MudMan

Man, I’ve had two separate devices fail to install updates the last week, leading to tons of weirdness and troubleshooting. I even had to chkdsk c: /F at one point like a neanderthal.

I have enough coomputers laying around that I’d move more of them to other OSs, Linux included if I hadn’t tried that and found it as much or more of a hassle in those specific machines, be it compatibility issues or just fitness for the application. I’m not married to Windows at all, but there are definitely things that are much easier to handle there, which does justify sticking with it through the reinstalls and awkward weirdness on those.

For straight revenue, yeah, that’d be right. Technically everything else is a rounding error. But if Epic was one of those single game unicorns like Riot or Rovio this would not make much sense. The synergies of Unreal with both the movie and theme park buisness for Disney seem like a better fit. I mean, assuming the move makes actual sense, Disney is out there talking about game collaborations and it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve spent money randomly and poorly in the gaming business. I just think the investment would make sense even if Fortnite wasn’t in the mix.

And either way it’s being blown out of proportion by the news because they haven’t even bought the company. 1.5B is what? 10% as much as Tencent owns?

I’m not sure what you think “our” game is.

I mean, in my game there is a functioning rule of law where separation of powers is real and universal access to the justice system is enforced regardless of income level. In that game when you set a rule that rule is applied across the board. And yeah, if the system is not playing that game you’re supposed to make it play it.

Is that the game? Because it’s a good game.

That is most likely going to generate less revenue than promoting donations, or a comparable amount at best. WinRAR is the meme example.

From a PR and marketing perspective, if I wanted to maximize my revenue as a single developer I would set up a Patreon or encourage recurring donations through the software by providing bragging rights stuff (merch, insider access, early access to unfinished builds and so on). Single mandatory payments simply reproduce the piracy/license access of commercial software and shaming people into paying without coercion just makes you seem less appealing to people who would donate anyway.

Ah, great, we should just let them run with it and never try, then.

I swear, defeatism gets me so bad. It may just be the most conservative power at work, along with “all politicians are the same”.

Incidentally, anybody thinking about a class action over Sony removing lifetime access to Funimation movie downloads? Because it’s the second time in a year they risk it on that one and I deeeeefinitely want to see that tested in court.

I… yeah, what? Disney is what does it? You were cool with Tencent, Sony, Lego, the massive fine for mishandling underage information? Disney. That’s your line.

Alright.

Hah. The framing from normie news is so weird. It’s “bizarrely Disney is investing on Fortnite”, instead of “Disney buys a stake on the people making Unreal, which at this point is like half of their and everybody else’s VFX pipeline”.

I wonder if the gaming news guys will have a better picture or the “Disney Fornite whaaaa?!” angle is what people will take away from this across the board.

I mean, good luck getting past entertainment industry contracts.

But also… please, please, PLEASE make it so that political opinions and conspiracy theories can’t be used to fire people. I double dare the CEO of a social media network, an electric car company and an aerospace company create a labor market where you can sue for discrimination for that reason.

I mean, I only want to see it if I can reset the timeline back to this point, but still, I REALLY want to see it.

Ah, welcome time traveller. Can you take me back to 2008 with you? It was so much nicer there.

Seriously, every multiplayer game I’ve played the last few years has cross-platform play, both them and Sony have been making PC ports for ages and the reason I own a Series X is that it’s quietly the best set-top media player out there, price-to-performance, and a cheap, convenient platform to play games on a TV.

I mean, if this is a prelude to them no longer making hardware I’d be bummed out, but not for those reasons.

No, listen, get with the program. You’re supposed to be very, very mad that a brand is losing its exclusives. You’re also supposed to be very, very mad if any PC storefronts ever fund a game to sell as an exclusive, unless they’re Steam. You’re also never supposed to acknowledge the contradiction.

You’re being a gamer wrong.

Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn’t.

There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.

Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).

I’d be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies’ look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so… make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.

Nah, I’m mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.

Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized “hidden gem” lists of game collectors in thirty years, it’s that.

Well, then you’re my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it’s a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they’re both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).

And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.

Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn’t sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what’s realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.

Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn’t played it personally.

Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I’d make that trade.

Man, these guys really can’t catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.

I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren’t that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?

I don’t know what the business plan was meant to be, and it’s kinda killing me that I don’t fully grasp it.

The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the “I can’t believe it’s not Deus Ex” franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.

I came here to joke that judging by what toy stores look like, they probably just sell merch. I was extremely not ready for that to be the canonical explanation and now I feel more respect for the writers. More empathy, too, because… you know they know.

The stuff my dad made. My mom worked past our lunchtime, my dad did not.

https://media.tenor.com/WUwtwTKCvicAAAAC/reexamine-personal-biases.gif