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Mainstream news was already starting to turn into ragebait in the 80s, and by the mid 90s there was no integrity left. Video games never had any standards. If you think that things were good back then that is just the proof that you had lower standards. It’s okay. We all had lower standards as kids. That’s perfectly normal. It’s important to acknowledge it though.

Nah. There were a few print magazines with some integrity, but there are still some websites with integrity. The really popular stuff has always been PR though. You just had lower standards as a kid.

Video game journalism has always just been third party PR, but journalists almost all absolutely love Fromsoft games. It’s user reviews that complain about them being too hard.

Of course, by “call out” they mean sort of vaguely point out that they exist without actually saying anything meaningful, and that will still somehow be too political for the “gamers”.

No, you don’t understand. The only acceptable amount of money is all of it. If you are making less than all of the money, then it can never be enough and your daddy will never love you.

Oh, also, it’s a common misconception that publicly-traded companies are required to maximize profits. They can have whatever goals their shareholders want. It’s just that the way modern publicly-traded companies work, most of their shareholders are people quickly buying and trading shares based on who they think will earn them the most money this month, so that sort of inevitably becomes the goal of any publicly-traded company.

It’s not really direct cause and effect, but yeah. The incentives for a publicly-traded company make enshitification far more appealing then it would be for most other organizations.

I mean technically yes? There’s kind of a post pandemic return to normal still going on, and before that there were consistent record low crime rates for the first half of the 10s, so they’re not that low, but they’re still pretty low. Nowhere near as bad as the terrifying dark ages of the 90s.

Yeah, and none of them can actually design bridges. Some of them can be useful tools for engineers to use while designing bridges, but this isn’t tech bro fantasy land. You’re gonna need some engineers. That’s gonna take more than a day.

Engineers using a specialized AI to make a design slightly lighter and then using a 3D printer to print that design isn’t a 3D printer using AI.

Did you actually even read the article you linked? It’s about a type of generative AI that’s slightly better than humans at finding the most efficient way of providing structural strength with minimal material. If you think that’s all there is to designing a bridge I can only hope you aren’t allowed anywhere near a bridge I need to drive across.

So uh… how exactly does a 3D printer use AI? Is the AI running the stepper motors? Or is this person actually suggesting that an AI could design a bridge? Because, uh, no. No it can’t. Maybe someday in the distant future, but large language models aren’t structural engineers. Those aren’t even remotely the same thing.

You can do that, but some of the features only work if you launch the game through Galaxy. Cloud saves only work that way. Some games need it for online matchmaking or leaderboards. It handles updates. If you care about achievements or statistics you won’t get any of those without Galaxy.

Just downloading the game from the website is usually good enough for actual old games, but it’s just a second class experience for most newer games. That bothers some people more than others. I’m mostly just annoyed by the principle of the thing, really.

Oh wow. The invasive programs given total authority to see and control everything on your computer at the most basic level made by companies famous for their terrible security practices can be used to do things with your computer that you might not want? What a total shock and surprise. Nobody could ever have possibly seen this coming.

Hey GOG! How about you make an actual Linux client instead of giving me another useless way I can’t play my games? Because unfortunately I live in the third world shithole with abysmal internet known as the United States. Cloud gaming is about as useful to me as a safe to store all the gold I don’t have.

It is sad but unsurprising to hear that Tuulik was one of the people recently fired. I had almost kinda hoped the studio would move on and make non Elysium games eventually. There were still talented people there, and when you look into it most gaming companies are run by scum. It seems unlikely at this point that they’ll even be able to do that though. It really just does exist to siphon money off Disco Elysium sales at this point, I think.

As for the copyright, yes, you are technically correct. Nothing can be set in that world. I’m also not a copyright lawyer, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, but from my understanding outside of the actual content of the game there’s really not much that’s copywritable outside of some names. If they just change the names and set a new story in a new city with new characters there’s really not anything anyone can do to stop them. Even for the city they’d really just have to change the details. You can’t copyright idea of a vaguely eastern European vaguely post-Sovietish sci-fi/fantasy city. Maybe they’d need to change one big thing revealed near the end that I don’t want to talk about because of spoilers. This is all replying to someone who said they haven’t played the game and don’t want to be spoiled after all. Even for that they’d just have to change the name and some of the details of how it works though, I think. A lot of what makes it what it is is to vague to be copyrighted, I think.

I don’t think it has anything to do with their creative accomplishments. I think it needed clarifying that no one he is not personally involved with outside of work wanted to continue working for him. Frankly you claiming to be confused by that is concerning to me.

There were six writers, and dozens of other people, for most of the development of Disco Elysium. Why would it be any better for just three of them to get the rights? This was always going to be a mess where people got screwed in ways they didn’t deserve. I can say that Kurvitz ended up being the one that got most screwed and that genuinely sucks, but also there was no way it was going to turn out any better. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

As for Kurvitz in the future, I don’t know how this will turn out, and it’s true that he can’t write any direct sequels involving any of the characters or locations explicitly in the game, but basically nothing else about the game is even really copywritable. He can still write stories in the same world with the serial numbers filed off. I don’t know if he will. He might spend the rest of his life being bitter about what was stolen from him, but if he wants to go back to what he’s good at he always has that option.

Nobody ever explicitly says that, and if you press them they’ll deny it, but people say things that only make sense if they believe that all the time.

Sure, they were all absolutely important to the game, and that matters, but saying Kurvitz, his girlfriend, and his best friend all left together when no one else wanted to isn’t really impressing me with how great of a person he is to work for. I don’t think he deserved anything that happened to him, but I am absolutely certain that the only thing holding the studio together was a collective desire to see the game finished from everyone involved. There was never going to be a Disco Elysium 2. There is no force on Earth that could have held that studio together with all the talented people involved past the release of the game. It sucks that the scum of the Earth got control of what’s left of it, and it sucks that Kurvitz lost the rights to his life’s work, but in the end it doesn’t actually change much other than one asshole getting like 60% of the residuals on sales of Disco Elysium. Which to be clear is a bad thing. I’m not happy about the situation. This was all lightning in a bottle though. It was never going to happen again.

Well, I certainly don’t know any details, but I’d imagine they mostly do that with older or more obscure games where it’s just not worth the time to make sure everyone gets their pennies sorted out properly. Probably not so much with modern game of the year winners.