This is legit the movie I shit on most. I hate it so very much. It’s not the plot exactly, it’s two things:

• The tech accuracy is so bad. I won’t go into everything but they go out of their way to say shit that doesn’t make sense. My favorite example is that the AI is just a big floating orb and they feed it data through infrared, the slowest communication method available. Like they didn’t have to say infrared, they chose that.

• The product placement. Again, a lot of examples but my favorite is how at the end he shows up with Guitar Hero and the kids are like “Yay Guitar Hero that’s the best game ever.”

So in 16 years, they produced two games and a remaster. Am I missing something? Of course you can’t keep a business alive when it doesn’t actually make anything.

I’m not saying, “Hey, it’s fine” I’m saying that people and cultures change, and should be allowed to change. Never before have people been so unable to escape their past. Yeah, occasionally you get a Bernie Sanders who seems to nail it right off. But most people have some skeletons or some shit they’d be embarrassed about if it were dug up and went viral.

When you dig up the past and hit people with it, you discourage progress. People are more likely to dig in their heels, knowing that the opinions they have today they’ll have to answer for tomorrow.

I agree but I do sympathize with one part of it. Things that were widely considered funny a few years ago are not today. I do think it’s unfair to hold people in the past to the standards of today, but people love digging up old footage and bludgeoning people with it.

If a comic makes a joke and it bombs, maybe it’s not funny. Maybe they used it with the wrong audience. Reading the culture and the room and choosing wisely is part of the job, like you say. But if it bombs 5 years later on Twitter, maybe it should have just been left in the past with the context it belonged in and not dug up and resurrected for clicks.

And that’s becoming it’s own problem with search, especially with technical questions. The good answer is also old and out of date.

Honestly, I think some of it is a bit over the top. At the end of the day, they’re a company producing a product and not the chosen savior. But as far as giant companies go, they’re almost everything you could want.

• Lots of pro-consumer policies. From making returns a thing, to never taking away access like some stores, to big sales. If the idea of buying a digital game in 2004 and still having access to it in 2024 doesn’t sound revolutionary to you, it’s because you haven’t paid attention to how other companies run their stores.

• Open source contributions. Gaming on Linux is getting a huge shot in the arm from Valve, Steam, and the Steam Deck, both through direct contributions and indirectly through showing it’s viability.

• Employees, by all accounts, are well taken care of and enjoy their jobs.

They aren’t perfect, but the bar for a company, especially in the gaming industry, being ethical is so low that the way Valve operates makes them basically saints by comparison.

“Clean house” feels optimistic. Standard procedure for a buy out:

• Executives are retained or let go with generous packages
• Middle management is summarily executed
• Someone sorts a spreadsheet of developers by salary and lays off the highest paid (and sometimes best, though no telling when we’re talking about these two garbage fires)
• Remaining developers are shuffled. Some are asked to move to teams that are doing wildly different things than what they were doing before. Some teams are filled with lower cost “resources” from other countries.