lol the inflammatory bullshit title already decided it.

My habit of collapsing long sections so it’s less annoying to scroll probably doesn’t help either, but whatever.

I don’t disagree with that. But he’s almost definitely responding to all the vitriol directed at employees losing their jobs as a result of bad decisions passed way down the chain to them, and this article is trying to make it some gotcha hit piece.

I do think being in charge of monetization at a company that does so in the way almost any AAA studio does is an inherently unethical job and will have a hard time feeling sorry for him personally, since he’s willing to do that job, but people are also being miserable assholes to everyone else who just is trying to work on a game for a stable employer. And all he’s actually saying is “maybe don’t be an asshole to people”.

He’s very clearly talking about celebrating people losing their jobs, and does so without saying anything super crazy.

What they needed was a lot less empty planets and a lot more that looked populated (not occupied by a small outpost; populated, by a civilization).

The beauty of Skyrim (and I guess fallout, though I hated the guns so much I struggled to ever get into it) was that you could just wander if you got bored. You’d just point yourself in a random direction and see what popped out as interesting. Many of those places would be moderate sized cave systems that brought you out somewhere completely different, where you were free, again, to just pick a direction and explore.

It doesn’t feel like exploration to go to an empty map with a base that you kill everything in, then backtrack back to your ship every time.

Good luck with that.

They didn’t do anything more than a handful of idiots no one wants to deal with is going to be bothered by.

Because no one else is requiring some shitty rating system?

Just going to throw this out there for fellow introverts.

I love how basically the whole gaming space was excited about “more ship/fleet focused Black Flag” and it morphed into some shitty live service trash.

They have a lot of perfectly fine games. If they were priced appropriately.

Mario, Donkey Kong, Metroid are all pretty good 2D platformers (with Metroid obviously being one of the original sources of metroidvania as a genre). But tech has advanced to the point that one person, or a small team, can make 2D games every bit as good as theirs, many small teams have (with better art in some cases), and there are many better options that start at lower prices than their “huge discount mega-sale” price of $40-45, and discount even further beyond that.

Their games sell well enough, so clearly it works on some level, but it’s just generally doesn’t make a lot of sense to get a game like Metroid Dread over a game like Ori or Hollow Knight. Games aren’t fungible, and I get that, but I genuinely think a lot of indie games are better, better looking, and much more substantial than a lot of their 2D offerings.

This is stupid as hell.

What do you think emulation is?

Copying your own copy of a game and using tools for compatibility is what we’re talking about, is protected, and already has the case law demonstrating so.

Cuphead.

I suck.

Easy. YouTube doesn’t want to deal with actual DMCA more than they have to, so they have their own system that lets big companies do whatever they want, whether the content is legal or not.

Allow user hosted servers or fuck off.

No company in history has ever not done so because of technical limitations. It’s literally always exclusively about control.

Seriously, the Last of Us had a really fun multiplayer mode. They didn’t have to make it some shitty treadmill of garbage for people to engage with it.

There are Android ereaders. They’re mostly Chinese manufacturers, and I’ve heard more than one doesn’t follow the GPL properly with their modifications to Android, but the end result is freedom to use a variety of sources of books (including Libby and Hoopla from the library, among others).

I haven’t played with parental controls to know if they’re easy to access, but my most current Boox came with the play store installed and it’s pretty easy to learn how to adjust the display settings for different apps with different types of content.

Libation (add audible to your search to find it)

The interface is 100% of the reason I won’t use it. It’s by far the worst experience for navigating a library I’ve ever seen. It’s just access to your filesystem, except with effectively no files on the screen at a time.

There’s no tags, no ability to choose between by author, series, publisher, genre, etc, just a really bad presentation of your filesystem.

Take-2 has bullied mods that don’t connect to their servers claiming it’s an illegal derivative work or violates the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. If Larian actually wanted to be assholes, they could make life annoying for people who want to make mods.

Again, I don’t think there’s any actual legal merit behind harassment for mods, but lack of merit isn’t always enough for community projects to be comfortable standing up and fighting against well funded harassment.

I do think the lack of merit makes it significantly harder for WOTC to compel Larian into any nonsense like that though.

I don’t know that PR would be a sufficient barrier. They seem perfectly willing to be raging jackasses.

I think the bigger question is whether their contract with Larian is sufficient that they actually have the juice to compel them to take legally questionable action to restrict mods. There are a couple companies that use DMCA shit to harass mods into shutting down, but there really isn’t a strong basis behind it. It’s just them having a big enough checkbook to not be worth the fight. And even the sketchy “bypassing copy protection” method they usually use isn’t relevant to a game that’s DRM free. The strongest actual precedent against mods is stuff like Bungie getting judgements against cheat distributors, but that isn’t the same, because it’s actively degrading the service for others.

My guess is that it won’t get shut down because WOTC can’t make Larian bully people into shutting it down.