We have a lot of entries appearing in Steam, yes, but a huge percentage of them are investor-driven, research-founded money farms.

Where do you think future game developers are getting funneled? This is a tail as old as the industry. Big firms sponsor these entry level programs in order to glut the market with cheap labor.

We’re kind of complacent with having people like Valve around making Steam, but we kind of need more people in that space for people to turn to as every major console gets enshittified.

I do not think we need more game developers (particularly in an industry that’s contracting labor demand in the pivot to AI) more than we need housing developers (particularly in a real estate market that is struggling to meet new production targets).

Listen, I think its cool that people are following their dreams. But I can’t imagine looking at the modern world and thinking “The thing we’re really lacking right now is more new video games”.

What I would love to see is the existing pool of video game developers enjoying more labor protections, shorter working hours, paid sick leave, and guaranteed housing/health care benefits. Because, as someone who has seen the industry chew up and spit out really talented developers, that strikes me as far more important than just learning to code or getting networked into the crunch pipeline at EA or Microsoft.

Walles says: “My favourite example of someone in our cohort who has work experience but is trying to break into the games industry is this young man from Nigeria. He’s a home builder, he’s project managing every day, building houses – and he codes. He wants to take that project management experience and become a producer in video games.”

This is such a bleak read, knowing how many people - both inside the gaming industry and out - who are struggling to find affordable housing.

Dave Plummer is the same guy who thinks Linux is a disease

I guess, maybe in the way that a vaccine is a disease.

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Why are trying to convince me my omptimism is futile?

Because optimism without realism is just a recipe for cynicism later on. The problem of systemic gambling won’t just fix itself.

The worse things get, the faster the number of people wanting to fix it will grow.

Advertising and other propaganda creates a great deal of countervailing pressure.

I honestly don’t. Was never a SS head.

But I’ll take your word for it

The bigger your market grows, the more aware the cultural zeitgeist becomes

You’d like to think so. But look at Robinhood. Five years ago, everyone was screaming about how it was a rigged game. Citadel Investments was manipulating the options markets. Fidelity was getting insider deals. Everything was rigged. People needed to protest. Close out your account. Yadda yadda yadda.

What happened after that? As far as I can tell, Robinhood is more popular than ever. They’re certainly more profitable than ever. There was never any reform or regulation. Mostly, Reddit and similar big name social media firms just purged all the whinners and inflated the profiles of the shills and hacks.

A bookie in Vegas, one city, could keep running their casino forever

DraftKings has been making money hand over fist. They’re desperately trying to find new things for people to bet on. This isn’t one bookie in one city, it’s an international conglomerate that’s expanded its market share around the globe. It is a worldwide bookie.

No shortage of marks. They all keep coming back.

It’s not sustainable.

In the same way that slot machines and roulette wheels aren’t sustainable, sure. Once you figure out they’re a scam, you stop playing them.

But you don’t need to trick all the people all the time. You just need to trick enough people to turn a steady profit. Firms like Microsoft and EA have figured out a formula that’s worked for a long time and now they’re just running the playbook. Like any good bookie in Vegas, they make money off the suckers. And they reinvest a sizeable chunk of their profits into marketing to bring in new marks. And there’s always new marks.

No-one will enjoy where that leads

There will be a dozen senior executives in a VIP lounge absolutely enjoying where this goes in another five or ten years.

Sure. But a lot of the marketing is geared towards younger people unfamiliar with the service. I remember getting deluged with ads my freshman year of high school and again my freshman year of college, for instance.

They’re banking on their unsubscribe process being so obnoxious that they’ll lose fewer people than they gain, year to year. And given the steady growth of revenues for these programs, it appears to work over the long term.

Yeah, you’re pissing people off. But when everyone operates this way, it just becomes the standard for accessing this form of entertainment. Like ad reels before a movie starts. “Well, I just won’t go to the movies!” is a hollow protest in the midst of the crowds of people fighting to get into the theater.

That’s a good idea. I’ll see if I can make it work.

Your ads are not gonna work the way you think they’ll work

They’re banking on people too young/old to know how to navigate past the screen to accidentally sign up for shit.

My one-year-old son accidentally got ahold of my TV remote and signed me back up for Netflix by pushing random buttons a month ago. Had to go through the TV and scour it of all the little pre-installed buy-me apps to make sure that couldn’t happen as easily again. Still not quite sure how to disable the “Netflix” button that’s built into the remote, shy of carving it out with a knife.

I’m personally a big fan of doing the very tiny semi-transparent (X) that’s impossible to click on as far away from the “Yes, Please Digitally Fuck My Wallet Pussy” blinking blue bar at bottom center of the screen.

Soulless cash grab with a healthy veneer of jingoism and plenty of toxic masculinity.

You’ll play your Muscle Man Beats Up The Evil Foreigners game, you’ll pay top dollar for it, and if you’re lucky you’ll get a loot box with a Trump/MBS NFT in it.

Was going to say… Who is out there buying games way outside their machines’ specs? Seems pretty straightforward.

I do get a little annoyed at the folks angry at BL4 using a higher end engine. Like, it does look a lot better than previous iterations. That engine upgrade wasn’t for nothing.

There are a ton of looter shooters floating around that aren’t using the Unreal 5 engine. Just play one of those instead. Hell, go back and play BL1. I’m pretty sure that thing runs on a toaster.

How does someone with such a shitty personality and dress sense get so smug?

Lots and lots of money.

If I looked and acted like him I would want to punch myself in the face

He has top of the line security details to do that for him.

Sure sure.

The United States is a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them

But these were ostensibly the priorities of the party winning the votes of liberals.

Conservatives want to take all our games away, they have hated video games for decades, they made it clear for years that they want to see games censored the same way as movies and television.

Wasn’t the OG 80s era censorship campaign coming from Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman?

Didn’t we get this whole '10s era Christian Conservative “We just want to debate! We just want our free speech on College Campus and The Internet!” campaign?

It seems as though censorship of <insert bad thing> is mostly just a wedge issue to put your partisan group on the side of the current popular media trend. In the '80s, it was saying you were Opposed To Satan during the Satanic Panic. In the 90s, it was saying you were Opposed to Gangster Rap and Saggy Pants and Drugs. In the '00s, we were in an ideological war against Islam. In the '10s, we were in an ideological war against Big Government Socialism Taking Over Our Lives. In the '20s its been the War on Woke Foreigners.

Do you all really think Palantir and associated social monitoring programs are just going to make drones to try to spy on what American citizens are masturbating to? Nope! Palantir is a broad-spectrum monitoring company, and they will have various manner of AI bots scanning the contents of your hard-drive and reporting your browsing and downloading habits to all kinds of agencies and institutions who would loooooove to have more “product” to sell to our for-profit prison industry!

That’s one theory.

Another is that we’re trying to put together an industrial scale compromat operation, such that any given individual can be smeared and alienated from the public at-large if they oppose the current regime.

I’m sure advertising can function as a side hustle. But we’ve been drifting away from any kind of real consumer economy for nearly a decade. Everything is “how quickly can the government and its business interests cycle money between one another to replicate economic growth”? You don’t really need end-users if all you’re making is an AI-driven marketplace.

Maybe we need more women working in game design.

eardrums immediately shattered by Gamergate reactionary media

Amazing that they weren’t using Signal

I wouldn’t rule it out. But you can’t do public comms over Signal.

it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.

Again, I wouldn’t rule it out. But if I’m on a public group that’s very likely compromised by the IDF, I’m not going to announce all the other protocols they need to block.

He’s just reporting one avenue that’s been closed to the protesters by a corporate entity that is now complicit in genocide.

blaming them on using WhatsApp is besides the point

WhatsApp admins are explicitly interfering with a public protest in order to satisfy a genocidal foreign government.

This is at least as big a deal as TikTok censorship of anti-China posters. It’s just on behalf of a US ally, so we’re defending it rather than threatening to interfere in their business practices in turn.

the shame is on the cess pool that is Meta

Who appoints WhatsApp administration heads if not Meta? It’s the same picture.