rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

IT'S JUST CAPITALISM LOSERS

i used to pirate games and then signed up for Steam to be legit and use multiplayer but i'm cool with going back to pirating games if it is helping The Resistance

with a dash of "It's just another global corporate monster like apple, microsoft, facebook and whatever, I don't know why anybody needs to single this firm out for scorn when they ALL DO IT"

Seriously let's get into the robust defenses of Steam's monopoly, come on dudes

http://ctj.org/images/2014/googleevil.jpg

Oh Adam thank goodness there was a service that made it easy for you to stop blatantly stealing other people's work without suffering any consequences

the resistance is free to join but if you want access to the higher ranks and badges you need magic gems which are only $2.99 for 100 or $5.99 for 250

tombo, i would argue that it's phenomenally naive writing and is being written with the presumption that I as the reader have all sort of preconceptions that i flat out don't have
corporations are inherently amoral by definition

please note all resistance dues accrue directly to @CEO who reserves the right to dole them back out to the loom operators and mining subcontractors at @CEO's discretion, dependent on quarterly expectations - we are beyond criticism because this is literally how every other company works we swear. did you know Windows is actually developed by slaves it's a fact

corporations are inherently amoral by definition

oh fuck I need a drink now

i will join the street team at microsoft if they give me 500 magic gems for $6.99

A well written critique of Steam's poor business practices would be of interest to me!
This one includes the following sentences:

Good Guy Valve worked hard to make us believe that willingly installing surveillance and control software onto our computers was a morally benevolent, perhaps even righteous act — and we swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

But it took the better part of a decade for enough people to start noticing that Steam's refund policy wasn't so much a “policy” as the words “eat shit and die” printed in huge size 72 font and to start raising hell about it.

This is the Good Guy everyone seems too afraid to call out, the toxic friend who is so popular that upsetting him will just make things worse for you, so you convince yourself he's really not that bad and that everyone else is over-reacting

xp show me a for-profit that's kept to a morality-above-profit mission statement and I'll pour you that drink

personally, i am extremely smart and don't need a filthy article to point out a monopoly, but p sure monopolies are still problo

people really do like valve. and EA has been seen as the quintessential heartless corporate philistine for like decades now. when they tried to wrest some distribution control from valve it was annoying and made the consumer experience worse and there's nothing more morally obscene to consumers than worsening their experience.

anyway this about covers it i think?

god this is written in an irritating fashion, but it makes a good point

— Inventor of Leftism (@ByYourLogic) May 17, 2017

NO SALE, NO OWNERSHIP, NO REFUNDS
We all eventually discovered that our close, personal and entirely fictional relationship with Valve did not entitle us to any kind of refund on our purchases.

*11 paragraphs follow about how shitty Valve was for not offering refunds*

Even when Valve finally did get around to launching a refund program (a full two years after the supposedly evil EA did it!), many people quite accurately and angrily observed that the default refund option was in Steam credit, which means Valve wins either way. It's almost like Good Guy Valve just ... doesn't want you to have your money back.

ffs they made you uncheck a box get a grip

We love the Steam Sales and the discounts they bring. But perhaps even more than we love the low, low prices, we love The Sale Event itself. We love the pre-sale videos that we carefully cut together to hype each other up for the imminent spending spree. We love the in-jokes and the memes, the constant banter about the bleeding wallets and the screaming, tortured credit cards that just can't take any more.

There's a word that people use to describe “creating a sense of excitement to improve spending on an upcoming commercial event,” and that word is “marketing.” Marketing is a job, and in the real world, people get paid for it.

But in the world of Good Guy Valve we give that marketing away, for free, to a billion-dollar corporation every year (sometimes twice a year, if he asks nicely), doing our bit to help that corporation make more money during a sale event.

We’re colleagues in the sense that Valve gets our money and our labor, a topic we’ll talk more about later. We do our part with the memes, the articles and the social media posts, and our good friend Valve does the rest. The rest meaning taking our money.

what is he talking about he is professionally writing about all of this for a major publication presumably he is being paid for this. is he upset that Valve isn't paying him directly for message board comments and retweets?

lol otm that article was dumb

DLH OTM

Adam and Tofu just more accelerationist than the rest of us

Adam, yes, please go back to being a thief, that seems to be your aim here

as monopolies go valve/steam isn't much of one

it's approximately as much of one as twitch, youtube and the itunes store

yeah none of which i think are particularly egregious. in the "video game" space steam isn't even the biggest player. it's the biggest player in the PC gaming online retail space.

All of the arguments against this piece seem to be just going around the point entirely. So it's not egregious - that's the same as being okay?
Is it perfectly acceptable that we have to rely on lawsuits in other countries to keep this company from exploiting its "exclusive distributor" status to an even greater extent?

what is steam exclusive distributor of?

...

I dunno man I tried my best maybe you can load more results than me

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=exclusive%20on%20steam

I'm slow, that's also maybe why I needed forks to tell me corporations aren't moral beings

Half Life, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress? Is that the complaint? It's not like they're three particularly hot franchises atm.

steam is valve's exclusive distributor which is not exactly a monopoly, it's just the delivery service for the games they make

i dunno why this got under your skin tom but i'll happily pour you that drink now
http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/16/161375/2254963-link_receives_red_potion.jpg

i'm with you tombot

_If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation. They’d not only be caught dead before helping a company like that come to power, they might even join the resistance to stop them._

lol are you serious

I had a hard time finishing the article after reading this. The article reads like an angry Reddit post.

I think the average PC gamer is only worried about big corporations when they don't adhere to ethics in journalism

luckily nothing unethical happens during the manufacturing of those PCs

https://www.patreon.com/saint11/posts?tag=tutorial

good piece on the architecture of dark souls: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-06-18-an-obituary-for-the-architecture-of-dark-souls-eternally-dying-land

https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/17/15974096/what-it-costs-to-run-an-independent-video-game-store

good piece, albeit depressing

this is nuts:

Jake Stoner at Cap'n Games in Sparks, Nev. simply has an Amazon Prime account and preorders one copy of every new game. Since Amazon offers 20 percent off preorders, he gets a lower per-unit price than distributors offer. Then he turns those around for a $5 profit on each.

"I don't try to mislead my customers, but I'll let them know that I'll have one," he says. "So if you want it, that's great. I don't have an issue with that. But I'll only have one. And that works OK. But most of the time, I just refer people elsewhere."

For some like Brossman at Complete in Box, though, it's worth it to suck it up and play the distribution game. He points out that certain items have even worse margins than new games, noting that he pays $29.90 for a Microsoft gift card that sells for $30. If a customer buys that with a credit card, his store loses money on the sale.

fell into a youtube hole last night watching a series called 'boundary break', where a guy pokes around in areas outside the limits of videogame spaces

super-dorky but i love this shit - here's the dark souls iii one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbaA6_84gyY&list=PLYfhW_P-MkU7vBmWwwyqdIWNDzXfEZwnO&index=24

directly related but not specifically about games - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-04-bungies-13-year-battle-to-kill-crunch-culture

"A lot of people get burned out because they don't take the vacation, so as a manager part of your job is to make sure they do," Timmins said. "Leadership needs to set examples. It can take years for a culture to develop; for people to believe it's okay to take a vacation, that it's not a crazy crunch culture where something bad is going to happen when they come back."

i wish i could staple this to my PMs' foreheads (i don't work in games, but i am a software dev; at one point this summer i worked 29 days in a row, and we still haven't launched)

good article. hope people in the business read it!

https://gamehistory.org/aladdin-source-code/

https://kotaku.com/the-runescape-players-who-farm-gold-so-they-dont-starve-1819720013

herne bay arcade, kent. not rly heavy on video games but there’s some good vignettes:

http://www.seasphotography.org.uk/search/results/6b8242cef3ec13ea3a46da0b9e2ecbf7

https://splendorsvendor.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/behold-a-paleblood-sky/

https://kotaku.com/one-of-the-most-famous-faces-on-twitch-refuses-to-let-t-1820333034

good one

So the developers behind one the first idle RPGs to take off have announced they’re abandoning the free-to-play model because it’s unethical:

http://www.clickerheroes2.com/paytowin.php

Regarding Metal Gear Solid samples in Burial's 'Untrue'.

https://kottke.org/17/12/the-making-of-burials-untrue

Not a whole lot on Metal Gear Solid, but thanks for linking that, lots I didn't know yet

this is not "worth reading" but is it weird that i think Tim Rogers is my favorite person to hear talk about videogames? is anyone else a tim rogers fan?

Where be the kingfish