They should just collectively say no. My company tried to bring everyone back to the office two years ago and people just didn’t show up. They’re not going to fire everyone. Now we have 100% remote as an official option for those who want it.
The smaller the company the easier this is to organize but sometimes that’s not even necessary. No one told us to do that but enough of us decided to on our own that it might as well have been organized. We’re talking thousands of employees here. That collective response instilled more company pride in me than any corporate initiative ever has.
It makes sense. I respect the hell out of the guy for being honest and true of his morals and standing by his community, but I'm sure he knew what he could get into by doing that, and he took the shot anyway. I hope he's just been shuffled around elsewhere and still has a job.
Triple AAA games are usually very polished. But polish doesn’t make games fun. Polish is important with accessibility, and it’s easy to see why accessibility is important for a big studio casting a wide net.
But fun? That comes from creativity and innovation. Big studios are averse to risk taking, and struggle to attract creative individuals, because the corporate culture seeks to stamp out individuality in the name of process and procedure.
So yeah, more evidence of this. My money is going to Indy devs who prioritize fun over polish. (But polish is good to have too).
Agreed. I think it’s why TV exploded so much and led to things like Netflix making 1 billion shows a year. Breaking Bad showed people you can get away with deep stories with engaging character development on the home screens imo. Or that’s when I saw the change or awakened to the tide.
Edit. I think we are also seeing it become exactly what it left the movie industry for though. Wonder what our next medium will be they exploit to death with mundane entertainment.
When PUBG was just coming out, it was absolute jank city and I LOVED IT. I was driving a motorcycle and my partner was in the sidecar, and we were suddenly jettisoned into space, apropos of nothing… flat ground.
We laughed but it was also a bit sad, as only about eight other people were left.
We fall down from space and land… and we don’t explode. We don’t even bounce. The motorcycle is on fire. We have taken no damage. We get off the motorcycle and walk away, laughing our butts off.
I believe both are pretty important, at least to me. I highly value accessibility as someone with various disabilities and particularities and limited concentration, a game that is accessible to me is easy to start playing and for any amount of time so I can stop and afk as needed. It also means difficulty and quality of life options and features so I can choose how I want to play and play efficiently at my own pace. However if the gameplay/fun factor isn’t there I’m not going to enjoy it regardless. So both are very important in my experience.
Yeah, I think also worth remembering that people love games that serious gamers consider beneath them. I love indy games but I also understand why AAA games are fun, simple handholding game play is great sometimes.
Tommy:
Let’s think about this for a sec, Ted, why do they put a guarantee on a box? Hmm, very interesting.
Ted:
I’m listening.
Tommy:
Here’s how I see it. A guy puts a guarantee on the box 'cause he wants you to fell all warm and toasty inside.
Ted:
Yeah, makes a man feel good.
Tommy:
'Course it does. Ya think if you leave that box under your pillow at night, the Guarantee Fairy might come by and leave a quarter.
Ted:
What’s your point?
Tommy:
The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn’t a crazy glue sniffer? “Building model airplanes” says the little fairy, but we’re not buying it. Next thing you know, there’s money missing off the dresser and your daughter’s knocked up, I seen it a hundred times.
Ted:
But why do they put a guarantee on the box then?
Tommy:
Because they know all they solda ya was a guaranteed piece of sh*t. That’s all it is. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time. But for right now, for your sake, for your daughter’s sake, ya might wanna think about buying a quality item from me.
I remember being so psyched about the original Serious Sam that I pirated a copy to play right away, and then bought a boxed copy as soon as I saw it in Best Buy.
Love me Serious Sam. Really wish Croteam wouldn’t try to be a AAA studio. SS4 only real issue was it was an optimized mess. Great game mechanics, great levels, great music, great writing and VA work, but uglier and more stuttery then their previous games. They switched to using Unreal Engine for Talos 2, so I’m guessing they prioritized on just making the game rather then trying to make their own game engine, which had previously been a point of pride for them. Really looking for to their future games. Expecting a Talos 2 expansion before a new Sam game, but looking forward regardless.
I guess a zombie game where you play the 24 hours before patient zero gets sick, like an evil medicine lab simulator who got a 24 hour deadline to produce the first viable zombie or get shut down by the evil investors
Free games were a great way to “get us there” but not a great way to monetize us. They haven’t come up with that. I’ve bought exactly 3 games on Epic, two that I price-camped because they were too expensive. The free games didn’t influence my decision.
The third was a free game where they had the best price around on a “more complete edition”. (Pathfinder Kingmaker). I feel like they could’ve done more of that if they wanted to monetize the free.
But what all these game stores need is to change the rules. GoG tried by making their Galaxy app pretty good at importing others’ apps. I feel like someone (Epic? lol) could go all-in supporting and helping maintain an open-source game management app like Playnite, so people who use that app would put Epic on the same tier as Steam, and then Epic would just have to win on an even playing field.
And if Epic provided a “find your price in all services” extension to an app like Playnite, and then just made sure to be $1 cheaper on everything, they’d dominate the market.
Or they could just continue doing what they’re doing and keep losing money.
The emulator is more likely that the Switch 2 was supposed to be released this year and ended up getting pushed to next year. This means they have to support the Switch fully for another year and it’s a harder sell when it’s easy for customers to make a choice between:
A Switch and 3ish games
Or
A Steam Deck that can play all the Switch games for free
When these are both the same price. The fact that instructions were easy to find and follow didn’t help.
It appears to be part of a series of fake DMCAs. Some asshat has been going around dmca-ing sfm, Gmod, and tf2 maps under different names with a lookalike email domain.
The fact that DMCA requests don’t have to be signed with an asymmetric key that lets you validate the company that sent it was actually behind the request is some of the dumbest shit.
We’ve known how to use certs online forever. Certainly well before the DMCA. Why the fuck wasn’t that a provision?
Oh right because our politicians are tech illiterate apes.
They’re like Japanese Disney. They’re nothing without their IP and they know it.
They also know that the only reason they have DK as a character is because Universal dropped the ball in protecting their IP. If they let Garry’s Mod casually have a “Mario” character in it, it dilutes their ability to legally go after some other studio who straight up makes an unofficial Mario game.
It started after Satoru Iwata’s death in 2015. He was a notorious true gamer/engineer before CEO and his vision was always long-term. The two who have replaced him since have decidedly chosen the short-term route for fast profit vs long term consumer binding.
An employee benefit that should cost them next to nothing to offer too.
Like, they have enough money to buy fucking Activision but not enough to give their employees free access to their own service.
Often, yes. But you can’t take responsibility away from employers. I have been one and I behaved responsible. I didn’t become a billionaire because greed is always abusive.
The thing is, if they don’t offer these cheap stuff, they may have to do something crazy, like pay staff what they are worth. This definitely looks like a false economy.
I’d be careful to read too much into this. If they wanted it to be successful, it would have been Raid: Shadow Legends or Genshin Impact level promoted, especially with $140M sunk in dev.
This seems like they had no confidence in the finished product so they didn’t even bother to market it, just shat it out to app stores probably to meet contractual obligations and it will be gone soon.
Either that or there is some behind the scenes nonsense happening preventing it from being marketed. Think something like Will Smith having it in his contract that it has to release and giving him 25% of sales, for example.
But for something to cost that much and bomb that hard, it’s essentially impossible without them basically cutting their losses before launch and expecting it to fail. It’s the mobile game equivalent of the “lowest grossing movie”, basically something that was only released because it has to be, and not a true reflection of product quality. Like I’m sure it sucks, but is it THAT much worse than 99% of mobile trash? Probably not.
Unless it’s either PS5 or Xbox exclusive (not both), I don’t think that’s true. Sony and Microsoft wouldn’t collude to prevent launch on PC. That’s extremely illegal, even for companies that are masters of dodging antitrust laws.
The most realistic explanation (IMO) is that Rockstar did their research and found that most PC players also own a console, and will very likely buy the game twice in the long run.
Or if we’re being charitable, maybe the game needs more optimization work before it can run well on the Steam deck, and they want that working before launching on PC.
With GTAV, the original release was 2013, the next gen was 2014 and PC 2015 so I forsee it being the same and being even later.
The upside was that the PC port was really good at release and I’m pretty indifferent to if I pick this game up in 2030 when it’s actually a good value on PC.
Well the updates to Skyrim, Fallout and lack of modding tools for Starfield seems to indicate that it is now a reality. I seriously cannot fathom why they would sabotage themselves like that. It’s absolutely obvious since at least Oblivion that mods are lifeline and reason for success of Bethesda rpg games yet here we are.
No, not really. After Starfield released mod scene EXPLODED capital letters, there were hundred new mods every day. However, without proper tools 95% of those mods are very simple reskins and modders got burned out and bored on this fast. Now we are 8 months after release with still no tools and that enthusiasm is largely gone. Part of it will still be back, but the best moment to establish a vibrant mod community has passed.
But the point of Bethesda isn’t to sell their games. It’s to sell GamePass. Nobody has to play Fallout, they just have to want to play Fallout enough to buy GamePass.
the time in which the TV is on but users aren’t doing anything is valuable
Ads are making everything worse. Yes and ads are disturbing the doing nothing. Doing nothing is very valuable to me. It’s the time when I have some time for myself.
Ads have funded a lot of content in the past. I don’t mean just in the Internet era, but in the TV era and the radio era and the newspaper era. We’re talking centuries.
Unless you’re gonna get people to pay for your content, which can create difficulties, attaching it to ads can be a way to pay for that content.
Now, all that being said, that isn’t to say that one needs to want to choose ads or needs to want to choose ads in all contexts or can want unlimited ads. I’d generally rather pay for something up front. Let’s say that it takes $10 to produce a piece of content. For ads to make sense, it has to make the average user ultimately spend at least $10 more on some advertised product than they otherwise would have, or it wouldn’t make sense for the advertiser to give the content creator $10. I’d just as soon spend $10 on the content directly instead and not watch the ads. Ultimately, the average user has to pay at least as much under an ad regime as if they just paid for the content up front, and doesn’t have to deal with the overhead of me staring at ads.
But for that to work, the content provider has to be able to actually get people to pay for whatever content they’re putting out. If it gets pirated, or people disproportionately weight the cost of that up-front payment, or people are worried about the security of their transaction, or what-have-you, then the content provider is gonna fall back to being paid in ads.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with advertising in general. I kinda hate that too. What I have a problem with is super invasive advertising where it collects a monumental amount of personal information, maliciously and often without your consent, to target ads for specific products.
And anyone who says they’re not doing it, I don’t believe them anymore.
Roku is capturing everything that’s on your TV and processing it as personal data.
They actually made the load time worse with their update. Not by a little, by a fucking tonne. Going from any interior to outside now takes like a full minute and 30 seconds, its ridiculous.
It took that time before the update for me as well. 1-2 minutes for every loading screen. There was a mod for that (before the next-gen update) that you could not load via nexus, bc the setup was a little more conplex, but it worked really well (see www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/10283 )
The method of this mod was to speed up the fps only while in the loading screen to 300-350 bc the loading times were somehow tied to the fps. Well done Bethesda.
It seemed a lot faster for me prior to this latest update, but they were never superb. Here’s hoping either the mods can be fixed or bethesda can get their shit together.
I’ve literally always done this with fallout 4. I think Skyrim too. Not because I thought it was improving anything mind you, it was taking so long that I would tab out to scroll some website while I waited.
Xcom2 had a nice “feature” where if you hit capslock right when the mission starts to load it paused all animations and actually loaded the damn mission far quicker than normal
Hah, those are the load times I used to get on my Xbox One with its dinky HDD. At the very least, The Midnight Ride has been updated to post next-gen, and I now get really small loading times (<5 sec) on my SSD. The game feels less rough around the edges, too. Only took 3 hours to set up :,)
Super strange because on PS5 the load times are extremely fast since the patch. indoor / outdoor transitions are never longer than 4 or 5 seconds, and quick travel maybe 6 or so
One of the last industries that would actually benefit from return to office. I doubt anyone writes better code or produces better art after getting stuck in traffic twice a day every day.
Exactly. The main part where they’d benefit from being in an office is initial planning, story boarding, etc. That should’ve happened a long time ago, and right now they should be fixing bugs and performance issues, fine-tuning art, etc. That doesn’t require direct 1:1 collaboration, and generally benefits from an asynchronous process where QA reports issues and the individuals fix them.
I’d love it more if the Quest 3 had an internal camera to track my face/eye movement. 🤷🏻♂️
Though I have thought about v-tubing/v-streaming and have the camera setup for it already, which I could use the face tracking with. Right now it’s used for FBT.
I’m considering v-tubing and I noticed you’re from yiffit, so I thought I’d ask. My best friend makes custom textures on commission for VRC players, which is how I found out about face tracking, but I wanted to hear an opinion from someone within your community since best friend is just “furry-adjacent”
I would imagine those are handled more like recording sessions where it’s not a 9-5 but a scheduled event. I could be wrong though I’ve never done it myself.
Weirdly even if this was some vindictive way to get more overtime out of people, I believe studies suggest people who WFH are more likely to work overtime because it’s less impeding and the barrier to look at work is less (I don’t remember any studies off the top of my head). So I assume this is just a management problem as management are usually the people having trouble when it comes to WFH
When my family members briefly had wfh they did all of the overtime. You can do a full home cooked dinner, OT, and still have time to relax after. Breaks don’t feel like a waste of time you can’t even finish a meal within. None of these buffoons will accept that performance went up using the same metrics that they used to complain about poor performance before covid hit though.
Yeah, commuting wastes hours not only because of transportation, but how much earlier you have to wake up and go to sleep and how physically and mentally draining the process itself is. Takes quite a toll.
kotaku.com
Top