There are 14,000 games released on Steam every year. What percentage do you believe contain in-game purchases? It’s quite literally just the giant AAA venture capitalist backed studios that do this. Just don’t buy them.

It’s like saying if we allow AI art to continue soon there will be no more humans making art. People will always make art. People will always make games. If all the art you see is corporate slop that’s a you problem.

Hank Green actually posted a video relevant to this yesterday. He was reading a Fox News article about a machine that can turn C02 into fuel that an internal combustion engine can use.

He then scrolled to the comments and saw all the posts talking about climate change being a hoax. He says it would be very easy to assume the average Fox News reader is a climate change denier. If you were to ask him how many people in the US deny climate change is real, he’d guess around 50%. However, surveys have consistently shown it is less than 10%. It is a minority of people. His point was that people leaving stupid comments are not the average person, they’re just really vocal, and try not to assume stupid comments are reflective of the average person’s beliefs.

Gaben said it best when he said “piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.” There is no other company that even comes close to matching Steam’s services, both to consumers and developers. The industry could become a different place when he dies. I don’t see any other CEO continuing to spend money to innovate and expand services rather than offer less and charge more to extract record profits.

Related news is the authors of Dave the Diver having to explain that they are in no way an independent studio

To save people from looking it up: The studio that made Dave the Diver is traded on the Tokyo stock exchange, has 7,000 employees, and brings in $2 billion USD per year.

Good idea. This is probably to stop new Linux users from panicking when they buy a new game and then Steam gives them the “this game is incompatible with your operating system” error when they launch without enabling Proton first. I know that message popped up for me a lot.

He should get tips from the Yakuza team

It’s a video game. It’s all CG.

Is it because he’s a westaboo?

“We record with other actors in a studio in Los Angeles, so it’s a bit of a problem if they don’t have native-level English skills”, he said.

Yep.

Oh it’s out?

PlayStation 5 exclusive

Ah. Thanks Sony.

US law allows companies to enforce essentially any terms of service or end user licence agreement they want when selling products or services and rewriting laws to add an exception for video games is never going to happen.

Stop Killing Games believe existing EU laws don’t allow this and are alleging some TOS and EULA of game companies are in violation. They want the EU parliament to review that and hopefully clarify the laws to ensure game companies aren’t “depriving citizens of property”.

From the petition:

We wish to invoke Article 17 §1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [EUR-Lex - 12012P/TXT - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)] – “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss.” – This practice deprives European citizens of their property by making it so that they lose access to their product an indeterminate/arbitrary amount of time after the point of sale. We wish to see this remedied, at the core of this Initiative.

The hope is that companies won’t make two versions of their games. One that complies with EU law and one that doesn’t. No idea where that comes from. GDPR is EU law and many companies created two versions of their service to avoid needing to follow it for everyone. Some companies, including game studios, even dropped their EU customers entirely instead of complying.

It’s also become YouTuber drama bait at this point and is an easy way smaller channels can get extra views.

I just finished playing the remaster of this game! I was also pretty confused by it and can see why it got a lot of criticism.

Her defense is that players end up feeling similar to the character in a meta kind of way. Players probably didn’t agree with the way the story was going, but pressed on anyways because they want a conclusion to the story, and that conclusion ends up being terribly unsatisfying. You could have stopped playing, just as the character could have stopped pressing on, but you didn’t. Now both you and the character have to deal with the crappy ending.

It’s definitely a unique way to tell a story, but I’m not sure it’s a story that needed to be told. “All of that stuff you did was pointless”. Yeah, I know! I knew that at the start!

She also brings up the “Abby Spectrum” which is more of an interesting idea. Trying to avoid spoilers, Abby is presented to the player at the start of the game doing something absolutely evil. She’s essentially the big bad villain. Later on you get her tragic backstory and see her do lots of nice things. The idea is basically, everyone hates her at the start, but how do you feel about her at the end? Are her backstory and good deeds enough to change your opinion of her? Where do you fall on the “Abby Spectrum”?

Maybe the story would have been better if it focused more on this question instead of purposefully setting out to be unsatisfying as a meta way to explain why endless violence, fighting, and revenge is bad. Though I suppose there are a lot of people who might actually need that to be explained.

Have you heard of Cookie Clicker? It’s an idler game where you click a cookie to get points. You can spend those points on upgrades like automated clicking and more points per click. The goal is to get like a billion points or something but with the upgrades you’re eventually getting millions of points a second without even clicking. Now imagine saying “I want to hit a billion points without buying a single upgrade. I’m literally just going to click the cookie a billion times.” That’s what this guy did, but with Old School Runescape.

There’s been a trend of extreme OSRS players trying to one up each other in dedicating years of their life to doing a repetitive task for 18 hours a day, every day.

Lol I had no idea they gave money to “Clickolding”, a meme game about a guy who wants to watch you click a button.

I don’t think there’s any moment that truly blows your mind. It’s a very slow burn. I found every run I learned something new that made me want to revisit old rooms and search out new ones. It definitely helps to take notes which is also fun in its own way.

Sometimes solving a puzzle just gives you some lore but that was also neat too. There’s one note I found that stuck with me regarding following traditions. It doesn’t have anything to do with the game but it was great writing!

You should get a wall mount for the TV. Lot of people in the room? Need more space? Voila! Pushes right into the wall!

Detecting multiple Leviathan class lifeforms in the region. Are you certain whatever you’re doing is worth it?

I’m going to assume the square saying “Reactive Bank Roll” which looks like some kind of paid emote.

I have a friend who has worked for 3 companies over 6 years. She has never once released a game as they were all cancelled before release. She found out she lost her job at one company after reading an interview about a bunch of studios being shut down. One of them was the place she worked. Even her boss apparently didn’t know.

The studio she works at now initially hired her for completely remote work, but they’ve since changed their minds and now she has to drive over 100km to work every day. She was going to quit but she’s sticking with it for now in the hopes of finishing at least one game.

Surprisingly, we’ll prove that standard scientific tests are not powerful enough to determine that the dice are unfair while playing a game.

Here’s a casino cheating consultant explaining how casinos check for loaded dice. (The rest of the video is also really interesting!) You spin the dice. Balanced dice spin normally, loaded dice spin in a lopsided way.

I wouldn’t call it a news show. It’s more like short video essays on systemic issues. But I definitely agree there should be way more content like this. Not only does it bring attention to issues a lot of people probably aren’t thinking about, it also offers realistic solutions.