So in your mind, no one who is self-publishing a book should put it on Amazon. No one who is trying to sell their product on etsy should use PayPal. No one who is just trying to get rid of a few things around the house should use Facebook Marketplace… etc…
Welcome to reality. Sometimes the best of a bunch of bad options has to do. Should these companies all be put int he ground. Yes. But if we let perfect be the enemy of good, we never make any progress.
Sure. You have to rent a stall at farmer’s market if you want to sell your corn, too instead of selling it to a larger distributor. No body is saying otherwise.
The point is that having Steam as an option as an indie dev rather than having to connect to a larger publisher in order to get your work out there, is a good thing. The fact that some titles don’t make money isn’t part of it. It’s the fact that Steam at least allows these devs to cut out the middle man (the publisher). Maybe it’ll work and be a hit. Maybe it won’t. But at least they have the option to try.
I’d argue that that is entirely a good thing overall.
It means that Steam is very open to Indie devs (something we already know) that don’t make as much money but are passion projects for the creators.
If they’re making enough from the…let’s call them prestige titles…to be able to afford to give indie devs a place to host their passion projects and maybe get more eyes on it, than I see no problem with that.
No idie dev is going into it thinking they’re going to be next giant thing. They just want to share their work and maybe make a few bucks. And Steam gives them that, PLUS the chance that maybe they’ll be a Rimworld or a Hollow Knight; something that sparks a giant success for them.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but at your level of subscription, you only have access to stock photos from 2012 or earlier…
Personally I’ll never go Vegan simply out of spite because no matter what is being discussed there’s ALWAYS some asshole inserting veganism into the topic.
Veganism might be great for the environment, but as long as you(they) continue to act worse than especially obnoxious Jehovah’s Witnesses, veganism can go fuck itself.
If I devoured one cow every time some vegan asshole spoke up in a thread that was on a completely different topic, cows would be extinct.
No one. It’s a giant “plausible deniability” cluster-fuck.
It’s ‘blaming the dog for farting’ writ large and in the service of billionaires.
My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.
Syndicate (loved), Black Flag (Fun to be a pirate, fun story, but again…that same gameplay loop)
Original Assassin’s Creed (I recognize its groundbreaking nature for its time, but found it kind of underwhelming),
Rogue (got it for free at some point…don’t know where or when or how. But found it similar to Black Flag; fun to be a pirate, but the same gameplay loop)
When I had Game Pass, I also took stabs at Origins and Oddysey.
I think anyone can recognize the loop I’m talking about. Go into an area. find a point that let’s you sync a bunch of little mini games (in AC it’s syncing from high points, in Watchdogs it’s hacking towers, etc…) Then you just randomly do enough side-plot and main plot missions and kill the sub-bosses until you “control” that part of the map and then do it again. Every game. Every Franchise. They all follow the same loop.
It’s only when a game adds something somewhat different to the equation (a grappling hook in Syndicate and a train that is constantly looping through the city or sailing a pirate ship in Black Flag) that it has any sort of novelty for me.
Those cheeky buggars have made the same basic game for over a decade just by changing time periods and art assets.
I’ve always had trouble getting into the Assassin’s Creed games, even though as a history buff they should be right up my alley. There’s something about the Ubisoft generic play-loop that bores me after a certain amount of time. ( I have that same issue with the Total War series…love history, so I should love those games, but for some reason they just don’t click with me).
Weirdly enough, the only AC game that has really clicked with me is (AFAIK) one of the least popular ones, and that’s Syndicate. I think it’s because the setting. Victorian London had a lot of verticality from the various buildings that allowed a very spider-man like experience.
No one exists except me. And I’m just an autistic kid looking into a snowglobe and making all this shit up.
I tend to think that the pro AI people are of a younger generation, because if they were closer to Gen X, they’d be feeling betrayed rather than excited.
Gen X and Millenials built the internet. We populated it with our forums, our blogs, our facbook profiles. We were the first ones sharing our photos, our very lives, with all of our friends and family. We created what it would become and we trusted that it was a community resource. Then along comes a couple of billionaires, they suck up everything that you have built and then have the balls to charge you an entry fee!
It’s like if you and your neighbourhood all got together and decided to build a playground for your kids, and when it’s done, some asshole asks the city for the right to the land and puts a toll booth up.
More than any other concern, THAT betrayal is what pisses me off the most. How fucking dare they say that I have to pay to access a system that was built on community content. They can fuck themselves sideways with a rusty sledge hammer.
Using AI to double check your code is very different from using AI to replace your skilled creative talent on a motion picture. It’s not even an accurate comparison… GL isn’t talking about coding, he’s talking about visual effects, writers, even actors…all of whom who’s careers are at risk.
You want to use AI to make sure you didn’t miss a semicolon at the end of a line, great…knock yourself out. But that has literally nothing in common with what Lucas is blathering about here.
Of course he did. He loves updating his classics every time some “new technology” comes along to let his freak-flag fly.
We’ll be seeing a re-re-re-re-release of A New Hope shortly where he uses an AI generated Boba Fett and Solo giving them a scene or two to develop a backstory.
100%. I’ve been saying it for years that at the end of the day, the only punishment that actually works is the public shaming.
Bring back the public perp walks. March the criminal through the streets with a big banner announcing their crime, and then leave them them in a public cell in the middle of town for a few days with their name on it, their crime, and no privacy so that people can come and see them.
A few days of that will do more to cure recidivism than any jail you can name.
And they should be.
The OG Playstation had, by far, the biggest collection of games that I consider my favourites.
Weren’t expecting what?
Choice?…A succulent collection of choice?
What’s to stop them from just going a generation back and using DDR4 instead of DDR5.
There is no one who can convince me that it makes any noticeable difference anyway. When I was putting together a new/used desktop I specifically looked for DDR4 for precisely that reason and I would take any bet that a performance hit would be measured in numbers too small for any user to even notice.
Constantly needing newer hardware with only fractional improvements is the biggest scam in tech. They took their lesson from Apple and Samsung.
I’m not defending anybody.
I’m saying that if you’re an author (for example) that wants to self publish instead of trying to find a big publisher to accept your manuscript, what are you going to do? Email a copy to anyone who wants to buy it? No…of course not. Similarly, if you’re a dev who wants to release a game without going through a big publisher like Activision or Bethesda or whatever…what are you going to do? Other than Steam and Itch.io, there aren’t many places to do that.
Does it suck? Yes. But the reality is that if we want to get our work out into the public, regardless of monetary concerns, we have to roll around in one mud puddle or another. Our only choice (until that changes) is how deep of a puddle we choose to get in.