user chooses to terminate the agreement.
The second block is termination by Larian, and only covers “certain Services”… “provided by Larian Studios” (so likely multiplayer matchmaking), not termination of the full agreement, and no game removal.
The places in the EULA where Larian lays out their prerogative to terminate your license to the game is based on behavior (i.e. banning you).
Yes, but by definition all of them are also playing the game, and given that this is mostly a novelty feature (and also based on how shockingly little use the user-facing chatbots I’ve seen in professional settings are utilized), I personally doubt that the chatbot energy usage will top the game’s.
My guess is there will be 90% of people who use the feature once or twice before ignoring it forever, 9% who will use it occasionally for e.g. video creation purposes, and 1% or less who will actually sit there and use it a bunch just to talk to. That would about match up with ChatGPT’s general usage trends.
Every time I see someone say that most people haven’t swung a sword/ shot a gun/ been in a fight/ been in an accident, etc, I always wonder if I’m the one in the bubble or if they are.
I’m a huge open world and/or sandbox nut. Non-linearity is my jam. Kenshi, Rimworld, AssOdyssey/Shadows, Project Zomboid, Witcher 3, X4…
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good story, but story takes many shapes, and not all stories are pre-written; plenty are emergent. I grew up playing with Legos (and still do), and me making whatever story I wanted (or that emerged along the way) was part of the appeal.
Honestly, apart from FF8 and TW3, and now Expedition 33, I haven’t found many games with written stories that grabbed me. I read books when I want that fulfillingly-crafted linearity.
I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it’s always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you’re wrong when you’re predicting something will fail....
R* sucks. Their asshole-simulator games-turned-live-service-cashgrabs have never represented anything but the worst of the games industry. GTA6 getting canceled would be an excellent opportunity for millions of people who would’ve bought it to spend their time playing something better.
I don’t think they’ll do that for already-released games, but I wouldn’t put the big 3 (Sony, MS, Nintendon’t) from doing the barest ‘remasters’, and replacing their digital versions of those games with the ‘remasters’.
Yes and no. Most of the cost-reductions in hardware manufacturing lifecycles come from minimizing materials loss and optimizing design efficiency. The components don’t actually just get cheaper to produce over time on their own, from a material perspective. That means that material shortages are much more likely to have a big impact on cost (up or down) than new manufacturing technology, for the same chip.
This is the incident that made me cancel my WoW sub, and close my Battle.net account. Never again trusting them, even under Microsoft (or rather, especially now under MS).
I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great.
Oh man, 2011… I’m a millennial, and even I was already out of college in 2011. My ‘kid’ games were $80 USD in the 90s. Here’s an articlefrom 2014 that someone made about how insane N64 game prices were.
Star Fox 64 – $79.95 (Source: GamePro #106) - 1997
Big question: Why have alienated young men, especially in America, found their home in the populist political right? Part of the answer is that the populist right takes video games seriously....
I think you’re misunderstanding what “taking games seriously” means in this instance.
The Right takes the political power of games seriously. They understand that games can be tactically used as an access route to young men, to influence their politics. They know that it is just another medium like TV or movies or books, and don’t eschew interacting with them for political purposes like Democrats traditionally have.
That’s why it was such a big deal when AOC played Among Us (and later, her and Walz streaming various games). It was a politician on the Left actually ‘deigning’ to interact with young people in a platform that they inhabit, and not belittling it.
The closest equivalent person we have on the Left to people like JonTron or other YTers who mix Right-wing talking points with games to draw young men into their pipeline, is Hasan, and Democrats treat him like he’s practically Ted Kaczynski in waiting.
It’s so frustrating to see so many comments doing exactly what the post is pointing out, either deriding games as a medium, or “gamers” as some monolithic group of disaffected young men.
Games are a medium, same as books, movies, or tv. They can convey any message, and yes, many games do have Progressive (or even Leftist, see Disco Elysium) themes. But unlike TV, books, and movies, where there is a constant stream of political interaction from both Left and Right wings’ political apparatuses, there aren’t really a lot of Leftist political entities attempting to reach young men via videogames.
Name one Left-wing gaming influencer apart from Hasanbi (who it should be pointed out, many Democrats tend to hate on). I can list off at least 3 different right-wing ones off the top of my head (JonTron, Asmongold, Dr Disrespect), and I don’t inhabit those spaces, so I’m only going off the biggest names. And that’s not even beginning to get into the gaming-adjacent Rightwing influencers who those gaming influencers direct their fans to.
It’s a pipeline, and we don’t have one on the Left.
I remember the first time AOC played Among Us, and it was a huge deal for us on the Left, because it was possibly the very first time we’d seen a Democratic politician actually engage with games publicly.
Gaming is literally the largest entertainment medium now by a large margin (yes, larger than movies and tv), but we don’t see politicians putting out lists of games to play like they do books or movies. Instead, most times we see an article about a Democratic politician somewhere like Kotaku, it’s often because they’re trying to blame video games for something.
So instead we have largely ceded the gaming sphere (not the games themselves, but the areas of discussion around gaming) to the Right. They pull in disaffected young men, tell them women and ‘wokies’ are the reason for their problems, and then hand them off to overtly political folks who transform that general disaffection into right-wing political capital.
they saw “woke” as a reason for why games or movies turned out bad
This only became a thing after the pipeline was established. This rhetoric is what the pipeline feeds them.
I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc. Gamergate in 2015 largely caught the notice of the Right’s political apparatus, and they saw the opportunity to convert the casual misogyny and racism into feeders for their political machine. “Woke” didn’t really become a right-wing attack in the gaming and movie spheres until pretty recently.
I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.
Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.
Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.
Early Alt-right pipeline (2015-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.
Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.
Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground
You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).
It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.
No, that was never what wokeness was (and none of those companies ever called themselves that), it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.
Leftists are shit at messaging. Like, really really shit at messaging.
Leftists have great messaging. If you think messaging is a Leftist problem, I think you’ve confused Liberal, Progressive, and Leftist.
So, it’s not successful, but it could be. So they were in fact correct that it’s not successful.
I use fdroid, so I know exactly how badly administered it is compared to Play. There are apps that haven’t gotten updated in months or years, despite the app on Play or Github being much newer. There are typo-squatting apps, and apps uploaded by people who do not own or manage those programs. It’s a wild west experience, and the average android phone user isn’t going to know enough to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Valve would be better off doing their own android offshoot OS.
I recently got a job after finishing university, all is good. However, after 5 full days of being behind desk job, I feel a bit exhausted of being behind desk....
I don’t burn out on screens. I can enjoy a game for 4 hours to unwind from 6 hours of work.
If you’re just starting out working, I wager to say you’re still… unoptimized. Putting in a lot more effort than necessary. New jobs are always stressful. Working for the first time even worse. Give it 10 years of working, and you’ll (hopefully) find your groove where you don’t let work drain your entire battery, and you still have energy left for relaxation.
How did this all happen? After first touching base with our team and ensuring our interest, the team at Gunzilla Games secured the rights to Game Informer. From the start, the new owners insisted on the idea of Game Informer remaining an independent editorial outlet; they felt just as strongly as our team did that the only path...
It was the game news source in print media, for many years. It often used to come with demos on a CD in the back of the magazine, so it was also the best way to try games for yourself.
I don’t think they’ll ever get back there, if only because honestly having a magazine to read was better than a website, imo, but I’m always tentatively hopeful to have another reputable news source in the gaming space.
I was going to mention GameStop (I think most of us got it for ‘free’ with our GameStop trade-in subscription thing), but I couldn’t remember if it was always owned by them, or if they just bought it after it was big.
so if Mewt made up Ivalice does that mean that Ramza’s whole story… is a footnote in history for a world that only existed as background for a bunch of kids who can barely play snowballs??? those kids made up Cúchulainn the Tainted King because nobody splained about death properly to Mewt who is like 9??? I can’t BELIEVE...
Been playing Avowed, and enjoying it a lot. It’s a really good AA rpg in the POE universe, and the worldspace is probably the prettiest I’ve seen in the past couple years. I think the last time a game really 'wow’ed me with visuals, to the point that sometimes I just stopped to appreciate the view, was TW3.
Also played some Avorion, which scraches my Eve Online itch without having to actually play that, and Mabinogi (Frieren crossover event), which was the first game my partner and I played together 15 years ago. It’s gotten so many QoL updates in that time that there’s almost no ‘grind’ anymore, and it’s so much more laid back than other MMOs, and has so much content.
I lean towards ‘no’ because I do not see moves on their part to actively attack other distributors, but I admit I have not done research on this subject.
Based purely on having used many other distribution platforms, I think they (Valve) just legitimately have the best service currently. Everyone else either kinda sucking (GOG, as much as I love them), or really sucking (EGS, Origin, UPlay, etc), and losing to you in the market, doesn’t make you a monopoly.
M$ did hella shady, monopolistic stuff (patent theft, market manipulation, very likely corporate espionage, and certainly most visibly prefferential treatment of their own software ecosystem and sabotage of third party software on their platforms) to create and enforce market dominance. Unless Valve has been doing something I’m unaware of to kill other platforms, they’re not really similar situations.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically
I’m interested in which of their games that have loot crates you think are targeted specifically at children? Basically all of their games, but especially their games with loot crates, tend to be targeted towards adults. Hell, TF2 came out in 2007, which is 18 years ago, so no one who is a child today was even alive when it came out. It’s mostly elder to mid-Millennials. You can dislike loot boxes (I do), but don’t try to paint Valve like they’re Roblox or Epic Games.
everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed.
Other platforms were around before Steam was fully dominant, but they tended to be focused on the creators’ first-party games, and excluded other publishers and titles from using their platform. Desura and Central/Impulse both had decently large user bases. Stardock Central actually preceded Steam’s release, but was overtaken because Stardock was mostly just using it for its own games, but also billing the service more as a way to unify your physical and digital libraries, and to provide patches and whatnot, whereas Steam went all-in on digital-only.
because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years
Yes, but this is sadly just the natural reality of digital sales. Because you are buying a license, it’s not trivial from a company’s perspective to make those portable, and the company you’re moving the license to is then having to host your content without ever actually receiving the money for it, which isn’t super appealing. GOG actually tried this for a while(GOG Connect), where you could essentially redeem your Steam games to your GOG account, but they realized it wasn’t worth it (especially since there isn’t game parity on the 2, so most people have to keep Steam anyways).
You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.
I must have missed where I said Valve would never do something bad? But yes, I don’t believe in condemning someone for what they might do in the future, preemptively. If and when Valve goes darkside (probably when Gabe dies, and it ends up under new management), they should be condemned. Acting as though they’re bad just because they’re dominant in the market is silly, though; they didn’t get there through anti-competitive business practices, they got there through others failing to do better.
There’s a difference between having a monopoly and abusing it
Sure, but whether Valve fits the definition is debatable. Being highly dominant does not automatically make something a monopoly. At best you could call it an imperfect monopoly/ imperfect competition, because substitutes absolutely do exist, but they’re not mostly close enough to be truly competitive. It’s also important to factor in that 4/5 of the largest games on PC are not even on Steam at all: Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and League of Legends. PUBG is the only one of the top-5 that’s on Steam.
You added “only” in there. You can compile a game for each OS natively (and many games do). Native in this context refers to the binary itself (ELF, EXE, bin, etc), and the OSes that can run it without using some kind of compatibility layer.
This guy makes several key mistakes, and doesn’t understand the relationship between (or difference between, for that matter) developers and publishers / executives. He pivots in one sentence from talking about number of layoffs to talking about failed games, but those are not direct corollaries. Big publishers and large studios laid off teams with games that performed incredibly well. Lots of teams that were mid-development were killed. Remember Tango Gameworks? The studio that everyone liked, and didn’t have any flops? That was completely laid off? It had nothing to do with their games, and was entirely about Xbox forcing its 1P studios to release on Game Pass, which doomed their sales. It was bad executive management at MS, not bad games, choosing to buy Bethesda and Activision at the expense of budgets for its existing studios. Obviously Redfall and Concord were huge flops, but they were a tiny fraction of the layoffs across the industry.
He correctly points out that Gaming is a subset of the software industry, and that the trends and decisions being made by executives across the industry are the same, but just sort of hand-waves that away by saying it’s not just gaming, and that “people are facing economic challenges right now” in general. Yeah! And guess that those challenges are? Short-term P&L gains via mass layoffs, in order to claw back money from acquisitions, stock buybacks, and executive pay-gouging. But it’s not developers doing that, it’s publishers and executives. No one writing code is like, “I’ve decided to make live-service schlock”. But they’re the ones losing their jobs, not the dorks who did decide that.
“What is unique in gaming, is that this is largely self-inflicted.” (6:40) My brother in Christ… stahhhhhp.
He then turns this into some kind of attack on game journalists, who have been rightfully calling out the game industry layoffs, as though they’re… supposed to only report on things happening uniquely in gaming, and not also in other industries, even if it’s also happening in gaming? The narrative that “if a studio is laid off, it was their fault, or just the economy forcing them to be laid off”, is the false narrative of the publishers, and this guy is (whether he realizes it or not) helping bolster that narrative.
Lastly, this dude is dropping right-wing dogwhistles left-and-right. Listing “ideological soapboxes” alongside “bloated projects” and “garbage games” for failing games tells me everything I need to know. And if you check the comments, his fans definitely heard the whistle too.
Here’s his brilliant take on thousands of line-level developers being laid off for decisions made above their heads by millionaires:
“As a customer I’m going to be honest, I just don’t care or feel anything for any of these internal struggles that these companies go through.” (7:10 in the video)
Big “stop picketing and deliver my Amazon package I paid money for” energy right here.
I didn’t really want to have to watch any more of this dude, but I wanted to make sure I gave him a fair shake… and hoo boy.
Just look at it for what it is, and realize it’s going to fail. And then plan accordingly.
This is just victim blaming, bruh. Even if a developer sees a project is going badly, it’s not like there are infinite jobs out there that need filling. Changing jobs is not fast and easy, some of the workers are likely on work visas that don’t allow them to just change employers, game companies aren’t all in the same small area such that it won’t require moving homes which is a huge expense, and there’s no guarantee that the project you’re moving to will be any better.
This is a failure of worker protection laws. Framing it as workers just needing to hustle smarter, while executives run companies and families into the ground, is peak corporate apologism.
He’s literally reading off one of this articles, that goes off on a tangent that a few people on Twitter said something about games being “too woke” and tries to counter that.
If you don’t think that alt-right-lite is a huge problem in gaming circles, I don’t know what to tell you. Go play literally any multiplayer game and you will find plenty of gamers spouting anti-DEI/ anti-woke/ right-wing talking points in no time flat. And yes, they absolutely do avoid games based on it. And the problem with just ignoring this is that you’re ceding the narrative to them. Young white men have seen a shift rightwards precisely because alt-right-lite chuds like JonTron capture them via gaming-focused content, and then shift them over to politics-focused guys like Tate/ Shapiro/ etc. It’s a pipeline, that often starts in gaming spaces.
Ideological soapboxes are very real things that games “journalists” push on a daily basis.
He wasn’t talking about ideological soapboxes in reference to journalists, he was talking about developers. And he is using that as a direct euphemism for “DEI”/ “woke” content.
And yes, the comments are agreeing with him, that’s the point of a dogwhistle. There are a bunch of comments being anti-diversity/ anti-woke, referencing another video of his about game companies hiring people who supposedly despise gamers.
Here is a video of his called “The Real Impact of DEI in Gaming”. He uses rainbow/pink/diversity-washing being bad to then ultimately conclude that DEI is a net negative that he (no joke) BLAMES ON OVERREGULATION by the government. He then goes on to suggest that DEI actually is about dividing people in order to (also not a joke) feed a DEI-consulting industry.
“They’re hiring in people that don’t have the merit, that don’t have the skill” (8:40) Classic. He then goes onto blame “DEI hire” developers for games being buggy or releasing too early, as though that is their choice (once again, he clearly doesn’t understand what developers do or do not control).
It’s frustrating seeing these chuds get wiser about the number of levels they couch their ultimate anti-diversity rhetoric in, because clearly it’s working on some people. Instead of saying, “diversity in gaming companies bad”, he says, “regulations force execs to hire diverse devs who lack merit (which is bigoted bs on its own), who then over time lower the quality of games, ** and also** evil DEI consultants intentionally push devs to make diverse games without being sincere about the portrayals and stories… so in the end we should stop pushing devs to be diverse and make diverse games, and just let each group of people make games for themselves (which is back to square one where big companies just hire white guys).”
He’s literally just taking all the Republican anti-DEI rhetoric and applying to to gaming.
Grim Dawn is a diablo-like ARPG, kickstarted in 2012 as the debut title from Crate Entertainment, an indie studio made up of devs from Iron Lore (who made the Titan Quest games). The devs describe it thus:...
Most executives at large publishers aren’t gamers. Pretty pictures are more likely to entice them than deep mechanics. They could assign 5 people to make a game like Balatro or Stardew Valley, but they never would because they don’t work like that, they came up through the MBA route and think in terms of enterprise software development lifecycles. Also, “making money” isn’t good enough for them, they want to make so much money that they can pay themselves millions of dollars despite never actually contributing to the game.
Many years ago me and an old friend co-op’ed Ghost Recon Wildlands, hands down a great game minus the third person perspective, soon after we moved on to Far Cry 5, it felt familiar, like GRWL but published, less outrageous pop in anyway since feeling burned by Stalker 2 I’ve put a couple of hours back into Far Cry 5 and...
Ubisoft has never been a mod-friendly publisher, and none of their titles support modding to any extent that I’m aware of. The mods that exist for it are pretty limited in nature (i.e. they modify existing values and textures, and don’t really expand the game afaik). I like FarCry 2, 3, 5, New Dawn, and 6, but the series has definitely written itself into a corner. Removing the guns makes it not work (e.g. Primal), but they’ve literally ended their timeline with 5 and New Dawn, and 6 just makes it feel like they don’t know where to go and are doing offshoots. 6 felt more like Just Cause than Far Cry, to me.
Just to gauge what lemmys saying. I’ve had my head buried in Stalker 2 forum thread for the past week. Its polarising with one side saying “its a blast” the other “its a fucking dumpster fire”....
Games are art, and art is valuable for how it enriches.
Not all art is good art, and there are plenty of games that no one is trying to preserve.
Capitalism is currently also killing off lots of non-video game art that it can’t profit off of. Tons of old shows, movies, books, and music are out of print, and being held and often lost by the IP holders.
If we allow art to become solely a vehicle for generating profit, we are going to lose out on so much beauty, talent, culture, and history.
This (sandbox games that are all about “pure” gameplay, where the narrative is made by the pseudo-random events) is my bag!
In no particular order except for #1, these are my top-10:
KenshiPost-apocalyptic alien planet sandbox that can be a colony simulator, a faction-combat game, an exploration and boss-fighting game, and so much more. This is by far and away my TOP recommendation.
RimworldDwarf Fortress-like colony simulator set on proc-gen alien planets. Supremely mod-able.
StarsectorSandbox space game with a bit of everything. You can play it in so many ways, and there are so many encounters and missions and things to do. Tons of mods.
Mount and Blade: WarbandA medieval-combat “simulator” where you lead a… Warband of soldiers around a faux medieval world. First-person combat with a lot of great complexity. Supports mods.
Derail ValleyA train-driving simulator, where you just take contracts to haul stuff between towns/stations/etc. Multiple engines to drive, and a lot of cool physics to contend with.
Project ZomboidZombie apocalypse survival simulator, with multiplayer. Lots of mods.
SporeA sandbox classic, where you usher a species as it evolves from protozoa to being an interstellar species.
The Sims 3Playing house for adults (and kids). Build a house, decorate it, get a good job, have kids and pets. The unattainable Millennial fantasy.
StarboundUniverse exploration sandbox, with a bunch of humanoid aliens you have to ally with to defeat a big monster thing. Moddable.
X4: FoundationsEconomic simulation sandbox set in space. Build stations, ships, influence wars between empires using economic sway… Very very slow, but fulfilling.
In the letter, Democrat senator Mark Warner argues that Valve’s content moderation doesn’t meet industry standards, and says he wants Valve to “crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content”....
I think you are looking for a unified solution to deal with very different and very nuanced problems.
The swastika was chosen by Hitler as a means to legitimize his movement. It’s important to remember that the average 1920s German had little formal schooling in world history. Even compared to our shitty and revisionist US curriculum, they had next to nothing. He could co-opt it and people were legitimately like, “wow, that’s crazy, I absolutely have never heard of Buddhism or Hinduism or anything. Maybe we really did used to rule all of them”. The Nazi swastika was at no point a dogwhistle, it’s a very explicit and bold statement of their false identity. It was an assertion of power and authority. If you cede the symbol to them, you are intrinsically acknowledging them as the “legitimate” owners of that symbol, which they are not. You can very easily distinguish between a swastika that is being flown as a white supremacist symbol, and one that is not. No Nazis are building Buddhist temples or weaving faux-Native American textiles just so they can have a “plausibly deniable” swastika, nor using pictures of those items to masquerade as non-Nazis with a nudge and a wink (because that would hurt their ‘pride’). They just use Nazi imagery directly.
To attack this, you need to very actively de-legitimize its improper usage, and boost its proper usage. The message cannot be “yes, this thousands of years old symbol really is about the Nazis”, because that is the stance of the Nazis themselves. It has to be, “fuck off Nazis, that’s not your’s, and we’re going to actively weed out your bullshit”.
On the other side are symbols like Pepe, where the purpose was never about legitimizing their ideology, but in fact to hide it and dogwhistle. The creator of Pepe is attempting valiantly to do exactly what I said above, but I think that while getting Nazis to stop using it (and everything else, air included) is great, there is no wider history or adoption that makes Pepe worth using elsewhere. It was just a cartoon frog. In this case, drawing a direct line between people who choose to represent themselves with Pepe, and with the shitty ideologies they’re using it to dogwhistle about, is actually the best counter to them, because a dogwhistle isn’t a dogwhistle if the relationship is explicit and universally understood.
Banning Pepe outright in Steam profiles makes complete sense to me, because it sends the message that “we know what you’re using this to mean, and you’re not fooling anyone, dumbass”.
Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).
Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy. angielski
https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/3d4d3bb4-67c7-40fd-9458-238f50f665f2.jpeg...
Nintendo’s Zelda movie has found its princess and hero of time [Bo Bragason and Benjamin Evan] (www.theverge.com) angielski
No, Ubisoft's EULA clause ordering you to destroy your games isn't new, nor is it unique (www.thegamer.com) angielski
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Lies of P is getting difficulty options to make the Soulslike more accessible [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
PS5’s three best-selling digital games in April 2025 were all Microsoft titles [VGC] (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Open World Games: yay or nay? angielski
As I get older, I notice that the open world formula is tiring! I much prefer a linear game told well than the same game with add-ons....
GTA 6's delay doesn't mean the games industry's in trouble - it's already dead (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
I saw someone, somewhere, saying something like this recently: it’s always easier to play the role of doomsayer than the optimist, because far fewer people seem to care if you’re wrong when you’re predicting something will fail....
Microsoft Raises the Price of All Xbox Series Consoles, Xbox Games Confirmed to Hit $80 This Holiday - IGN (www.ign.com)
After Years of Struggle, Blizzard Has Found Itself in Uncharted Territory: Overwatch Players Are Having Fun Again (www.ign.com) angielski
The games industry is screwed. [26:11] (youtu.be) angielski
I spent well over a month talking to investors to get the actual data behind what’s happening to the games industry. I was going to say “enjoy!” but it’s, uh, not great.
From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right (www.videogamesindustrymemo.com) angielski
Big question: Why have alienated young men, especially in America, found their home in the populist political right? Part of the answer is that the populist right takes video games seriously....
Why doesn't Steam support Android? angielski
Steam revenue estimated 2024: $10.8B...
Adult gamers of Lemmy how do you find time to game without being exhausted of the screen?
I recently got a job after finishing university, all is good. However, after 5 full days of being behind desk job, I feel a bit exhausted of being behind desk....
Game Informer Is Back (www.gameinformer.com) angielski
How did this all happen? After first touching base with our team and ensuring our interest, the team at Gunzilla Games secured the rights to Game Informer. From the start, the new owners insisted on the idea of Game Informer remaining an independent editorial outlet; they felt just as strongly as our team did that the only path...
still can't believe Mewt made the whole thing up (beehaw.org) angielski
so if Mewt made up Ivalice does that mean that Ramza’s whole story… is a footnote in history for a world that only existed as background for a bunch of kids who can barely play snowballs??? those kids made up Cúchulainn the Tainted King because nobody splained about death properly to Mewt who is like 9??? I can’t BELIEVE...
Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of Feb 16th
Whatcha all been playing?...
Avowed Review Thread
Game Information...
Why Steam can be considered a monopolistic platform? angielski
^^^
Why there are few native Linux games compared to Windows or even Mac? angielski
Does the existence of Wine compatibility layer discourages the creation of native Linux games?
The Extreme Disconnect between Game Journalists, Developers, and their Audience (www.youtube.com) angielski
Grim Dawn, one of the best ARPGs, is on sale right now ($2.50) (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Grim Dawn is a diablo-like ARPG, kickstarted in 2012 as the debut title from Crate Entertainment, an indie studio made up of devs from Iron Lore (who made the Titan Quest games). The devs describe it thus:...
Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good: The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market? (www.nytimes.com) angielski
archive.is link...
favourite gameboy family games?
Looking for more games. Only requirements are following:...
Far cry 5, where are the mods?
Many years ago me and an old friend co-op’ed Ghost Recon Wildlands, hands down a great game minus the third person perspective, soon after we moved on to Far Cry 5, it felt familiar, like GRWL but published, less outrageous pop in anyway since feeling burned by Stalker 2 I’ve put a couple of hours back into Far Cry 5 and...
anyone know any good android games?
Fools quest I know but I’m wondering if there are any good, native games that I can play on my android handheld...
What do we think will be GoTY and which game do we think should be GoTY?
Just to gauge what lemmys saying. I’ve had my head buried in Stalker 2 forum thread for the past week. Its polarising with one side saying “its a blast” the other “its a fucking dumpster fire”....
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Why video game preservation is important? (fedia.io) angielski
^^^^
What's your favourite it's all in the gameplay game? angielski
Valve must address swastikas and other hate on Steam, writes US senator in a letter to Gabe Newell (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
In the letter, Democrat senator Mark Warner argues that Valve’s content moderation doesn’t meet industry standards, and says he wants Valve to “crack down on the rampant proliferation of hate-based content”....