I will admit that I didn't notice this. Mostly I was referring to the whole girl power thing that the game likes to do, with the women being hyper-competent while the men are largely useless. It's bad that they did this as well.
Right? They went off chasing that mythical modern audience by wokifying the game when they could have easily made a quality and highly successful game instead.
We know they can do it, Control was a great game despite its flaws and minor woke elements. But they had to double-down instead and make complete trash.
Yeah, they likely got paid well by Epic. But according to an interview, they paid 50 mill euros on production and another 20 mill on marketing which is pretty hefty.
From what I've been able to find, it's 60$ for the standard edition and that should have been enough to get them above the break even point, but it doesn't take into account refunds from people realizing the game is woke trash.
Even without considering that, it would have barely broken even when a studio needs to make enough to fund its next production or to convince investors to fund the next production.
Saw this on my feed and thought it might be worth sharing.
It is both amusing and unsurprising that Alan Woke 2 hasn't made a profit in 6 months in, despite PC Gamer (and the rest of the mainstream journos) praising it as a great game.
This is especially bad for them since Remedy has 360 employees and they all demand a paycheck each month. Funny money schemes and ESG investing can only delay the inevitable, not prevent it.
In the article they try to spin it that it isn't so bad and things will get better, but anyone with a working brain cell will realize the truth.
The rule will still hold true: get woke, go broke. The mythical "modern audience" that wokists and Sweet Baby Inc are chasing doesn't exist and likely never will no matter how much they try to brainwash people.
It was also dumb as fuck to sign that Epic exclusivity deal. If they hadn't done it and instead released on Steam they could likely have tricked enough normies to buy on release day to achieve profitability.
But I guess some higher up had no confidence in their product. That's something I've noticed, a lot of devs releasing games exclusively on Epic seem to have no confidence that their product is of sufficient quality or that it will be successful.
Last I checked, most of Alaska is natural parks and protected land. If this project gets fucked up (and there's a high chance it will under the Biden regime), then it will likely have far-reaching effects.
Also, that isn't as much the case anymore. Alaska's oil production peaked in 1973 and it's dropped 60% since then.
Although I'm sure that there's more reserves in protected land.
I don't really care about this from an environmentalist perspective, but the Dems and Biden are displaying a lot of hypocrisy with this move.
it's dumb to attack biden from the left.
Not necessarily, you can point out hypocrisy in their own ideology and you should.
it was approved under Trump and Biden can't stop it. "In August 2020, during the last quarter of the Trump administration, the BLM approved the development of the ConocoPhillips project option."
News to me, I didn't know this.
because it isn't going to devastate shit, are you some kind of green hippie faggot? do you know how desolate this shit is? it's in the middle of one of the most uninhabitable places on earth.
lol I don't actually care about the environment. I'm more of an adaptation kind of guy. We can debate climate change and pollution but whatever happens, I think we'll ultimately have to adapt to the new conditions and stop it with the stupid environmentalist measures.
Maybe Willow is in a desolate area, but it's not that simple. Even tundra has a complex ecosystem and depending on how the oil is transported, it could cause damage throughout protected land and habitats. It also depends on how the oil is extracted. If they used fracking for example, it could be very polluting.
Also I don't trust the Biden regime not to fuck this up.
no environmentalist wants to stop projects like this to help "the environment", they only want to stop human development and make all of us humans poor and unable to advance technologically and economically because they hate humanity.
Ehh. It's more complicated than that. Normie environmentalists do want to "save the environment" and "save the planet" and all that crap. It's the elites that are using environmentalism to pass laws that would do exactly as you said.
Willow is a necessity like I said, as we do need the oil to run civilization, I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of the Dems and Biden going along with it when their own ideology is against more oil drilling.
For all their grandstanding about environmentalism and saving the planet, the Democrats don't stick with their principles, it seems.
The "It's [D]ifferent" meme has well and truly become reality. Why else would Biden approve a project that will produce 600 million barrels of oil per year and in all likelihood utterly devastate Alaska?
Or maybe they realize on some level that it's not possible to run industrialized society off just electricity with the tech we have, so we need to drill more oil.
Cameron clearly doesn't know what he's talking about if he's saying this. The whole reason people cared about the MCU was because it had interesting heroes with compelling journeys (before it went woke, anyway). You can't just feed people slop and expect your movies to succeed, they need more than that.
Then again, Cameron lost his credibility a long time ago. He called Terminator: Dark Fate the true sequel to Terminator 2 even though that movie gave John Connor the Luke Skywalker treatment.
I think there's little doubt that Avatar 2 (and the other sequels that for some godforsaken reason he's making) will not only be worse than the first movie, but they'll also be massive financial failures.
While on paper a good idea, what would end up happening is that the countries that have laws requiring moderating "false information, hate speech, and extremism" are just going to ban those companies from operating in their territories until they meet these laws.
While we can hope that the bill passes, we should expect the worst. There's vested interests that are going to stop at nothing to prevent it from going through.
Even if it does, the cure might have devastating side-effects to the online ecosystem and the global economy.
Or alternatively, the EU needs to be reformed with leaders that aren't corrupt and willing to defend people's freedoms and rights against Big Business.
You can dissolve the EU, but so long as there is a free market what's going to happen is that Big Business will be used to enforce policies and regulations across country lines.
I think you underestimate the sheer amount of licenses and regulations you have to meet, and how expensive it is.
But let's suppose you're right. You make your own startup bank, you commit to free speech and not fucking over customers. You slowly grow over time until you become successful. Now pray tell, how do you stop the government or Big Finance from using every dirty trick in the book to obliterate you?
Looks like the next big battle for free speech is coming right up. The EU is doubling down on controlling speech, and it's going to affect everyone as we're dealing with a few international companies that control all major social media platforms.
If this works for them, it's going to mean more censorship, more thought police, more authoritarian bullshit.
If this doesn't work and the companies don't play ball, it might lead to the balkanization of the internet. Honestly, that's a concerning prospect that would probably result in the total collapse of the globalism and the global economy.
Why? Because so much money is tied in Big Tech in an international network of companies. Balkanize the internet which is what made all of this possible, and in an instant we'll go back to the 90s in a very destructive way.
I've been reading Joshua Moon's (owner of KiwiFarms) old articles, and in one of them he linked this piece which doesn't seem to have been covered anywhere else. This Dick Masterson guy tried making a Patreon alternative as Patreon has proven in the past that they're more than willing to censor those that they disagree with, on top of providing a clear view of how digital deplatforming works.
What ended up happening is that his business was put on a global card processing blacklist known as MATCH, which is maintained by Mastercard. His blacklisting resulted in him not being able to process cards, collect subscriptions and run his business. Not even offshore banks were willing to deal with him, since they used MATCH code 10 "violation of standards" which is the harshest one.
It is clear that it's not just woke-infected companies that censor, censorship flows downstream from Big Finance. Elon Musk can take over Twitter and fire all the people in the trust & safety board, but what does that matter if Big Finance can just stop people from paying your business?
People have spoken about how the WEF and Klaus Schwab want to institute a digital currency to enact even more censorship, even more authoritarianism, but the truth is that we're already living in this future.
If you're using a bank account and a card, your money is numbers in a database. Whether you have US dollars, Euros or Pounds, this doesn't change. The only money that you truly own is cold, hard cash but you can't pay an online business with cash, so you're forced to use cards.
So you have to submit to Big Finance. If you don't do what they want, they shut you down, and they're a requirement for functioning in today's highly digital world.
There's plenty of examples of this happening now. This is one of them, there's others including cases where people's actual bank accounts were shut down, which is even worse than payment processors shutting you down.
However, things might have reached a turning point. PayPal went full mask off with their 2500 dollar "misinformation fine" and now they're getting absolutely obliterated by the backlash. Especially since they had the gall to lie about it. They backpedalled, then tried to sneak it back in a few weeks later, thinking we all had the memory and attention span of Joe Biden, but we did not.
Let's hope the momentum keeps up and we fight back against Big Finance. Western governments thought they could get around pesky little things like constitutional rights by delegating their authoritarianism to companies, which was pretty clever, but it must stop.
Western liberal democracies are driven by both oligarchies and mob rule simultaneously.
Western institutions (the executive, judicial, mass media and academia) have all been subverted by the wokist ideology. It's gotten to the point where a single angry tranny can utterly ruin you and get you attacked by a personal army. Corporations and governments alike will kowtow to these people and bend to their every whim.
Yes, there are plenty of rich oligarchs and they have heavy influence on policy, but they are now being controlled by the monster that they seem to have created.
Nevertheless, things still work out in their favor because so long as they pay lip service to the new state religion, they can continue operating more or less with impunity. Amazon is pushing wokeness in one of the most expensive propaganda pieces ever, but people aren't interested that Bezos is literally forcing workers to piss in bottles because bathroom breaks lower productivity.
It's bad enough to have a group of rich, corrupt oligarchs that are looting your country, but now some of them have been infected by the woke social contagion which gives them a cause to fight for. A faith with unbelivers that need smiting and values to uphold.
In a way, the West today is a mix between an oligarchy and a theocracy (with the cult of social justice heading it)
Yes and no. The wokists want a democratic society that technically allows you to make choices, but they want to make sure that you make the right choices.
A wokist outwardly supporting monarchy over democracy is a full on mask off moment.
It's not about centralizing power, it's about making sure that all the instutions are under their control and people obey them.
Do I need to remind you that the Americans had their second amendment and they've managed to retain a very free country for most of their history?
Anyway, since you're so smart why don't you tell me how you propose that we're going to defeat the WEF and make our countries great again?
You're absolutely right. This is one advantage that I didn't immediately think of, but it makes a lot of sense. Under a democracy, you're only ruling for like four years so what investment do you have in ruling well?
You can make a mess and let the next idiots clean up the mess that you created. If they even bother doing so.
And when mediocrity or terrible performance becomes the norm, it just becomes part of the system.
And yes, it's likely that The Guardian is only suggesting this for Charles. Some people called him a WEF shill, but I think that he's as yet unproven so things could go either way. Let's hope he proves loyal to his country instead of the WEF.
That would be a drop in the bucket for Alan Woke 2. I suspect that the exact amount is negotiated since it doesn't make sense to only give 10 mill to a big budget game like Alan Woke 2. It also wouldn't make sense to give that much to a low budget indie game going for exclusivity.
I've seen plenty of small productions going exclusive on Epic and they didn't look like they cost millions to make.