Treat Japanese studios with respect. Don't impose all sorts of malicious rules and regulations over them and don't censor their games, especially in their own country.
Don't shut down your own Japanese studios!
Fire anyone who attempts to sabotage the commercial sales of Japanese games by giving them poor and politically-charged translations or who posts libel of them on social media.
To paraphrase another post here, if DEI was hurled into the sun tomorrow the games industry would enter an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. And they just refuse to do it!
That’s what all these studio closures are actually doing. They just can’t say it out loud because current western orthodoxy won’t permit any negative real talk about the destructive power of DEI.
Of course, absent anyone explicitly telling us that the problem is actually these stupid leftist death cult ideas, all of the lefty retards in game dev are blaming the layoffs on “muh capitalism”. Corporate greed was invented just this year, doncha know. They definitely aren’t sacking all the studios because DEI bloat has made them no longer fit for purpose.
My favorite is the “clever” leftists who think that blaming DEI is a just smokescreen for the failures of capitalism. Sure, the AAA space is lousy with mtx, but that’s been the case for a while now? So what’s different? Sweet Baby Inc. and Co. sabotaging most of the games with cultural Marxism seems to be variable that lines up best with the downturn.
It’s because games today while impressive graphically sacrificed what used to make games great. Fun. Most games today are the equivalent of fast food. They can be somewhat satisfying while you are playing them but become utterly forgettable an hour later. There are more games coming out than ever before but how many of them have the staying power of games from the S/NES? That’s also before we even start talking about modern politics in the story and character design.
In single player games, we have the ongoing process of “cinematification”, turning most AAA offerings into barely-interactive wannabe movies. This might not be so utterly insufferable if the industry were not also overrun by Marxist subversives who write the worst stories possible. Sitting through cutscenes when you’re trying to play a video game is boring enough. Sitting through leftist political and cultural lectures elevates the experience to pure torture.
Then on me online multiplayer front, you have the MBAs trying to monetize every inch of the gameplay loop. They deliberately introduce the most insane inconveniences and frustrations into games now so that players are constantly “incentivized” to purchase “solutions” in the form of mtx. If you participate in any of these scams, you are literally paying malicious game dev psychologists to mind rape you. If you won’t pay, you are will subject to the same degenerate mechanics and game design that are intended to exploit the whales.
Over the last few years, these two problems have started to converge. Single players games are gaining more and more mtx, which is protected by highly intrusive DRM like always online. Multiplayer games, on the other hand, are becoming every bit as gay and unattractive as woke AAA single player games. It’s the worst of both worlds in both spaces at this point.
The good games are only coming from a few places now: indie studios small enough to escape diversity mandates, privately owned studios outside of the mainstream corporate paradigm, and a handful of based devs who are maintaining the old ways mostly on momentum (Fromsoft).
Masters of Doom is probably my favorite book ever and I’ve listened to or read it about a dozen times. The passion Romero, Carmack, and Hall had for games is what is missing today. When a 40 year old Apple II game is more fun then your mocaped raytraced multimillion dollar game you are probably doing to wrong. But then again the studios don’t care. The lgbtwhatever took over so now we need to know characters sexual preferences and pronouns. Then it’s just cynical copy and paste efforts. But man does the shop work to sell you some hot skins.
If you participate in any of these scams, you are literally paying malicious game dev psychologists to mind rape you. If you won’t pay, you are will subject to the same degenerate mechanics and game design that are intended to exploit the whales.
Thanks Riot. You really contributed a lot to the games industry.
Graphical tech has reached the point where additional performance doesn't translate into superior visual experience.
Consider the PS4. Because of it's architectural similarities to the PS5, it's entirely practical for companies to target both systems for release, and many are doing so. The PS2 existed alongside the PS3 for many years but it was never in competition with the PS3; but the PS4 will probably remain in direct competition with the PS5 for the entirety of the PS5's lifecycle.
Microsoft for their part let the xBox brand fall apart by, ironically, making the same mistake Apple did in the 90's, with a big, confusing lineup of offerings that overwhelms the consumer with choices.
And Nintendo... is Nintendo. They'll survive simply by understanding the JP market better than anyone else.
'irrelevant' company with cash in the bank, understands its market, and consistent revenue streams even during global downturns that are crushing other companies, stock undervalued. Bullish.
While others are struggling, nokia just put wifi on the moon and dividends in my brokerage account.
Nintendo has a focus on the developers that sony and microsoft do not. They aren't trying to 'one up' on raw horsepower (losing race when costs increase exponentially for diminishing returns) They are releasing hardware that allows people to play the games nintendo is making for them, and for them to make those games.
The switch had everything nintendo needed to pull off Breath of the Wild, which people are forgetting but that had a very similar effect on the dev industry that BG3 did.
I'll take a choose your own adventure cartoony interactive gameplay physics based game where everything in the world I see is a real interactable object every single day over a photorealistic 16K FPS theme park railroaded shooter up with fake scenery everywhere that already has a predetermined series of events and outcomes.
I'm sorry, but. most AAA games these days make me feel like I'm playing poklemon snap. Just following the minecart course and pointing my camera and clicking the button at all the Pokémon's that pop out at me. Yeah the up the difficulty by making the pokemon shoot back so you have to be faster than them... but its still Pokémon snap under all the fancy paint.
i want nintendo to crash with the rest of them. they openly hate and actively sabotage any efforts by their own customers & fans to celebrate nintendo shit
their zealous protection of their IP is indeed very annoying, I'm almost right there with you. it boggles my mind because they essentially get free advertising from dedicated fans. Sega's embrace of fan works is pretty much the only reason they are still alive. personally, nintendo at least still produce some good games so I'm still happy to see them live.
Hopefully when younger individuals started taking those leadership positions at Nintendo, those overzealous and self-sabotoging copyright policies can be phased out.
It's a shame because Nintendo's games themselves are top-tier for me.
Without even realizing it, you just gave the reason why Nintendo is so hard on emulators. They intend to stop competition from using their own game to make money. Meanwhile the Mother3 translation has been available for decades.
Yuzu was a Switch emulator developement group that was openly monetized and talked about which new N. Switch games they could get to run for their users, who were invited to patronize their work. They gave a tutorial on how to extract and install de-encryption keys, which was a key argument of the lawsuit.
Yuzu gave ''access to pre-released updates'' to patreons, an argument for Nintendo's claim that they were monetizing being able to play new torrented games.
The lawsuit, however, including several dubious or false claims ( ''One million Tear of the Kingdom leaked copies downloaded illegally before the official release!' ( trust me bro no source ).
Blaming Yuzu for this... except Yuzu emulator crashed if you tried to boot Zelda Tear of the Kingom before release. You couldn't play that game on Yuzu at that time.
Financially profiting off unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is a big no-no, and there is actual money sitting on the table for the copyright owner to go and grab. Which Nintendo did.
They got sued by Nintendo and settled for 2.4m along with ceasing development and distribution.
Ryujinx, another emulator which can run over 80% ( but probably 40% - 50% bug-free ) of Switch games, is still going and not getting sued. Compatible on Windows, Mac and Linux. They have a Patreon though, so they might eventually get sued for profiting.
Emulating a console and extracting+using your own keys to play games you have a physical copy of is unambiguously legal. Other uses vary in legality depending on jurisdiction, but profiting off distribution is universally illegal.
Had Yuzu refused to settle and cease, they might have won, as they didn't distribute any game. But their lucrative ''buisness model'' was obviously based on their patreons filesharing copyrighted material, so they might have lost there.
Anyway the Yuzu code was open-source and got forked. But Ryujinx is still doing it best for now as far as I know.
Oh and all of this would apply with USA copyright law. Cue Russian and Chinese national anthem not giving a fuck.
When PlayStation’s chief architect, Mark Cerny, hints that game development durations will soon surpass the time it takes to conceptualize and design an entire console, it’s clear that the industry is on the brink of implosion.
And then they will need to adapt the new game to both the older and newer platforms, adding more time to development process in order to get a simultaneous release.
Out of curiosity I researched the Gears franchise. You can't even buy remastered remakes of 2 and 3 for the PC. Only the first is available. What are these people even doing.
Tim Cain (of Fallout 1&2 fame) has a story he told on his YouTube about work he had done more recently and how inefficient it was. He wanted to test something and needed a very basic ai, something he said could easily be done in a few hours. The team told him "3 weeks." He eventually got them down to 2 weeks, but that is the kind of productivity these places have, turning a a 3 hour job into a 3 week job; no wonder things take so long.
Tbf, i can easily believe longer times because of upper management bullshit. It's wild how often this stuff comes up irl now, and ends up with spending more time in meetings about a thing than just doing it.
That too. Unironically, the push towards making dev time billable internally vs being a resource that's just there all the time leads to having to unnecessarily justify shit and it makes everyone unhappy.
An example, if you need a report (that's all built on the back end, hooked into all sorts of things) changed, it goes from a simple request to "we need a sign off"
Most companies have started running that way. I used to work for a biotech company and the way they ran it is every step of the process was performed by a separate lab and each lab "sold" product to the next one in line. Supposedly that was to track costs more efficiently, but it just gave the higher ups excuses on why they got to treat the initial departments worse than the finish product departments, you cost us money, but don't bring any in.
Internal billing is stupid, and was made up so accounting could get lazy.
To add 3 lines of code he already wrote to 3 different functions that already exist, that would have taken him 30 minutes to do himself, but would have caused office politics, chaos, drama, and emotions to explode, that would have led to him losing his job if he just did it and didn't respect his juniors.
Sony Playstation chief architect Mark Cerny confirmed as an idiot who refuses to face reality then.
I can tell you exactly how to avoid a crash, potentially even among Western AAA devs.
Okay.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2930160/Nightmare_Kart/
That looks more like a carting version of Nightmare Creatures. But it does look good!
Give up on always online DRM already!
Stop basing your narrative games on divisive, destructive identity politics.
Phase out DIE initiatives and design choices.
Make 1 good, complete game at launch and stop relying on patches and DLC to bolster and fix it up later.
When coming up with ideas for a plot for a sci-fi game, don't bring on DEI assnecks, call in sci fi writers.
Sci-fi writers from 20+ years ago.
Lol youre right. I forgot about the new Hugo awards
The sci-fi writer from twenty years ago: John Scalzi
You're gonna have to go way further back than him.
To paraphrase another post here, if DEI was hurled into the sun tomorrow the games industry would enter an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. And they just refuse to do it!
You can just tell by their pictures. Colored plastic glasses, weird hair. No words needed.
yup. that's a pedo.
That was my first impression too. That or faggot, but usually those go hand in hand
They could just purge all the unproductives, the ESG and DEI overhead.
Probably just as bad as pre-Musk Twitter where he shit canned like 80% of the bloat and kept the lights on.
Twitter improved overnight when Elon fired most of the staff, including the woke curators.
That’s what all these studio closures are actually doing. They just can’t say it out loud because current western orthodoxy won’t permit any negative real talk about the destructive power of DEI.
Of course, absent anyone explicitly telling us that the problem is actually these stupid leftist death cult ideas, all of the lefty retards in game dev are blaming the layoffs on “muh capitalism”. Corporate greed was invented just this year, doncha know. They definitely aren’t sacking all the studios because DEI bloat has made them no longer fit for purpose.
My favorite is the “clever” leftists who think that blaming DEI is a just smokescreen for the failures of capitalism. Sure, the AAA space is lousy with mtx, but that’s been the case for a while now? So what’s different? Sweet Baby Inc. and Co. sabotaging most of the games with cultural Marxism seems to be variable that lines up best with the downturn.
It’s because games today while impressive graphically sacrificed what used to make games great. Fun. Most games today are the equivalent of fast food. They can be somewhat satisfying while you are playing them but become utterly forgettable an hour later. There are more games coming out than ever before but how many of them have the staying power of games from the S/NES? That’s also before we even start talking about modern politics in the story and character design.
The problem is two-fold.
In single player games, we have the ongoing process of “cinematification”, turning most AAA offerings into barely-interactive wannabe movies. This might not be so utterly insufferable if the industry were not also overrun by Marxist subversives who write the worst stories possible. Sitting through cutscenes when you’re trying to play a video game is boring enough. Sitting through leftist political and cultural lectures elevates the experience to pure torture.
Then on me online multiplayer front, you have the MBAs trying to monetize every inch of the gameplay loop. They deliberately introduce the most insane inconveniences and frustrations into games now so that players are constantly “incentivized” to purchase “solutions” in the form of mtx. If you participate in any of these scams, you are literally paying malicious game dev psychologists to mind rape you. If you won’t pay, you are will subject to the same degenerate mechanics and game design that are intended to exploit the whales.
Over the last few years, these two problems have started to converge. Single players games are gaining more and more mtx, which is protected by highly intrusive DRM like always online. Multiplayer games, on the other hand, are becoming every bit as gay and unattractive as woke AAA single player games. It’s the worst of both worlds in both spaces at this point.
The good games are only coming from a few places now: indie studios small enough to escape diversity mandates, privately owned studios outside of the mainstream corporate paradigm, and a handful of based devs who are maintaining the old ways mostly on momentum (Fromsoft).
Masters of Doom is probably my favorite book ever and I’ve listened to or read it about a dozen times. The passion Romero, Carmack, and Hall had for games is what is missing today. When a 40 year old Apple II game is more fun then your mocaped raytraced multimillion dollar game you are probably doing to wrong. But then again the studios don’t care. The lgbtwhatever took over so now we need to know characters sexual preferences and pronouns. Then it’s just cynical copy and paste efforts. But man does the shop work to sell you some hot skins.
Thanks Riot. You really contributed a lot to the games industry.
Turns out game design is a hell of a lot harder than 3D graphic design and a lot more important. Who knew? (spoilers: Me, twenty years ago.)
Graphical tech has reached the point where additional performance doesn't translate into superior visual experience.
Consider the PS4. Because of it's architectural similarities to the PS5, it's entirely practical for companies to target both systems for release, and many are doing so. The PS2 existed alongside the PS3 for many years but it was never in competition with the PS3; but the PS4 will probably remain in direct competition with the PS5 for the entirety of the PS5's lifecycle.
Microsoft for their part let the xBox brand fall apart by, ironically, making the same mistake Apple did in the 90's, with a big, confusing lineup of offerings that overwhelms the consumer with choices.
And Nintendo... is Nintendo. They'll survive simply by understanding the JP market better than anyone else.
Nintendo feels like Nokia to me.
'irrelevant' company with cash in the bank, understands its market, and consistent revenue streams even during global downturns that are crushing other companies, stock undervalued. Bullish.
While others are struggling, nokia just put wifi on the moon and dividends in my brokerage account.
Nintendo has a focus on the developers that sony and microsoft do not. They aren't trying to 'one up' on raw horsepower (losing race when costs increase exponentially for diminishing returns) They are releasing hardware that allows people to play the games nintendo is making for them, and for them to make those games.
The switch had everything nintendo needed to pull off Breath of the Wild, which people are forgetting but that had a very similar effect on the dev industry that BG3 did.
I'll take a choose your own adventure cartoony interactive gameplay physics based game where everything in the world I see is a real interactable object every single day over a photorealistic 16K FPS theme park railroaded shooter up with fake scenery everywhere that already has a predetermined series of events and outcomes.
I'm sorry, but. most AAA games these days make me feel like I'm playing poklemon snap. Just following the minecart course and pointing my camera and clicking the button at all the Pokémon's that pop out at me. Yeah the up the difficulty by making the pokemon shoot back so you have to be faster than them... but its still Pokémon snap under all the fancy paint.
good.
if the game industry crashed right now, the ones who would come out on top are nintendo, valve, and actual indie devs.
nothing of value is lost.
i want nintendo to crash with the rest of them. they openly hate and actively sabotage any efforts by their own customers & fans to celebrate nintendo shit
their zealous protection of their IP is indeed very annoying, I'm almost right there with you. it boggles my mind because they essentially get free advertising from dedicated fans. Sega's embrace of fan works is pretty much the only reason they are still alive. personally, nintendo at least still produce some good games so I'm still happy to see them live.
Hopefully when younger individuals started taking those leadership positions at Nintendo, those overzealous and self-sabotoging copyright policies can be phased out.
It's a shame because Nintendo's games themselves are top-tier for me.
The CAD$80 games aren't doing Nintendo favors vs independant competition.
You can also torrent Zelda Breath of the Wild bundeled with a Switch emulator for $0.
Without even realizing it, you just gave the reason why Nintendo is so hard on emulators. They intend to stop competition from using their own game to make money. Meanwhile the Mother3 translation has been available for decades.
Yuzu was a Switch emulator developement group that was openly monetized and talked about which new N. Switch games they could get to run for their users, who were invited to patronize their work. They gave a tutorial on how to extract and install de-encryption keys, which was a key argument of the lawsuit.
Yuzu gave ''access to pre-released updates'' to patreons, an argument for Nintendo's claim that they were monetizing being able to play new torrented games.
The lawsuit, however, including several dubious or false claims ( ''One million Tear of the Kingdom leaked copies downloaded illegally before the official release!' ( trust me bro no source ).
Blaming Yuzu for this... except Yuzu emulator crashed if you tried to boot Zelda Tear of the Kingom before release. You couldn't play that game on Yuzu at that time.
Financially profiting off unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is a big no-no, and there is actual money sitting on the table for the copyright owner to go and grab. Which Nintendo did.
They got sued by Nintendo and settled for 2.4m along with ceasing development and distribution.
Ryujinx, another emulator which can run over 80% ( but probably 40% - 50% bug-free ) of Switch games, is still going and not getting sued. Compatible on Windows, Mac and Linux. They have a Patreon though, so they might eventually get sued for profiting.
Emulating a console and extracting+using your own keys to play games you have a physical copy of is unambiguously legal. Other uses vary in legality depending on jurisdiction, but profiting off distribution is universally illegal.
Had Yuzu refused to settle and cease, they might have won, as they didn't distribute any game. But their lucrative ''buisness model'' was obviously based on their patreons filesharing copyrighted material, so they might have lost there.
Anyway the Yuzu code was open-source and got forked. But Ryujinx is still doing it best for now as far as I know.
Oh and all of this would apply with USA copyright law. Cue Russian and Chinese national anthem not giving a fuck.
BotW is available for purchase on hardware that is still sold. Just buy the game if you want it.
Emulation is for out-of-print and unavailable games.
"The Postersoy of AAA Incompetence" more like it.
You fools made this bed, set it on fire, then screamed and drove away anyone who would want to help you. Time to sleep in it.
That's what happens when you try to make every game for everyone instead of making several games that could appeal to different people
Do they make every game for everyone? Because to my eyes it looks like they are explicitly not making games for straight white dudes.
This is probably the biggest take-away:
And then they will need to adapt the new game to both the older and newer platforms, adding more time to development process in order to get a simultaneous release.
Out of curiosity I researched the Gears franchise. You can't even buy remastered remakes of 2 and 3 for the PC. Only the first is available. What are these people even doing.
Tim Cain (of Fallout 1&2 fame) has a story he told on his YouTube about work he had done more recently and how inefficient it was. He wanted to test something and needed a very basic ai, something he said could easily be done in a few hours. The team told him "3 weeks." He eventually got them down to 2 weeks, but that is the kind of productivity these places have, turning a a 3 hour job into a 3 week job; no wonder things take so long.
Tbf, i can easily believe longer times because of upper management bullshit. It's wild how often this stuff comes up irl now, and ends up with spending more time in meetings about a thing than just doing it.
Some jobs take about 3 hours, too bad that there's only one guy allowed to do it and he's booked with 3 hour jobs for the next 3 weeks.
That too. Unironically, the push towards making dev time billable internally vs being a resource that's just there all the time leads to having to unnecessarily justify shit and it makes everyone unhappy.
An example, if you need a report (that's all built on the back end, hooked into all sorts of things) changed, it goes from a simple request to "we need a sign off"
Most companies have started running that way. I used to work for a biotech company and the way they ran it is every step of the process was performed by a separate lab and each lab "sold" product to the next one in line. Supposedly that was to track costs more efficiently, but it just gave the higher ups excuses on why they got to treat the initial departments worse than the finish product departments, you cost us money, but don't bring any in.
Internal billing is stupid, and was made up so accounting could get lazy.
The mythical man month.
To add 3 lines of code he already wrote to 3 different functions that already exist, that would have taken him 30 minutes to do himself, but would have caused office politics, chaos, drama, and emotions to explode, that would have led to him losing his job if he just did it and didn't respect his juniors.
Womp womp.
Two more weeks