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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • the people of Europe showing that unlike their governments, they do not tolerate genocidal apartheid supporters

    I don’t know the details for each country, but as a Western European, it seems to me that apart from Germany, European governments are generally trying to distance themselves from Israel more and more, so there’s that. I can’t tell what each country does in details and in facts, but it’s the impression I’m getting. I know France has taken a couple punishing actions like banning them from an important military sales show and calling for a ban on weapon sales. Anyone knows if other countries have done similar things or the opposite?











  • I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.

    I totally agree that there has been a hate campaign about DEI right-wing complains, but there’s two subjects that came to head at the same time here because it was on the same big title:

    Star Wars Outlaw and AC Shadows had the same business model, Star Wars showed that it failed, and Ubisoft got spooked and said they’d have another look at the monetization model for AC. People did get pissed at both games when their business models with passes and editions everywhere were revealed.

    It’s just that AC also had at the same time the matter of racist and misogynist hate because of the protagonists. I don’t think this happened on Star Wars, and the fact that it failed too shows that it isn’t the only complain people are having against Ubisoft.

    Apparently the monetization guy is stepping on the minority hate campaign subject, he’s the one conflating the two problems here just because his job title. We shouldn’t forget that Ubisoft did pull an infuriating and deplorable stunt with that monetization model.


  • I’m not reading the article but why does the title still need to phrase it like the devs are the ones who need more time, suggesting they haven’t finished making the game a month and a half ahead of release? We already know that investors got spooked by Star Wars exploding because of its sales model with special editions driving up the prices for some bullshit, and we know AC was supposed to do the same but now won’t. They literally just said “actually we’re going back to simultaneous Steam release and we’re dropping the special editions and we’re rethinking the season’s pass from scratch and so-and-so will now be free instead of paid DLC” like a couple weeks ago. I can see that they did that following devs advice, but it wasn’t that the devs needed time, ever since the advent of DLC there have been multiple games from big companies where we’ve heard that the dev team fought against garbage DLC and sales practice but were told to fuck off and do what they were told and then the game exploded. The sales department is the one that needs more time to rethink the worth of cutting this down and selling the pieces, and then have the devs adjust all that.


  • I’m on the side that a remaster of a PS4 gen game dumb, but HZD was always the butt of the joke in regard to those awful generic bobblehead animations during every single dialog. It was laughably bad. With the reveal trailer, it does make a pretty big difference. Everything else? Not so much.

    If this had been a PC game all along, these animation overhaul would have been a patch of the original game, but since the trailer insists that they re-recorded all motion captures for the dialogs of the whole game, they get to sell it full price again.



  • Sales expectations here don’t mean “we think this game is so good it will move x million units,” that thinking doesn’t exist anymore. It starts from the money they put in it, and they deduce “we’ll need to sell x million copies to get the money back with the profit we want.” There have been a few interviews specifically about these two games saying that.

    It’s the same old idea that AAA products (movies, games, same excuse) cost more to make than they bring money back - although we never know exactly how much of that is actually “investors expect an x% return by week y” where x is just too high and y too short and they never want to think longer term, and we never know how far an investment actually goes. Especially in the case of the Remake trilogy where keeping the same engine and world is supposed to drastically reduce the cost of the last game compared to if they had started a new game from scratch with the same content - except part 3 is unlikely to sell more than part 2 given that it’s a sequel.

    At any rate, we all know it’s true that development time and costs keep going up exponentially, and no one likes it (and yet everyone wants 4k 60fps somehow).