Well in my observation the weaker players are quite often the more toxic ones. The “what a safe” spammers in rocket league are often the ones getting carried.
What a dick move, especially the second one. Really goes to show that management seems to forget they’re dealing with actual humans and not machines being turned off at an assembly line. So dehumanizing.
I disagree with the conclusion. My experience is anecdotal, of course, but I’ll share. I’m a gamer female with a husband and grown son. Husband is gone now, but the three of us gamed quite extensively together and separately for years, playing various MMORPGs and MOBAs, among other things. My son is exceptionally good at gaming, I am mediocre and consider myself a proud “filthy casual,” and my husband was absolute dogshit - to the point I had to leave my chair and go help him by taking over the controls to get him past certain difficult hurdles (and my son does the same for me on occasion).
My husband’s ego was never threatened by this. He never took his frustration out on me. Why? Because he was a decent person who was confident in his masculinity.
In the end, lack of skill does not cause misogyny. I believe misogyny springs from the same source as the lack of skill: a tiny brain.
Not saying I agree or disagree with the author. However you being his wife did not result in “female-initiated disruption of a male hierarchy” (their words) so it’s not really an argument against their hypothesis.
(Of course your husband being nice and not a dickhead probably also plays a role)
In 1997, Mindscape fired the entire Lego Island team the day before release. The team that just made a custom engine for their much-hyped and soon best-selling game that would garner sequels for years to come. The painfully obvious reason was the promise of giving people more money if the game did well.
Nothing has changed.
Unionize and fuck these corporations.
Even outside unions - pro-rate everything. No more hard cutoffs where some bastard can promise the world, get 99% of what they promised it for, and then give nothing.
There’s legal protections against retaliating against unions. How much teeth those protections have will vary wildly, but there are protections that do exist
Relevant law for Washington USA where Bungie is: app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.36
You can’t fire someone explicitly for being in a union, but you can still fire the union. If they fired the whole team, there’s no power left with the union. They can’t sue for being punished for forming a union, and they can’t threaten to quit or strike in solidarity, because the company doesn’t plan to keep any of them.
We are going to be seeing a lot of this over the next few years. And it is mostly the same as “EA bought and killed all these studios” back in the day.
The live game market is more and more crowded every year and Destiny 2 is winding up the same arc it has been in since Destiny 1 (I think?). It is hard to tell what the reality of “45% below the full-year outlook” means, but player retention HAS been falling and that is a good indicator.
If Bungie had stayed independent or stayed at MS they would likely be in the same place. Well, at MS they would have gotten gutted with 343 last year.
Its similar to HBS getting gutted under Paradox. I still think it is bullshit that, of all studios, HBS was not given the chance to “fix” Lamplighters considering their amazing track record in that genre. But also? I don’t know a single person who was excited for Lamplighters League. We all heard “Harebrained Schemes is making a new game” and immediately got our hopes up for something like Shadowrun or Battletech. And then we got LPL which… is fine. But, regardless of whether they were at Paradox or independent, that would have likely led to massive layoffs because of the flop.
And we are going to see a lot more of this, same as we did in the 90s and 00s. Between economic uncertainty, increasing interest rates, and just general “flops”. Because EVERYONE thinks “extraction shooters” are the next big thing. But… we are increasingly seeing questions of whether Tarkov is even particularly successful. Same with lots of other games. And publishers are less likely to say “Well, you’ll get it right next time. here is another couple million bucks” in the current climate.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone buys major-publisher games anymore. There are indie games that are at least as good and that come without the garbage.
The games industry got fucking huge and most people are just mindless consumers who buy whatever is advertised to them. It sounds crazy, but people buy these $70 games, buy the 'deluxe' editions for almost double, then buy loads of cosmetics in game. And they do it every year. All these companies are going to do is milk this mindset, so triple A will never change.
Indie, as you say, is the way to go. Actual games made by passionate people, with (most of the time) no bullshit attached.
Why mindless? Why can’t I enjoy a multi-player arcade shooter without being called mindless?
I almost exclusively play AAA games, with the occasional indie in between. The indies I play are basically all the famous ones that got really big.
It’s my entertainment, my time. Why call me mindless? The only issue Lemmy has, this whole “rebel without a cause” attitude against everything that is mainstream :)
A friend of mine is a top level director on a recent AAA game that wasn’t very well received. I can assure you, he was very passionate about his game.
Fair enough. Even if I like cod, I’ll still bitch about the campaign this time around. It’s not original and not exciting at all. I still don’t regret getting it for the mp/zombies.
Sorry, I wasnt calling people mindless, you are right that anyone can enjoy whatever they want. I was referring to 'mindless consumerism', where people arent really frugal and just buy whatever thing the big companies want to you to buy.
And the passion thing, obviously theres a lot of passionate people at big studios, but the leads of such places usually dont and bring it all down in the name of profit for them and their shareholders. Triple A is a money making machine, there's not a lot of innovation there anymore and a lot of the games are very unimaginative, regardless of how passionate the individual developers are.
Most indie games just don’t draw me in. They’re usually missing some major mechanic that ruins it for me. I also enjoy quality graphics, and in my experience, that’s the first thing to go with an indie developer.
That’s not to say I haven’t found some I enjoy (bastion, sea of stars, stardew valley), but most of the time they just don’t do it for me.
Dude same, first Roku started putting ads on the main menu and now Microsoft is pulling bullshit. Just another reminder that we don’t actually own anything anymore
You know! That’s what I was originally going to comment but wasn’t sure it’d make sense. Purchasing a product just means another way to sell to you nowadays. It’s ridiculous.
How do the people working fore Microsoft even come up with this shit? Do they not play Xbox? How are they not infuriated with every idea like this that they come up with?
Ambitious exec promotion candidate has an idea, senior executive sees idea and sponsors it as they believe it will make them money, JIRA lands in dev backlog, devs moan about it, devs like having jobs, devs implement.
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