I’m cautiously excited. Because if they do pull it off, it’s gonna be great. But just keep in mind that Cyberpunk 2077 looked like “the Cyberpunk 2077 CDPR pitched from the start” in the trailers. Until reviewers get their hands on copies, take everything with a pinch of salt.

My advice is work out where you draw the line, and don’t cross it.

I’m gonna be honest- if you’re buying games through Steam, you’re already giving money to a deeply unethical firm: Valve. Valve takes a 30% cut of all transactions on Steam. Valve is also the studio that introduced lootboxes and similarly predatory microtransactions to the western market, and continues to profit from them to this day.

Where I draw the line is when a studio drops below the already low bar set by the industry. When a studio sexually harasses an employee to the point of suicide. When most of the game’s development cycle is pure crunch. When a studio puts predatory microtransactions into a singleplayer game.

I also draw the line when a game (or any other work of media, for that matter) is directly giving money to bigoted scumbags. If a studio employs bigoted scumbags, that person is getting paid whether or not I buy the game. But if a studio is making a game based on the IP of a bigoted scumbag, they’re getting a cut of each sale. When a copy of that game is brought, they’re getting a bit of money they wouldn’t have got if the game wasn’t brought.

If that’s the case, I figured it was “Marxist-Leninist”, which is what most of them prefer to describe themselves as.

Or Reddit. You know, the website where a community dedicated to sharing CSAM was one of the biggest on the site and its lead moderator was a sitewide celebrity (oh, and Reddit’s current top admin was also a moderator on that community).

Some people are just spiteful shitheads. Also, there’s been a bit of a wave of DDOS attacks against US-registered sites lately- Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, got DDOSed a few weeks back. Seems like they’re going after any site that doesn’t have good DDOS protection and is based in the US.

Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon. I think there’s an anime adaptation.

Stellaris. It’s been “that game” for me practically as long as I’ve been into gaming. I’ve got nearly 1000 hours on Steam alone.

Not gonna lie, if they make good on their promises (I’m still rather suspicious of CDPR after the absolute mess that was 2077’s launch), it might just tempt me to pick up 2077 and Phantom Liberty next time there’s a big Steam sale.

Called it. I’d be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta’s just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole “planned Fediverse integration” for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.

Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they’d have been talking about “Metaverse integration” instead.