Its unfortunately a pretty common thing, especially for gatcha games. Look at the whole Limbus Company debacle from a few years back, for example, where people protested outside the studio because the summer skins weren’t sexy enough (for a game that hadn’t previously sexualized characters heavily) and got an unrelated artist fired because she was a feminist and thus was surely the one who made the decision.

With gatcha games, its a bit of a perfect storm with the extreme investment expected in these games, the monetization of characters, an industry that leans into this, and the fact that these games tend to be made in and marketed towards east-Asian regions where generally, sexuality is more accepted but sexism also more common and played largely by young, immature men.

Edit: Notably also, a lot of the men getting super invested in games like this are also vulnerable, which means a lot are likely to also end up in groups like the incel “movement” as well as being more likely to be swept up in any existing toxic culture around the games themselves.

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Its possible I’ve just been lucky enough to avoid that part of the playerbase. Then again, my perception my also be skewed from spending so much time in Dead By Daylight, War Thunder, Minecraft and Counter Strike. At least in Dota, it takes some effort to kill more than a couple teammates.

Honestly, by online gaming standards, I’ve found Dota pretty tame. Prehaps its just because I stick to more casual modes and have a high behaviour score, but I rarely see much more than a “GGEZ” at the end of a game, or players tipping mistakes. I think its been at least a month since the last time I saw someone hack, intentionally teamkill, or throw. Obviously, its still a competitve online game (toxicity isn’t rare), but the only other online game I can think of where I experienced less toxicity was Deep Rock Galactic.

Well, they implemented some graphical improvements and options, as well as workshop mod support so now would be a good time for a replay.

In general, I agree, but I think you underestimate the benifits it provides. While ray-tracing doesn’t add much to more static or simple scenes, it can make a huge difference with more complex or dynamic scenes. Half Life 2 is honestly probably the ideal game to demonstrate this due to its heavy reliance on physics. Current lighting and reflection systems, for all their advancements and advantages, struggle to convincingly handle objects moving in the scene and interacting with each other. Add in a flickering torch or similar and things tend to go even further off the rails. This is why in a lot of games, interactive objects end up standing out in an otherwise well-rendered enviroment. Good raytracing fixes this and can go a really long way to creating a unified, but dynamic look to an enviroment. All that is just on the player’s side too, theres even more boons for developers.

That said, I still don’t plan to be playing many RTX or ray-traced games any time soon. As you said, its still a nightmare performance wise, and I personally start getting motion sick at the framerates it runs at. Once hardware catches up more seriously, I think it will be a really useful tool.

A couple of major factors:

Users who expect low prices - This partly because of the history of mobile games being smaller and/or ad-funded but also because the vast majority of people playing games on their phone are looking for a low barrier to entry, time waster, not specifically a game.

Lack of regulation or enforcement - other gambling heavy fields tend to be at least somewhat regulated, but mobile games are very light on regulation, and even lighter on enforcement. This allows them to falsely advertise their games and how they function (both in terms of misleading ads, and lying about chance based events and purchases in-game).

Monopolistic middlemen - On other platforms, theres more direct competition (IE, Sony and Microsoft’s generally more direct competition) or companies that prioritize long-term growth and stability (IE Steam or Itch.io). Apple and Google, on the other hand, largely compete on brand perception and hardware specs. These means that their app stores, where they make most of their money, have zero competitors. Seeing as they have no reason to make the stores better, they can instead promote whatever makes them the most money; that being exactly these manipulate, sketchy, virtual slot machines.

Dota does too but its fairly hidden and requires unanimous agreement. That said, Dota is far less snowbally, so unlike League or Deadlock, it rarely makes sense to forfet very early.

There is an Avatar TTRPG and it faces similar problems to making a new game based on the series, and handles it similarly to what you’re suggesting.

The TTRPG divides the setting into Eras, Kyoshi era with the nations still being established, Roku era with established nations, The Hundred Years War era taking place during the war but before Ang wakes, The Aang era, after the show and its sequel comics, and the Kora era taking place after TLoK and its comic trilogy. Notably, none take place during the events of the main series. This means that the can create new stories that better fit the medium and don’t break cannon, and at the same time, you can still interact with significant characters and tie your story into the cannon such as making a quest resulting from the reprocusions of, or a prerequisite for events in the main canon.

Edit: clearly none of us read the article:

It’ll put players in the role of an “all-new, never-before-seen Avatar” and take place thousands of years in the past.

At the same time, the goal of dark patterns to to make people spend more money. Given that revenue is very likely one of the key things Google wants (and thus promotes) out of apps, its also entirely expected that the apps people find are largely those who try and get the most money from users, which requires dark patterns.

Other than the mob vote changes, Im not really a fan. More regular, small updates feels like it makes it harder to make the large, sweeping changes many areas of the game need, as well as adding a lot of extra work for modders to keep things up to date.

I mean, he’s not asking for help rooting directly, or for people to feed him instructions on every one of these devices. His question is intentionally left open for any pointers people can give, from a “I rooted the Samsung and its pretty easy to do”, to links to other webpages (which are exactly the sort of resource someone would have bookmarked while also being a nightmare to find on Google), to -yes- full step by step instructions for those willing to provide. He’s asking for direction, not demanding someone do the work for him.

I personally found the Inscryption scratched the same itch, albient in a different way. Its a very different game, being a sort-of narrative driven, Slay the Spire inspired card game. I won’t go into too much detail, given that spoilers, mechanical or narrative, take away a lot from the game, but I found that Inscryption did a great job of juggling a bunch of different mechanics to ensure I constantly had new tools to master, while also encouraging more lateral exploration through its plethora of secrets, and drip feeding story fragments to be peiced together as I progressed.

Theres a whole plethora of ranked, competitve Minecraft games, ranging from time trial type survival challenges, to parkour, to classics like Survival Games (battle royale) and Spleef. Alternatively, for something more casual, just use a whole variety of minigames.

As a viewer or as a player? As a player, I’d be interested interested in joining for Dota, and maybe CS2. As a viewer, Dota, CS2, or maybe some of the classics that are easier to understand on a surface level like Age of Empires or Smash Melee. That said, it’d obviously depend on specifics; as much as I love any excuse to play more Dota, for example, I only have one consistent teammate and tend to rely on randoms for other lanes.

• Workshop, providing mod hosting/browser/framework for API
• controller configuration tools
• Better storefront with decent discovery and better search (Although this wouldn’t be a condiment in the anology)
• Passable social tools (IE voice chat)
• Game streaming to friends
• Cloud saves
• Relatively good review system
• Item marketplace and trading

Considering that its already been effectively announced unofficially, and whats been leaked is in a very unfinished state, I expect they’ll wait until its more polished before putting any real marketing weight behind it. They may even be extra late, considering the rocky launch of CS2, with it still lacking much of the content from CS:GO.

Given the significant changes between trailer and gameplay, as well as the delays, I’m guessing the hero got reworked and simplified a lot during development. In his current state, he seems far too simple given the dev time. Still interested to see how he plays around though.

PlateUp can be fun in 2 player co-op. If you’ve played Overcooked, its basically a clone of that, but turned into a roguelike. Its not the longest or deepest, but its still solid, and the price is very fair IMO, esspecially if you get it on sale.

The vehicle challenges were definately the weakest part, but on average, I still enjoyed them. In particular, a lot of the wingsuit courses and land races were fun, and actually took advantage of the game’s strongest elements.