I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.

Well duh that’s what they Keyblade is for

I’ve worked in a few.

I could understand if each department had massive budgets that were spent in an idiotic manner due to inexperienced and incompetent leads.

I could understand it each department got less than the bare minimum, resulting in a final product that was mediocre despite strong individual contributors.

What I don’t understand is this mentality “hey let’s spend $200 million on this new TV Show, but only 2 million on the writing staff.”

Okay but they should recognize the concept of ROI and diminishing returns. An accountant should be perfectly capable of realizing that that after a certain point it makes sense to spend money hiring more writers versus bigger name actors or CGI.

I have no idea why streaming companies will spend like 10 million dollars per episode, and then spend the absolute minimum on writing staff.

Like, they have the data on what everyone watches. They have to know that some mid 2000s content with worse visuals but better writing is beating a ton of their flashy new IPs. Yet they’ll still insist on spending insane cash on something that will completely fade into the background in like a year max.

Honestly after watching DS9 I think O’Brien is the best engineer in the entire series.

Almost every other engineer we see works on some flagship federation starship. O’Brien has had to deal with:

• DS9, a hodgepodge of three different alien technologies and the occasional booby trap
• The Defiant, which was half baked to such an extent he had to design and implement a complete overhaul of major systems
• The dominion war alliance fleet, where he had to oversee repairs for the ships of three major alien races. Even if he didn’t do the repairs himself, he probably had to have significant working knowledge.

I feel like the only person you could compares is Scotty, and that’s mostly based on his feats in that one TNG episode and SNW.

You guys aren’t gonna like to hear this, but being super wealthy and successful is always going to confer some degree of cool.

That being said it doesn’t sound like they are doing this because they think it’s fun/sexy. The users in this article all seem to frame their usage in the context of mental health. While the merits are questionable, it’s objectively better than some Wall Street exec doing coke or slamming booze. I feel like a better article would be questioning government policy that allows billionaires to experiment with psychedelics, but ensures that an actual FDA approved treatment that the average joe could access will never happen.

I can’t help but notice these authors all exclusively focus on tech, while giving other high compensation and influential industries a pass. It really feels like a ton of journalists have a personal vendetta against tech that goes beyond the substance of any of their actions.

Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.

I’m railing about corporate making a mediocre game and then jamming some culture war shit into it in a blantant attempt to distract from the fact that the game is mediocre.

Also AC has had “more than just white guys” featured since the first game.

I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.

Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.

The CHIPS bill was a massive disappointment. It was cut down to 1/5th from the intended size due to house committee BS, and then the Biden administration decided to use it as a platform to enact a bunch of wholly unrelated social policies.

I’m not saying that jobs should not offer onsite daycare or have lofty environmental goals. However this was a bill designed to ensure the US maintains an advantage in a critical industry. Maybe put that stuff in another bill.

I actually have more respect for Pelosi after this.

She willingly stepped down in 2022. Her first reaction was to refuse to comment, and not exert pressure. She seemed to genuinely want either Joe Biden to come to the conclusion that he can’t run on his own and/or Hakeem Jefferies to lead the charge to have him step down.

It was only after Jefferies proved himself pretty much useless that she inserted herself back into the primary role. She proceeded to prove that, despite everything ,she’s incredibly capable in a way that no other democrat can match.

Regardless of how the election turns out, I think we can all agree that Biden was a massive liability for Democrats. While I have personal issues in regards to the Harris/Walz ticket, most Americans seem infinitely more amicable to it than Biden/Harris. None of that would have been possible without Pelosi.

BL1 writing was perfect for the time. The thing that made Borderlands was the 4 player online co-op. Internet culture was full of over the top edgy humor during that era. The writing fit the time.

I remember when Baron Flynn’s intro was just him smoking a joint. Everyone burst out laughing.

The ultimate use case for crypto mining: as a front for an illegal grow op.

Yeah I just think it’s funny a Senator took time out of his day to be like “we need a lobster emoji”

I wonder if this is a way to get rid of the two greeters at the door.

Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?

I feel like Game of Thrones could have had Harry Potter levels of cultural staying power if they didn’t completely fuck the ending.

I liked the SNW temporal cold war explanation.