But err, protesting never accomplishes anything and just drives away us genuinely good people who want some Starbucks. You need to find a better way to get your point across without leaving your designated spot.

This bullshit is a long time coming.

I mean, this pope is still all about protecting priests who got behind small children.

The “funny” thing is that trump/musk/doge could have had SO many “easy wins”. Because… the US government is ridiculously bloated and inefficient. Even just “Development of Military Weapon X has been terminated due to being over budget and no longer fulfilling the requirements of the contract. Boeing or whatever the fuck has been instructed to terminate all R&D into Weapon X and to instead focus on continued maintenance and optimization of Weapon Y for the next N fiscal years”

Same with government oversight. SO many policies are basically built around covering their asses ten times over (cough cough Challenger cough). And while there are very good reasons to do that (again, see the fucking Challenger), there is also a lot of room to reevaluate that and make things kind of worse but a lot cheaper in a way that most of the actual employees would love.

Instead? It was just “let’s immediately gut everything while we decide if we want to just become a full president for life dictatorship”.

No, I want games with focus. A game doesn’t have to appeal to me

It just… can’t appeal to a lot of people without being perfectly catered to them?

Blame the Publishers and human greed for that. FROMsoft seems to have absolutely 0 issue making highly specific games that only pander to a tiny subset of gamers (before ER anyway),

Dude… Dark Souls is a frigging Metroidvania. And every youtube essayist looking for some clicks will point out how incredibly tutorialized Dark Souls 1 is up to the Lordvessel. People whinge that Spirit Ashes made Elden Ring too easy all while not realizing that basically every hard boss in Dark 1 and 3 has an NPC summon… and the Dark 2 SOTS update added the ones that were missing.

I love the Souls games. It is fun to pretend they are super hardcore affairs for those of us who want to drive nails into our proverbial winkies (and some. mostly non-From, ones are) but they are ridiculously mainstream games with off the chart vibes.

Was it the 84 on metacritic that screwed Respawn out of a bonus on Titanfall 1/2 despite both of those games being fucking amazing?

I forget what the budget of Titanfall 1 and 2 were but both are very clearly A/AA games in terms of scope and what the budget “should” be. If they were actually somehow the kind of industry goliath that a GTA is then… EA done fucked up.

To put it in movie terms: You are complaining that a Michael Bay transformers is not as tight and well done as Before Midnight. They are completely different scopes.

Good for them? I still don’t want 90 dollar games that are only 90 dollars because they’re “Include all the things!” bonanza’s where I’m paying for shit I don’t care about.

Then don’t pay for it? Again, you (and I) don’t fucking matter when a significant chunk of the planet are perfectly eager to play those giant tentpole games.

You can make a ton of profit a bunch of different ways

Oh, well. If you are a master of the economy maybe you can fix the games industry so that there aren’t massive layoffs every week?

Spend a decade making a “jack of all trades master of none” simulator that will appeal to most for an obscene price, or create a passion project for a fair price.

Again. If you actually CAN make the “jack of all trades master of none” (which is actually a complete mischaracterization of the GTAs but…) game… you make it. Because 11.21 million people who are “mostly happy” and buy it on launch (in 2013 numbers) is a hell of a lot more money than 2 million people who are “ridiculously happy” (in 2025 numbers) in the first few weeks. And, for funsies, RDR2’s week two sales were 17 million in 2018

They didn’t need to spend 500 million dollars and a decade with a team of hundreds to produce a GOTY level product, so I only have to pay 50 bucks.

Let’s actually break that down.

Clair Obscur is a game that came out of the ubisoft content mines. We all love the idea that Guilaume Broche made it in his shed with scraps but he applied most of the game design lessons and industry connections from his time at Ubisoft (and 12 coworkers from Ubisoft) to found his studio and secure funding.

Ubisoft… is not in good shape. But, 5-10 years ago, they were very reliably in that AA/AAA space and the AssCreed games were used specifically to point out that platform exclusive games weren’t the be all end all anymore and that most people were playing the same games regardless of what console they bought.

CO also is a game that came out of the “infinite money” of COVID in 2020-2022-ish. Contrast that with the modern gaming landscape where money for devs is increasingly tight and studios are getting shuttered left and right. Xalavier Nelson Jr has talked about this at length in the context of Strange Scaffold which… is kind of what everyone says they want in a studio. They make great games with a ridiculous amount of heart on time and on budget with little to no DLC. But that still costs money.

Why would I pay R* 90 for a game where for every 2-3 facets I like there’s a facet I don’t care for That I paid for? Why would the general public?

You wouldn’t because you seem to think everything needs to be perfectly catered to you.

The general public does because they like 80-95% of a game and value having a great 20-30 hours with it.

AGAIN. This is not a model that most studios should follow. It was basically the killing fields back in the early-mid 2010s when studios and publishers were dropping like flies because they tried to make AA/AAA games that sold B/A numbers. Arguably, this is what has been leading to Sony and Microsoft killing SOME of their studios (less so one like Tango who get praised as what studios SHOULD be by the prick that fired them all a week or two before that interview).

Rockstar and especially GTA is not that. They are peak Transformers/MCU where they can, through one means or another, employ a significant percentage of the overall industry and still turn a ridiculous profit. And, as a result, keep those support studios open for other studios/films to use them (less so the MCU these days…).

Which gets back to: I 100% think there is an argument that AA games are a mistake. That puts studios in a very dangerous spot where they need to get amazing sales just to break even. Whereas a B/A game can be something like Clair Obscur or Armored Core 6 which is a very limited scope with the potential to branch out. But for the studios who can do AAA? They have every reason to because it makes ridiculous bank AND buoys the industry as a whole.

I don’t think GTA games are garbage - they’re literally designed to appeal to as many people as they can.

And they do.

I’d rather pay 50-60 dollars for a focused game aimed at a specific audience (…) At 90 bucks, nearly every consumer is paying some % for bloat they don’t care about

So you want games made specifically for you and cheaper.

Don’t get me wrong. It is genuinely awesome when it feels like a studio spent years making a game specifically for you (see: most of us Armored Core fans with 6). That works until that audience doesn’t show up. This is what led to THQ and the like crashing and burning a decade or two ago where games were successful but “not successful enough”

MAYBE that is going to be GTA6. Signs are, it won’t be. Because, yes, GTA 6 might not be catered directly to you. But the vast majority of people are going to love the overall package. Maybe they skip a feature. For example, I love the Yakuza/LAD games. Unless there is a story beat (involving a character I care about), basically nothing can make me do the crane game for more than two or three minutes (so one purchase…). Similarly, I loved Lost Judgment and have a LOT of Thoughts and Feelings on it. It would be one of my all time favorite games if it weren’t for the fucking after school special minigames.

Doesn’t matter. It might not be a 100% amazing game but it was still a 90% amazing game which… is still really fun.

Because

all in the name of making a game that will sell the most units.

Yes. And… Rockstar pulls that off. I don’t know why they would actively choose to sell fewer units just to make sure you never play a sequence you don’t enjoy.

Again, just to be clear: Very few studios can pull this off. We all make fun of RGG for how much they reuse everything but… that drastically lowers costs and lets them get out a solid 30-70 hour game once or twice a year. And studios trying to turn an A game into a AAA game is literally how THQ died.

But Rockstar is… well, a bunch of rockstars. They CAN do that. They do this through a lot of abuse of labor and manipulative marketing but… it works.

And, to be clear. I actively disliked what I played of RDR2. I found GTA 5 to be “fine”. But me thinking the games are worth getting on sale for 20-30 doesn’t matter when you have the population of a small country immediately ready to buy it at launch multiple times.

There is definitely an argument that AA games are a mistake.

But, since 4 or so, GTA kind of has been THE AAA (arguably AAAA) game and those releases literally buoy the industry.

Maybe you aren’t excited for it. Pretty much the entire rest of the (gaming) world is and so are their friends.

Going purely by “vibes”? I could be “okay” with a world where GTA 6 is 80-90, most major studio games are 60-70, small studios are 40-50, and indy games start closer to 30 than 15. Still plenty of room for waiting for a sale but also makes it a lot easier to be successful without selling millions of copies in the first month.

Aww, the dot world news mod team is gonna be so happy to know that the FBI is protecting their precious teslas.

Which mostly speaks to why this is “a good idea”. People vandalizing swasticars was effective. It was a comparatively low effort action that people could do on their way to work or while out drinking with the gang. And it did an amazing job of putting the fear of labor in all the tech workers who “will just ride out the next 4 years”. They couldn’t just say “I am one of the good ones” anymore.

So… get rid of that and we go back to “This is horrible and I really do care about whatever issue we think matters this week. But if you worked just a bit harder you would be able to afford groceries so…” that we see EVERYWHERE (even on this site).

A charismatic tyrant at least provides SOME excuse. People aren’t necessarily monsters, they are just gullible.

When you have someone as decrepit and incompetent as trump who ALSO has a visible diaper bulge at his hips and who can’t speak a coherent sentence? There is no argument other than people truly choosing hate above all else.

But how else are people going to make multiple communities that just scrape and copy every single message from reddit?

Its not even that.

It is throwing away your jacket because you don’t want to go out for lunch in the middle of the day. And then realizing you still need that jacket to get to and from work and having to buy a new one. And THEN buying lunch anyway because you are hungry.

A few articles have done a great job of documenting it but it boils down to the problem being the fundamental argument of WHY they are doing this. Officially their stance is to move fast, break things, and then repair what they actually needed. Except those repairs cost a LOT of time and money.

And… to add on to the brutally beaten metaphor: It also costs money to get rid ofy our old jacket because you can’t just throw it in the trash. You have to drive down to a good will to drop it off. Because government employees have PTO that needs to be paid out and so forth.

I always want to think the worst of bezos et al but:

If the plan was just to jack up prices they wouldn’t make this distinction.

Yeah. Nobody sane is actually going to use a device like this.

But it is a fun tinkering project that will be guaranteed to “go viral”.

Even when the prompt is better (at all?) articulated, threads like these are a waste of time. People who respond barely read the prompt and OPs generally don’t even know what they are asking for. So obviously you should play a little cult classic indie game called Hollow Knight.

My suggestion is to instead put some time in to find an influencer/reviewer you like. Even if you don’t have a similar taste in games, a good reviewer will say WHY they do and don’t like something and you can make informed decisions from there.

Gotta love people who blatantly steal the work of others.

For people who aren’t complete dipshits: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/security

Yeah.

There is a lot of the same barely veiled doublespeak with “game preservation”. I always think back to the days before GoG where abandonware sites were a dime a dozen and a select few torrent sites were AMAZING for having anything you could ever have wanted with very strict rules as to what generations/years were allowed and so forth.

Then comes GoG. Exactly what we had been asking for for years. A store that lets us actually BUY the games we grew up with or that were foundational to the industry. And with “No DRM” to boot. And… overnight almost every single torrent site added exceptions to just allow people to upload the gog installers.

Which is why these days I tend to side eye anyone arguing for “video game preservation” without a decent org behind them. Because having forty copies of Mario 64 on a shelf is not preservation any more than playing Crusader No Remorse upscaled in dosbox on a 4k monitor. Preservation is, more often than not, the full play videos that capture the “feel” of the era combined with interviews with the people who worked on it who can give insight into why decisions were made. And a system so that actual historians (even if they are “just” writing a video essay) can book time to experience it. Rather than a bunch of binaries to play on a stream.

The issue is also that it was added to a game that was already a decade old. So licensing was a giant mess and a lot of mods already depended on other mods.

For a release starting “from scratch” with paid mods would go a long way toward fixing that. Creators would have a much easier time making that demarcation of “I don’t care who uses this support library” and “I would like a few bucks to cover the voice acting I commissioned for this quest chain” and so forth.

Which is kind of what we saw with Make Something Unreal back in the day. UT2k3/4 was “close enough” to the best UT that there was a LOT of controversy over stolen scripts, level design, etc.

I dunno. I won’t at all pretend Bethesda did a good job of rolling out their model. But it REALLY pisses me off when people pretend they are “defending modders” while it is clear they are just angry that they might be charged for the content they consume.

I mean… if you actually care about the people who make your mods you SHOULD want them to be compensated. Even a simple quest mod or weapon mod is hours of work, if not days or weeks.

And while there is an argument as to whether Bethesda should receive a cut of that… people tend to not want to have that conversation about Valve and Steam so…

Just to provide context for those who didn’t watch Resurrections:

Neo is back in The Matrix as Thomas Anderson and is actually a video game developer and his claim to fame game is The Matrix. His business partner shows a lot of signs of being Smith “reborn”. They kind of lampshade that the people who own the rights to their game were going to make another one regardless of whether the creators were involved so it is up to them to either step aside or make the best of it.

Honestly? Resurrection has grown on me a lot, in large part because the credits sequence of all things recontextualizes the entire movie.

So yeah. I don’t LIKE Resurrections but I also kind of love that it exists? Even if… it existing makes me depressed?

Mods of the era largely fixed the scaling and the modern day best practices largely are based on that. Mortismal did a good video on Oblivion last year-ish where they talked about it but it mostly boils down to:

Just stop leveling in (if memory serves) the mid-late 20s. That more or less is what you will get with 60-70% of your levels coming from combat skills and is around where your DPS levels out. The mods of the time basically just tweak the leveled lists to plateau out similarly.

There was other more stylistic choices (stopping bandits from getting full daedric and glass gear) but that prevented the very common problem of “I didn’t optimize my build and now I can’t clear oblivion gates”

So… you blame that on “scholars”?

Because you seem to think that people weren’t talking about exactly that for close to 50 years. You just weren’t paying attention. And now are apparently criticizing people for continuing to talk about it.

Again, THAT is what the legacy of reagan et al is. We all grew up on media that makes us immediately want to complain that “Scientists said eggs were good for us then bad for us then good for us” and all the other crap that encourages people to just get angry when they hear “common sense” and actively ignore anything that isn’t.

Language matters. And understanding that language is how you understand what biases have been ingrained into you.