one thing i’d be interested in: is it possible to make a fun 4X-style game that challenges the very premises of 4X (which are mostly patterned after the models of expansion we’re familiar with in the West)?

Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having “no goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes.” Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there’s no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.

don’t do this

With approximately 600 members, Activision Quality Assurance United-CWA is the largest group of union-represented workers at any U.S. game studio. Workers in the new unit are located in California, Texas, and Minnesota. Over 1,000 video game workers at Microsoft now have union representation with CWA.

this is very cool, and hopefully more workers leverage the Microsoft neutrality agreement.

i don’t care about debating this with you. i will, as a concluding remark, just note incredible irony in lecturing about entitlement while simultaneously demanding gratitude for your work from people you literally just told to fuck off from this service three replies ago. in very blunt terms: i think you are getting the exact level of gratitude you deserve from us after this exchange, which is none. my experiences with you have been thoroughly unpleasant, unkind, and paint you as a toxic person and it is my view that your “years of work put into this software” are meaningless in the face of the blatant disrespect you show members of your community.

i mean, if your response to a community which has stuck by your software for over two years now and hasn’t even publicly committed to leaving is “fuck you” because you don’t like that we are vocally opinionated on our problems, frictions, and perceived deficiencies with your software—yeah, why would we ever do anything to help you guys? you’re strongly vindicating us here in supposedly “never ma[king] any code contributions” or “donat[ing] any money” (and i’m just going to grant you that for the sake of argument, i’m not even sure it’s true). i’m not going to contribute to someone’s software when they’re openly contemptuous of me for trying to make their software better.

if i was on the fence previously about the upthread critique that you guys are kind of assholes to anybody who dissents about what you think should be the way forward, i am no longer. all i can say further is that you are acting severely out of pocket here as a spokesperson for the software and as a community manager and i would strongly encourage you to log off at this point before you say something that make your community relations even worse than they already are.

I encourage you to do that and point your demands and entitlement at someone else.

respectfully (and as someone who has not paid attention to this thread outside of my one comment): i am continually failing to understand how asking you guys to give us better moderation tools to do our jobs–which is our primary reason we’re even looking elsewhere and, if resolved, would likely placate about 90% of the problem we have with continuing to use your software–is entitlement. we’re basically handing you a silver platter entitled “hey, here is our problem, and here is how you can keep us on Lemmy in the long term” and you guys seem to just not take that seriously at all? and now you seem to want to debate us out of thinking it’s an issue while simultaneously telling us to fuck off for investing in your software at all!

today is apparently just a bloodbath day in gaming generally. Deck Nine is also laying 20% of its staff off, and esports company ESL Faceit Group is laying off 15%

according to Jason Schreier:

PlayStation plans to close its London studio, which was responsible for several recent VR games.

Among other divisions, the layoffs will hit Insomniac (Spider-Man), Naughty Dog (The Last of Us), and Guerrilla (Horizon), three of PlayStation’s most successful subsidiaries

would you believe me if i told you this is Bloober’s first attempt at combat

i think it’s very clear now that the lack of unionization in the gaming industry will need to change, or every year or two or whatever arbitrary interval we’ll see an astronomical number of people losing their jobs all at once in this way.

i am aware of what a mod is and literally used it at you in reply–what you call them, however, has no relevance at all to my point. you’ve earned the thread’s first 3 day ban for your unnecessarily weird attitude about this.

ask any old-timer fanfiction writer about this. “fan work” as a whole–including mods–is a gigantic gray space in current copyright law and IP holders are almost certainly within their technical legal rights to prohibit any works like Revolution on a blanket basis. the current arrangement where most rightsholders look the other way and/or accept the existence of such fan works is a largely informal one, and there’s nothing codifying it being that way. it could arbitrarily change (or just be fucked up by a court case) at pretty much any time–and, indeed, occasionally rightsholders still do try and enforce their IP quite aggressively.

i guess this is a bit opaque but: pretty much any (formal or informal) mod action or guidance that isn’t completely self-evident (i.e. spam removal, approving users, pinning threads) has been seen by at least two or three other mods, usually more depending on who’s around. that includes this informal correction from me upthread. the site-wide mod team is aware of what i said because we have a chat for vibe checking stuff like this–and straightforwardly, if they disagreed with how i responded or the substance of what i said, then the posts would not still be up because i’d delete or amend them.

This is nitpicky and toxic.

are we seriously calling “pointing out that the argument being made has been changed in a rhetorical sleight of hand because the original argument is completely wrong” nitpicky and toxic now? come on. this is a piss take and bordering on “let’s look the other way when someone is making a false argument that aligns with what i want to be true”.

were this Nintendo, they’d be receiving rightful backlash, but people, like you, online will give a pass due to the sheer fact that it’s Valve doing the takedown.

well… now you’re indicating that this kind of isn’t hyperbole from you, because you’re just straight arguing the underlying (and still incorrect) “hyperbolic” point now, lol

Yes, hyperbole is non-falsefiable. It’s a rhetorical device, not a claim unto itself.

i mean i think this is just obviously ridiculous. if someone said “every person who dislikes Valve is a pedophile who hurts children” or whatever hyperbolically i think it’d be silly to say that’s non-falsifiable just because it’s hyperbolic. there’s still an underlying and incorrect claim being made

you run into the same issue: being hyperbolic here doesn’t really work if literally the same week of your hyperbole, something directly countering the hyperbolic point you’re making happens. hyperbole isn’t non-falsifiable or unimpeachable just because it’s hyperbole and intended to be humorous–you can still be hyperbolically wrong, and in this case you are.

While we really dug the game (you can check out our review for more on that), there’s one odd detail that stuck out we can’t help but give its own article: one of the game’s minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone — probably Ubisoft — forgot to record and add a human being’s voice for the role.

what a… weird thing to have happen. i’m not sure what the utility of it would be for one minor NPC but this being an accident honestly strains charitability, i think

TF2: Source 2 was, in short, because they were using assets they didn’t have the license to

Let’s not give Valve a pass just because they can lazily and baselessly say “um nintendo!” about it.

okay but this was not your initial argument–this is an entirely separate issue from it, actually. your argument was “Valve about to become as litigious as Nintendo with IP they’ve let rot.” and that is demonstrably false or they wouldn’t have let Portal Revolution release. if they were going to be litigious about the Portal IP, why would they DMCA Portal64 but not Revolution?

to me, this is clearly an example of incorrectly getting mad about something and then shifting the goalposts to not have to take the L.