• 4 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • Just to be clear, publishers don’t like reviewers, either. They’re seen as gatekeepers of audiences and people to be managed and bribed, and that means keeping the reviewer market small. They want reviewers to be PR people with a fascade of being impartial, and few enough to count on one hand.

    This is also somwthing that’s happening, then, because Nintendo sees a pathway to victory. Not only are their games licensed only for their own hardware, but they can claim the reviews are misleading and invalid because the games aren’t designed to run on the platforms they’re beinf reviewed on.

    Like, none of this is Nintendo coming for your emulation catalogue. It’s them coming for people trying to generate an income from their games. And all of the big publishers are going to line up behind them on this, because they also hate anyone who’s making coin using their creation.

    That’s capitalism. That’s what it means for something to be capital, and to own it. It’s what owning the means of production is all about.


  • This is not about the legality of emulation, unfortunately, but about whether people have the rights to publish lets plays without a license.

    Many suits in the gaming industry see lets plays as theft. They see people making money using their games and believe lets players should have to pay to license thst content, and that they should have the right to revoke that license if they don’t like what people are saying about or doimg with their games.

    I work in the industry, and I know people who work or who have worked at studios owned by every major punlisher in the west. This is a thing they all habe someone of import chomping at the bit for.

    It’s just that none of them want to be the one singled out as the first or only one attacking lets plays. Nor to be the one that shoulders the costs of having their position challenged in court.





  • A lot of games developers don’t understand trends in gaming that aren’t explicitly gamist. Even as walking sinulators and cozy games have garnered audiences that make those genres viable, many in the industry have refused to actually look at them with an eye to understand who they appeal to, why, and what about them is doing the connecting with their audiences.

    I worked on a mobile PvP project that rejected purely aesthetic elements because none of the director, designer, not “monetization specialist” could understand why anyone would want them, even as Fortnite was bursting onto the scene making its money on its emotes and paper doll elements.

    Art driven paper doll games were also eating our lunch in the mobile space.

    There are clearly some in the industry who understand the appeal, but most of them are not decision makers in development studios. The decision makers got there by coming up in a much more focused, much less casual, much less inclusive era in gaming, and have a pretty fixed idea of what a game “is” or “is supposed to be”.

    Because of this,aAs things shift towards more IP licensing deal, the results are going to be a lot of conflicts between tone and gameplay on these projects.



  • corporate profits decrease very slightly

    This is the thing that people will reflexively point to, but this:

    quality of life increases

    This is the real issue. If quality of life increases, workers are less desperate, and are less willing to put up with their employers BS. Moreover, if other jobs are also paying a living wage, it’s much easier to quit.

    We have seen, over and over, that businesses are willing to spend money to exert control over workers. They’ll do it even if it means a decline in profits, or even in revenue. Because at the end of the day, if you have your needs met, any money left over is just power, and power is meant to be used to control others.





  • If it’s still 9 months away, there’s no real reason to announce it publicly before the Christmas season. The fact that the original Switch’s sales are flagging is not a reason to announce, since it’s not launching in time for the holidays. Its announcement isn’t going to spurr Switch 1 sales.

    When it’s announces will be entirely deoendent on when retailers need to know launch details. Once it’s outside of Nintendo, they’ll have to announce things publicly or risk losing control over the narrative.



  • I think a significant issue here is that Reddit is not built for fostering communities, and things that mimic Reddit will not foster them, either. The whole model is built around an endless number of very large, single subject discussion spaces with functionally no globally consistent moderation or oversight.

    This is a model of content categorization and filtering for individual consumption, not community building. Lemmy “communities” are just content tags, they’re not real community spaces. They’re never going to encourage the kind of tight knit spaces with idiosyncratic customs, rituals, and rules that actual vommunities have. They’re never going to let you get to know others because “off topic” discussions are meant to be had in entirely different spaces.

    Reddit and reddit-like services are about content creation and delivery, noy community. Thatms baked into the form.