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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I actually doubt it. 30% of all of Hasbro’s revenue comes from WotC (I’ve heard higher than 50% before, but a quick Google says 30%). Of that I’ve heard people say as high as 90% of WotC’s income comes from Magic: The Gathering.

    Artists are paid a set rate, not commission for their art, but thousands of cards are purchased at very little cost to WotC. It’s a golden goose that is literally keeping Hasbro afloat, they’d be fools to touch the operations of MtG with a 10ft pole, nevermind replace it’s core with AI.


  • The most common cheat is probably gaining money or experience, but there have always been pretty extensive mod menus for GTA Online with tools from invincibility to making your vehicles rainbow, to randomly causing other players to explode or setting hundreds of muggers on them.

    In 2015ish, I used to cheat, other than getting rich, all I was interested in doing was making an indestructible chrome bus with smoke trails that I’d drive around picking up players in, to teleport us all to North Yankton and back like a tour guide.


  • I’m just really hoping that whatever they intend to use AI for isn’t art. Ideally there is enough backlash to this that they backpedal again for a year or so, but failing that, I do not want to see it touch the art at all.

    In my opinion, WotC is an art company. I don’t really see anything better in 2024 D&D 5e to what is expected in Tales of the Valiant 5e or is in Level up Advanced 5e, or for that matter, any RPG really. The only thing they excel on is the money behind them to have an entirely different relationship with artists. And that’s not mentioning Magic the Gathering which needs the art even more.

    There aren’t that many avenues for AI in D&D. You can’t really replace the game design due to the fact that AI can’t really problem solve or innovate. It’s already likely used internally by the finance departments etc, hell it’s built into Microsoft programs, it course it is used. It can’t really be sued to make the writing more efficient because the writing of a D&D book is sacred, you can’t change the word prone to lying down for readability for example.

    So it’s likely coming for art or WotC are returning to the idea of AI DMs, which is silly and I have no interest in, and I can’t imagine it being anything but a totally adjacent product to D&D.

    I can’t wait to see what evil and terrible way I’m proved wrong.





  • I was at the end of school during the 2016 election and my closest friend in my Comp-Sci class who I’d known from 11 was in the far right pipeline; this person found Hillary absolute abhorrent, loved trump and was generally the 2016 Pepe style crypto-facist. We live in the UK too, so this is even less common than it probably was in the USA.

    When school ended, I stopped speaking to this person, but a few years ago saw that she’s come out as a trans woman. I’m happy for her and not really keen to reconnect at all, but oh boy am I nosy about the timeline of her political views. I wonder if she still holds them, was struggling with internalised issues or just had a huge realisation at some point.





  • Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.

    There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.

    On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.

    Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.