MudMan

This is a requirement of modern right-populist politics. They won’t play defense, so they just say crap and you’re always chasing the latest nonsense and never get to make a point.

Of course the counter to this is for Walz to make this a non-stop couch-fucking roast from minute one. I’m talking opening statement is about upholstery, fabric texture, visualize choices for lubricant and material combos. Just go all in on the furniture abuse right away.

It’s not The Purge, it’s Kristallnacht.

“Forced exclusivity is bad” is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going “what exclusives does the Xbox have” like two posts down the road.

Or maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember where the “I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives” was instead “Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation” (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).

Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.

It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn’t like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.

Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that’s the ultimate motivation here. That’s not a particularly disputed fact.

Well, that and the several billion dollars in Gaben’s bank account.

Private companies are still corporations, guys.

I don’t think this tracks. Steam’s model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.

And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would “not take much”? It’s an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it’s an ever growing monopoly, it’s still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft’s own.

Yeah, if it isn’t it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments… well, that’s a level of control over a massive media industry that I don’t think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.

Man, I don’t like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It’s simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I’ve though “hey, wasn’t that Ubi Star Wars thing out” like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that’s an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.

But hey, since we’re going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.

There is literally no other thing that needs regulation more. It’s the entire reason contracts are a thing that exists. If anybody comes to you claiming they’ll set your working conditions based on empathy, that’s your cue to find a different job and a good union.

You can, in fact, ask that. It’s just that you shouldn’t have to because labor conditions should be regulated by law.

I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn’t there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.

Isn’t this pretty much the same system Google was intending to implement on Chrome before backtracking? That’s my understanding anyway.

Ultimately the issue is that we’ve gone to extremes. The response to the data market that runs the Internet is now that many people are against ANY amount of information being dislodged from users to anybody else. That is obviously way more strict than pre-internet standards, when people’s location data was widely available and TV advertising ran a whole lot of live reporting and segmentation data, but it has become the goal.

Mozilla (and Apple, and for a bit Google), are suggesting to go back to a world where someone quietly aggregates some info without tracking individuals in excruciating detail and now advertisers don’t want to lose the granularity and resell ability of the spy-level data gathering… and users don’t want to give up even aggregated info.

We’ve scorched the earth so badly there is no path forward, so we stay where we are. I have no moral stance on this, but it seems to be what’s happening.

I don’t know, I think maybe it depends on age? Most people exposed to US media will recognize at least the landmarks, but that’s probably true of other cities as well.

But NYC has been in so many videogames I feel younger people with a passing interest in gaming will at least have a weird set of expectations. Of Manhattan, if nothing else. The twenty years of open world Spider-Man games alone are more exposure to an overhead map of a city than most people get of the place where they live in that amount of time.

Anecdotal, but relevant: I had forgotten what the “smears” were supposed to be until I saw this and went “oh, right, they did that”.

Oh, cool. My current device uses Logitech Options+, which is not the same as the old G Hub and is not the same as what you’re describing.

Which honestly, before we get into the mandatory login and everything else, begs the question… why does Logitech need three different multi-device software hubs? What the hell?

It’s not (just) that manufacturers are trying to mine all this bloatware for data, it’s that most of them are absolutely terrible at making software in the first place.

Yeah, I’d like to know the specifics, too. My Logi mouse still uses the same application (although they did update terms recently) and while they’ve added some AI shovelware to it the mouse stil remembers its shortcuts with that thing off and I haven’t noticed any changes to how the application is put together.

It’s entirely possible the application is a Chromium-based browser thing, but in any case it still doesn’t require a login (although it does support one) and it will run offline.

Don’t get me wrong, Logi’s approach to this, along with a lot of other hardware manufacturers, sucks really bad. I do appreciate Microsoft, of all people, recently starting to standardize RGB controls, at least. It’s still wonky and interacts weirdly with some third party software, but it’s a start. I don’t need twenty different apps to keep glowy lights and saved shortcuts going.

Right now I’d say on that continuum it’s probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.

I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that’s not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.

That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.

It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.

It’s really, really good.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.

From the linked article:

“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development…he’s a good human, and full of heart.”

Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.

You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn’t the case, the guy isn’t quitting the company, he’s apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.