BougieBirdie

I’m surprised and relieved to hear such a salient take.

It’s not really surprising that if the big names in gaming spend an enormous amount of budget on a game that it’s not automatically going to be a hit. After all, a large chunk of that time and money is spent on further monetizing the game. The more monetization features they work on, the less attractive a game becomes to the player. It feels like that should just be common sense, I’m surprised a bunch of business majors never learned that they need a good product.

Like, honestly, a game isn’t going to automatically generate enormous profit just because a lot of money has been spent on it. It also has to be a decent game in its own right.

This is something that indie gamers have been saying probably as long as there’s been indie gaming. Maybe it will carry more weight when a suit says it. But then, he’s a former executive, so maybe it won’t have as much impact as it should.

Time for an anecdote:
I can think of two Blizzard games that I really enjoyed until they had a 2.0 release. Both used the 2.0 as an opportunity to change their monetization model in favour of squeezing more cash from players. They’re Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch.

Heroes of the Storm was free, but had a cash shop where you could buy cosmetics. Each cosmetic was listed for individual purchase. There were bundles, but if you really wanted just a single skin you could buy it for about $5-$15. That’s not an unreasonable price and I was happy to support a free game by buying the occasional skin for my favourite heroes.

When Heroes of the Storm had their 2.0 rework, they changed the cosmetic shop to be based entirely on lootboxes. You could no longer get the things you specifically wanted and had to rely on random chance. You could of course get more lootboxes by throwing more money at the game, but you’d have to buy way more lootboxes for a chance to get the thing you wanted. That turned me and a lot of players off of the game, and it wasn’t long after 2.0 that Blizzard stopped active development and put the game in maintenance mode.

Funny enough, Overwatch did the opposite, but it was still a step towards greed and super frustrating. In the original release, you had a lootbox based economy and a cosmetic shop where you could spend currency earned from the lootboxes to buy skins. Lootboxes were available for free as you played, but also available for purchase. You could ultimately get whatever you wanted just by playing the game enough.

When Overwatch 2 came out, the model switched to free-to-play and battlepasses. The free stuff you could get was limited to something like half the battlepass cosmetics (you can buy the pass to unlock more), and the cosmetic shop became a cash shop with insane valuation of skins. I think the average skin is like $30, and often they’re only available in bundles where you have to spend even more to also get skins that you might not care about.

In an attempt to reach more market, Overwatch 2 was released on Steam. This was the first (and I think only?) platform that Overwatch got released to where users can leave reviews on the game. It has a 20% recommendation rate, which is categorized as “Mostly Negative” and makes it one of the worst releases of all time on Steam. And this is for a game that you can play for free - it costs you nothing and people are trying to warn you not to waste your time.

The reworks between Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch are both examples of studios taking a beloved game in its own right, and lobotomizing it to make it more profitable. Never forget what they’ve taken from us.

TIL, thanks

I’m skeptical of the scalability.

On paper, it sounds like a good idea. Competing in air freight for medium speed / cost makes sense. Fuel for an airship is probably easier on emissions than bunker fuel used for freight ships.

Buoyancy is what I’m struggling with. We don’t have an unlimited supply of helium. Thermal airships don’t seem to be any faster than cargo ships. Hydrogen is too combustible.

So maybe this does have potential to carve out a small part of the market, but I can’t foresee this being a huge disruptor in the global supply chain

Sometimes you’ve got to seize the opportunity

If the company admits that the cost of wrongdoing might be worth a billion dollars, and then still engages in a billion dollars worth of wrongdoing, maybe the fine ought to be two billion

I’d love to see more developers with this attitude.

Atmosphere? Love it. Dread? Great! Darkness? Tolerable. Jump Scare? No thank you.

Jump scares are like the fart jokes of horror. Cheap thrills, low craftsmanship, and turns people off of the market.

And that’s not to say I don’t appreciate the occasional jump scare. They can be tastefully made, or used sparingly. Less is often more with these, and it helps add to the tension knowing it might come up again. But if they’re just non stop they lose their payoff quickly.

I once played this game that was styled as a museum of lockpicking mini games throughout the history of games. Super niche, but I’m in game dev so I eat that stuff up.

In four different places the curator mentioned that the lead developer Daniel Vávra is a terrible human. But they also acknowledged that the lockpicking was unique and interesting in that game. It read something like I imagine a museum with an exhibit of the Nazis enigma machine would - innovation spurred by terrible people.

If you’re on the fence about the game, know that the lead dev is a gamergate chud. But if you want a whitewashed and misogynistic game with a thin veneer of “historical accuracy” then I guess the game is on the cheap right now.

My basement flooded the other day. It’s been a flurry of activity trying to clean things up. Today I’m directing contractors in the cleanup and tear out portion of repair.

I know fuck all about DIY, so I might get taken for the proverbial ride, but I also know if I don’t do anything then it’ll get a whole lot worse.

This weekend I think I’m going to get higher than giraffe nuts and do nothing at all.

The friggin’ dogs in Resident Evil.

I have a kind of funny story about that. I was too young to be playing RE when it came out, but that didn’t stop me from sneaking it out of my dad’s collection of grownup games to try it anyway.

So there’s this well known jump scare, probably in the first fifteen minutes as you say where you’re running down a hallway and suddenly some dogs jump through these glass windows. I screamed, fumbled the controller, and was eaten by dogs. Might have been the first jump scare of my life.

So I hadn’t hit a save point, so you have to start the game over. So I decide to just leave the mansion through the front door instead of going out that way. And you get a cutscene where a dog jumps through the door and you have to wrestle it away.

I still haven’t played the game since.

But my wife and I are a big fan of the series, so eventually we decided to marathon them on the condition that she plays RE1. She’s playing the remake and goes into the room where the dogs jump through the windows and I’m holding my breath waiting for it to happen. Only it doesn’t.

So I’m a little disappointed, but I figure it’s a remake so maybe they’re switching things up a bit and going to put the jump scare somewhere else in the mansion.

Sooner or later you have to backtrack through that corridor though, and on like the third time going through this “safe” corridor the dogs jump through the window. She screams, fumbles the controller, and is eaten by dogs.

Seven-year-old me was vindicated that my adult wife also got punked and I’m not alone.

Yesterday my domineering relative cancelled the plans that I didn’t want to do but was going along with to be polite.

I should buy a lottery ticket.

What an outrageous lie. Imagine if students had healthcare

Give me five bees for a quarter

Not that I doubt the locals or anything - and like, fuck Microsoft - but what kind of industrial waste would a data center have?

From the article, it sounds like the facility is still under construction, so I imagine there might be construction waste, but that’s not really my field and I don’t know what that looks like. Runoff cement?

In this episode, Kirk (pictured) and his wife Luann are playing Pictionary at a dinner party with the Simpsons. The goal is to draw a picture from a prompt, and have your partner guess what the prompt was within a time limit.

Kirk and Luann’s marriage is about to implode, and they have several rather public and awkward outbursts. In this scene, Kirk has to draw “Dignity” and have Luann guess. He gets frustrated that she can’t tell what the drawing is, and implies that she’s more stupid than the cat, who would surely be able to guess it.

He gets fed up and says something to the effect of, “Let’s see you do better.” She quickly sketches something out (obscured from camera), and the guests at the dinner party all agree that her drawing is much more clear.

Part of the joke here is that Kirk can’t draw dignity because he doesn’t have any. It’s an intentionally vague clue which you can’t really draw a picture of. When Luann draws a clearer picture (at least, we assume it must be because the guests approve of it) it signals that she does have her dignity, which she later exercises by divorcing her husband.

Imagine learning divination magic to be able to detect copper wire

In a statement shared with GameSpot, Humble Games confirmed that Humble Bundle will have "no impact on its operations. Additionally, ongoing and upcoming games from Humble Games will still move ahead and be published by the company.

“Yeah, we just laid everyone off, but it’s business as usual, nothing will change for the consumer.”

I am not an artist

Proceeds to bust out a rad li’l dude doing a sick kickflip

I just shared this with my wife because she’s an artist and hates AI as much as I do.

Apparently she made an account last night.

“Red tape” is a pretty common idiom here. It’s similar to bureaucracy, but it’s more like the useless stuff you have to deal with in order to do something.

Say you want to update your driver’s license and you need to bring in some ID and fill out a form. That’s regular bureaucracy.

If you want to feed the homeless so you have to get a permit for an event, prove your volunteers have food-handling training, fill out forms for your volunteers, notify the police that there will be a public gathering, schedule an inspection of the facility, etc, that’s red tape.

Another way to look at it might be that Bureaucracy describes the system in which offices communicate with each other, and Red Tape are the tasks/forms/whatever you have to complete in order to get what you want approved.

The previous ‘family sharing’ feature allowed for you to share your games with someone else, provided you were not playing any games at the moment.

This new family sharing seems to allow you to share your library even if you’re playing another game.