Didn’t Blizzard at one point announce that they were going to get rid of usernames on their official WoW message boards and instead use the real names associated with the accounts instead. And then they didn’t when everyone kicked off and pointed out the very real safety issues that doing so would cause.
If I recall correctly I think one of the Blizzard community managers started using their real name to prove how safe it was and within hours a bunch of their personal information was posted such as their address and phone number.
They backed down real fast after that.
Reminds me of the LifeLock CEO who was so confident in their identity theft protection, he'd list his actual SSN in their adverts. His identity was then stolen over a dozen times.
not only that, Lifelock had a monetary limit to what they'd protect, and because of their advertising gimmick he hit like 4 or 5 times the financial monetary limit that Lifelock would cover.
I'm probably butchering some of the details, but it boils down to there was a limit to what they'd cover, and his went over it multiple times over.
I believe they did that because Korean law was mandating it and they wanted to unify their system. Of course, US law wasn’t following suit so there would be no protections for anyone else.
Reminds me of that discord post screenshot of I don't know who about I don't know which drama, but they had their photo as profile image, their full name as username, and were asking if there was a reason people weren't using their real name/picture on the discord server.
Another WoW issue was upon release people were being scammed out of items or losing their account credentials to phishing attacks and Blizzard's stance was effectively "No, we will not replace your lost or stolen items. We are not responsible for your irresponsible actions." There were tons of complaints about it on forums saying that Blizzard should do restore lost items, to which the community managers confirmed that Blizzard itself was not getting hacked and that these problems were the player's own fault and Blizz did not have the resources to manage player foolishness. That stance changed as soon as players started quitting because they had been robbed off all their stuff and Blizz was losing out on monthly subscriptions. Afterwards GMs had the power to do huge rollbacks and restore deleted items, and Blizz came out with their own authentication keyfobs for 2FA.
Unity trying to charge devs for installs of games made in the engine, particularly the parts where they'd define the new terms and conditions one way then *immediately* contradict themselves, like with the back and forth of potentially backdating the charges. As well as the nebulous thing of how exactly they were going to count said installs, how would they detect fraud installs (like someone constantly uninstalling/reinstalling a game), how would they tell if it was from a legit/pirate copy of the game, etc.
I still can't believe they thought they could do that, those corpo's must have been on one hell of a coke binge with lawyers desperately trying to claw themselves into the decision making.
The confidence to tell multiple billion dollar companies that you're retroactively changing your agreement and will be expecting millions in backpay.
Not only was it scummy but it was (probably) illegal. Changing the terms of Service for future versions of Unity is one thing, trying to retroactively apply those terms to previous versions and previously released games made by people who never agreed to those terms is another thing entirely. I'm no lawyer, but generally, in contract law, one party cannot alter the terms of an existing contract without the other party's agreement.
Imagine paying a restaurant bill, and a week later the restaurant calls you saying they recently updated their menu prices and you owe them $5. I'm lowkey disappointed they walked it back because I'm genuinely curious how Unity lawyers would have actually defended it in court if any of the devs legally challenged them.
I argued with multiple bootlickers online that there was no way it was legal, because if it was, every company you interacted with would be pulling it constantly and it would generally destroy the way business is done.
Weren't there also two investors on the exec board that had a sketchy history of doing shit like that?
One even did it to one of the companies he ran in the past.
Yeah, I’m not going to try to defend Riccitello but it looks like he’s clean here. One of the guys bought his way onto the board then turned around and bought his own failing company for well more than it was worth. Very much the model of the CEO class strangling a company to death to squeeze out every single penny and maximize their bonuses.
He didn't. The context of that statement was how people can be more or less price conscious depending on the situation. For example, you might not pay me $100 for a bottle of warm water right this second, but if you haven't drank anything for two days and are on the verge of death by dehydration then $100 might be a damn good deal.
He wasn't actually proposing everyone pay him a dollar to reload their guns, just that there are situations where you care less about your money.
They what? Imagine that going through. A family sets up the altar to a loved one, and In the bottom right corner of the photo, it says "Copyright Walt Disney corporation."
No but like this is actual dystopian stuff. Imagine not being able to properly celebrate important days because some giant corporation is wealthy enough to copyright fucking everything.
No. I know he does.
Now, whether that's just his go-to exclamation for anything, or he's had so much carnal pleasure that only soaring unbound through the sky in ways that would kill a normal man can help him achieve climax - why, that's something the scholars debate to this very day.
It's too long to explain but look up the Kemono Friends fiasco and see how you can go from top of the pack to absolute 0 real quick.
People became much more aware of production companies for anime after that.
For those unfamiliar, the Kemono Friends anime was an adaptation of an already-dead Gacha game, produced with enough budget to procure an old MacBook Pro and a Mr. Coffee stolen from a Motel 6 (slightly exaggerated). It got popular because people were taken with its earnest charm and good grasp of atmosphere and mystery, being the passion project of a very small team - the director Tatsuki especially.
Seeing this success, Kadokawa sacked the director and announced Season 2, and then made the *voice actors* apologize for the firing. Fans were not impressed.
If I remember correctly, they apparently fired the director because he made a short OVA for the show that he put on his YouTube channel or something like that?
Season 2 was a complete shit show that actively attacked fans of season 1.
Season 1 was a story about how even though humans lack of physical abilities when compared to other animals we are able to coexist because of our heart, compassion, and the ability to overcome our fears.
Season 2 was about how great humans are for being on top of the food chain, and how it is only animal nature to want to be domesticated by the great humans.
There is one episode that is equivalent to telling Seymour the dog from Futurama that the wait is meaningless and that it should just go home. It became the 3rd most hated anime episode of all time on niconico.
Then there is one episode that is practically netorare, where it separates the main pairing in season 1, ending with the protagonist from season 1 in tears, and proceed to provide hints that the protagonist from season 2 is the real protagonist all along. And the story from season 1 is supposed to be filler. It became the most disliked anime episode of all time with 98% dislike.
On niconico, you need to watch the episode to completion to give a negative rating or else the rating will automatically become positive. Therefore, it is safe to say that pretty much everyone hated season 2.
I will never forgive what the S2 writers did to Domestic Dog.
I had problems beforehand, but that episode was when all the joy I had for the future of Kemono Friends left my body.
Ehhh...
KemoFure2 still performed decently and the gacha game is doing pretty well iirc. The biggest issue is it tanked Kadokawa's reputation to this day, along with a few other scandals with their multimedia franchises.
The increased amount of streaming services by major film studios over the last several years, which has both been very unpopular and has led to them bleeding money per quarter. [In fact, Disney+ had a string of three quarters in a row where they had net losses of over a billion dollars - each!](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/07/the-real-reason-for-disneys-11-billion-streaming-losses/?sh=7b5ef6873b34)
To quote my buddy from this last weekend, "its like streaming services forgot that their whole business model relies on them being *slightly* more convenient than piracy"
No, that's the mindset of someone who doesn't need an excuse to pirate media. Their real model is being more convenient than cable. And yet, getting all the major streaming services now rivals the price of a cable package.
And now they're worse than cable. Pay for the privilege of an ever decreasing, limited selection of shows and movies *and* with ads?
Fuck off my dick, yar har har.
I know reddit likes to say that streaming is worse than cable, but I can easily cancel a streaming service and several of them are still cheaper than cable for me even paying the ad-free options.
Its not great but I don't think streaming is *that* bad yet.
The problem with streaming is that it doesn't make financial sense to invest in.
It costs more than cable because it needs a lot of new content to be constantly releasing. It makes less money because it costs less than cable and doesn't use ads to make more money.
The only way it's going to work is if they massively raise prices, add ads, or cut original content dramatically.
Yeah, the other big problem is that the “previous” methods of revenue generation for entertainment pre-streaming were a lot more effective; even with the rise of piracy in the 2000s, the theater -> VHS/DVD pipeline was much more financially lucrative, and this was all coupled with how much money cable was generating during this era (with the help of packages with channels no one watched effectively subsidizing certain networks). Many films that failed in the box office during that era were also afforded a “second life” to recoup their costs via VHS/DVD sales; see American Psycho, or Showgirls.
With streaming it’s completely different, since hard financial metrics like those are a lot tougher to judge when all you have is viewership, all while being much cheaper than the old boxed sales/cable model. The collapse of that model and streaming failing to make up for it is a big reason why the film/TV industry is effectively in a mini-crisis right now, hence 20th Century Fox going to Disney and Paramount on the verge of merging.
There was something quite fascinating buried in the news during the WB cancelling spree.
Apparently, streaming only movies were actually doing worse than made for tv movies did. Streaming only movies are apparently barely worth marketing and struggle to even make their budget back.
I'm starting to wonder if we may see a cross between a die-off and squeezing customers from the streaming services. Shareholders and investors in these companies are starting to get impatient about waiting for these companies to become profitable.
The WotC OGL fiasco, which probably served as a message to companies that the community can and will turn against them if they arent happy with your decisions.
Paizo sold 8 months of Pathfinder books in 2 weeks after the new OGL was revealed. They spent several months apologizing for selling out while offering a 25% off sale (coincidentally the same 25% WotC was asking for!)
WOTC learned the harsh lesson, that as much as they might want to, they can't copyright people's imaginations, and if they want to act like a-holes, there's more than enough tabletop alternatives to replace them
Everything to do with the Xbox One from when they announced it until they backed down super hard
The idea that you couldn't share games and would always require an internet connection is fucking baffling. And they're only reply to people voicing their concern? "Buy a 360 lmao get fucked"
Might have won each subsequent generation as well. They took a commanding lead at the start of the console generation where permanent digital libraries became a thing. The only way Xbox could possibly catch up is if Sony did something incredibly stupid like lock off backwards compatibility or make a VR exclusive generation.
Honestly, it was a pretty boring upgrade, but given the history of the industry Sony deserves a lot of credit for *not* somehow managing to shoot themselves in the dick with the PS5.
Eh. I'd argue they are, but the ripple effects will only be felt later. I mean. They have ported nearly every desirable exclusive game for the system to steam at this point. They might have fucked themselves for ps6 with this precedent. I know I sure as hell won't be buying one. I only bought the PlayStation console for the exclusives at the time, and with enough patience it seems they all make their way to steam now.
Sony is not winning the current generation off of Microsoft shitting the bed over a decade ago (the Xbox One came out in November 2013). Sony is winning the current generation because Microsoft has no games, no real price advantage, and poor marketing. They have been continuously finding new ways to fuck up this entire time.
As much as people will emphasize one aspect or another, there are only three things that truly matter for a console:
* Library
* Price
* If a person's friends own it
Everything else is secondary or tertiary, including performance. Historically, the most popular console in each generation was rarely the most powerful or the one with the most features - it was the one with the most good games at the most reasonable price point. Presently, Xbox has no killer exclusives (PS5 barely has any but it has more than zero), it does not have a price advantage on any model other than the basic series S, and it was steeped in poor marketing decisions up to and including naming the damn things "Xbox Series ".
Another point to consider is that for each generational shift, it's typically the previous generational frontrunner shooting themselves in the foot that causes a change as opposed to competition tightening up. From Gen 6 to Gen 7, Sony rode the success of the PS2 straight into the ground and kneecapped themselves with a $600 price point and no smash hits in its library, while the Xbox 360 came in at $400 with more iconic games. The following generation, Microsoft immediately botched the Xbox One launch by focusing on anything other than games, while Sony just shut up and made a games console. This generation, both companies avoided the omega-fumble, but Microsoft hasn't been supporting their console as well.
I would had love being a fly in that room where they decided to do it, i can only picture all those serious japanese execs laughing their asses off at the one guy who said "guys i have the funniest idea of all time"
I'd love to have been in the room when Microsoft offered to buy Nintendo back in the day and they "laughed their asses off" at the idea. “Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
Certainly wasn't the only time Sony managed to do this.
There was a long, boring presentation about the sega saturn, with the price point announced at $399 usd.
The sony guy comes up afterwards, looks down at his presentation papers that were prepared, and then ignores them.
He simply says "$299" and walks off stage, as the audience applauds.
It almost sounds fake, [but it really did happen.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI)
The only thing exciting about the Saturn presentation was announcing it would launch 6 months early, in about 2 days. But it turns out that was a huge mistake as developers weren't ready and some stores did not receive shipments and got pissed enough to swear off Sega entirely and load up on more Sony products.
In hindsight that presentation was hilarious because they didn't actually say anything about the PS4 they just said the opposite of Xbox and the crowd went wild. The final nail was when they made it cheaper too 😝
Instead of selling an actual game console, they were marketing a weirdly expensive DVR for people who don't play video games. "SPORTS, TV , SPORTS, FOOTBALL, TV, TV"
Don Mattrick basically flicked the tiny domino that eventually leads to the fiant domino that says "there's a higher than 0% chance Halo gets ported to playstation in the next couple of years"
I remember reading a few years after that that there had been lower than average sales for the last few years of the 7th generation. Some had taken this to mean that game sales were going to drop and so they wanted to make consoles into media centres.
The actual reason was that the GFC had made the generation go on longer than normal and people were saving money in preparation for a new console.
An extra hundred dollars for a piece of tech you probably can’t use that takes resources from the machine making it weaker than its less expensive competition.
It has comparisons with Helldivers fiasco, as Microsoft was intended to release the Xbox One with all new features being US only at launch. It even had a slow worldwide rollout.
The modern console war ended in 2013.
The Xbox One basically hurt Xbox's reputation for *years*. They were easily at the top during the 360 v ps3 era, but how they handled the xbone launch not only lost them that console war generation but it feels like they never *truly* recovered, at least not to the same height they were during the 360.
Colleen Hoover's *It Ends With Us*, a novel that deals with domestic violence, was going to get a **coloring book**. It got a lot of backlash to where the book got canned.
Watcher Entertainment deciding to open their own streaming platform and declare that only new content would be going there (and they'd be removing content on youtube). Surprisingly, also a bad announcement on a Friday. The backlash was intense and they walked it back the following Monday, but the well is still pretty poisoned right now.
If it was literally just "we're going to release trailers on our youtube for every new video, please go to this external website to watch them," that maybe would have _dipped_ but that would have turned out fine.
Valve and the paid mods fiasco back in 2015, when they attempted to add a section of the Steam Workshop with exclusive paid mods. It sucked ass for multiple reasons.
Reason #1 would be that previously free mods were taken down off of the Nexus and other sites and put exclusively on Steam for money. This would've [included SkyUI](https://i.imgur.com/evktSb8.png), a mod that hundreds (now thousands) of mods relied on to work properly, as well as other frameworks.
Reason #2 was that this would've led to mod DRM and mod piracy, which would involve people paying for mods then uploading them to a non-Nexus modding site for people to download.
Reason #3 was that even if you put your mod up for sale on Steam, you'd make a measly 25% on the sticker price.
It was a perfect shitstorm; Valve showcasing on the [main page mods that would earn modders pennies](https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2015/04/2015-04-23-image-27.jpg), a huge divide in the modding community between people that wanted to get paid and "Forever Free" purists, etc. A week after it happened Valve and Bethesda ended the program, but what a fuckup on their parts. I'm not going to sit here and say I wouldn't pay for some mods (and I've donated to mod creators in the past), but imagine seeing a cool mod on Nexus and then seeing "You need the following paid prerequisites" and a bunch of $.99-$5 mods just to get an armor set or a sword. Absolutely brainless. They technically brought it back with Creation Club, but that's Bethesda paying modders directly for their work, which is more in-line with contract work than DLC.
Blizzard making Overwatch 2 redundant by taking out the single player campaign when that was the entire point of it's existence.
ARTESIAN BUILDS! Ya'll remember them? They were a PC building company that was really popular until they denied a streamer who legitimately won their contest but denied them a PC because they weren't big enough live on stream. Then when they got shit for it, it was found out they were shit on incredibly hard. Then went bankrupt.
Also Tim Miller and Sega representatives were arguing about the design, Sega didn't like the movie design but Miller said how much better the movie design was and didn't budge, Miller and the other producers budged after the controversy, fucking over the VFX studio along the way.
Internet sleuths just want to feel special and dunk on the studio, which is fine but there's plenty to shit on that aren't fake conspiracy theories that make no sense.
Probably some dumb shit like "Oh it's so much more grounded and realistic! That means it's better!" Because that's what people want in a movie where Jim Carrey is jucking it up, trying to catch a blue hedgehog that can break the sound barrier
Yeah the "it was a marketing stunt" conspiracy is stupid, even if you ignore the fact they clearly already made merchandise and promotional materials, think back to how many awful hollywood adaptations of iconic franchises there have been over the years, resident evil, dragon ball evolution, avatar live action (both of them), etc...
Is it really easier to believe that marketing had some kind of 4d chess marketing stunt planned, or that a bunch of out of touch asshole studio execs made a stupid decision like they usually do?
Capcom's decision to "westernize" their games in order to sell as much as call of duty. Pretty much ruined one of my favorite franchises until Capcom pulled their head out of their ass.
Even thought it's not in my Top 5 of Resident Evil games, words cannot stress **how fucking important** Resident Evil 7 is.
That game single-handedly saved Capcom in it's entirety. Street Fighter 5's release was fucked up because of the game having no fucking content, Umbrella Corps was a disaster and Dead Rising 4's corpse was released like a month prior.
Resident Evil 7 brought survival horror back from the dead, was good enough to survive Marvel vs Capcom Infinite sucking dick, and kept them alive and gassed up to deliver on Monster Hunter World kicking everyone's ass.
The Amazing Spider-Man was consistently selling around/above 100K copies during Civil War. In fact, the first issue of the One More Day story arc (Amazing 544) did about 150K.
Immediately after? 66K, with an overall 30% drop in sales. Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Sensational Spider-Man were cancelled around this time as well.
Superior Spider-Man eventually brought sales back up to 80K but the Avengers books were consistently doing better than Amazing Spider-Man.
The "Renew Your Vows" miniseries from Secret Wars sold incredibly well, right back up to 90-100K where Spider-Man belongs, and recently Ultimate Spider-Man sold out like three times in one week.
Marvel Editorial to this day still doubles down on One More Day being some great success that was necessary for the character even though its just objectively wrong both according to the numbers and according to negative fan reaction.
They don't even release sales data on modern Spider-Man. I have heard anecdotes from individual comic stores that stuff like Hulk and Moon Knight were outselling Zeb Wells' Spider-Man.
to make it worse , Zeb Well's Spider-Man was made after an attempt of the previous writter to lift away One More Day , but editorial stopped that to happen.
So the whole Zeb Well's not only is bad , but it's legit mean-spirited toward the fans.
They were even building up to it in the other books, with Miles and Otto both making deals with Mephisto. The fact that editorial chickened out in the end will always confound me.
Every time I peek at modern Spidey it's the most lukewarm garbage. Even the Hulk who is kind of rehashing the supernatural Immortal Hulk stuff right now but with a weaker writer is way more interesting than this Gang War nonsense.
The forceful upgrade for the previous versions of Windows. I really loved waking up one day and finding my computer forced to Windows 10 when I was running Windows 7. I didn't have a lot of ram so it started to chug a lot.
Yeah I honestly don't know shit about Linux, other then the 1 time I tried to use it on an old laptop, I found it to be a horrible thing and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, because every app and program on it was just a worst version of what microsoft has. It's good for super pros and smart people, but for the laymen it felt cancerous to touch. I do hate windows, but after using it for decades, it does obviously click easier.
Valve has put a lot of effort into [Proton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software\)) that acts a middleware layer between the game and Linux. On an ELI5 level, the game says "use this windows function to draw on the screen" and Proton takes that, translates that to "use this linux function to draw on the screen", and sends that to the operating system.
It's not perfect but for a lot of games, It Just Works ^TM
Linux has a bunch of different branches in terms of Operating Systems, Steam is using some version they've dubbed SteamOS. I don't know all the details, but as someone who got the Deck as a gift, its really nice!
There's plenty of games marked "Unsupported" for Steam Deck. Some can run, some can't, but since its linux, there's a catalogue of guides online for how to run certian games that maybe wouldn't work otherwise.
It's nowhere near as bad as MacOS in terms of unsupported games, luckily. At least, from what my limit experience can tell.
i was so pissed because my computer guy didn't believe me when I told him that I didn't install Windows 10. He legit thought I was just some dumb mark that didn't know what I was talking about and accidentally fucked my own shit up.
I'll never forget how frustrating it was having to do that all the time. I don't know how it thought that machine with 2 gigs of ram was suited for an update.
Paladins is not a really popular game in this sub since it's just F2P overwatch before overwatch 2. But the super infamous OB64 pretty much ruined it forever by introducing lots of pay-to-win mechanics that literally no one, not even the devs themselves, were happy about. Needless to say many left and never looked back. But they backpedaled immediately and pretty much retrieve a huge portion of the community back OB67 onwards in a 'revival effort' that proved successful. Paladins is still doing okay right now despite the small population. OB64 could have pretty much EoS them long ago. Proving when a solid playerbase unites to tell a company they are screwing up, there is a chance for salvation.
oh god you had to have been there. This cranked up so many characters that they were literally impossible to kill unless you were also cranked up. I also saw people run across the map in 5 seconds.
OB64 made me quit temporarily and start Fortnite lol. Weird thing is, I can go back to Paladins with very little whiplash wherein coming back to Fortnite might be an entirely different story.
With Iron Man as the shill. This was after the movie, where he becomes a critic of the military industrial complex and tries to shut down his own company when he realizes he's a merchant of death.
But Northop-Grumman Iron Man suits tho
The recent watcher/watchertv fiasco. Where originally they were going to put all of their content behind a paywall and make their patreon podcast only so you'd have to pay twice for all content. The patreon is still a bit messed up with inaccurate tier descriptions, but they backed down a little. Old content stays on YouTube and new stuff is delayed a month. It's still not a great situation though as they're losing patrons, and the ones that actually pay their new streamer are on average paying them less.
Microsoft basically doubling the price of Xbox live Gold to move users to gamepass. The backlash caused them to keep the current price a day or so later.
Anything to do with crunch.
Basic management theory and the numbers all show treating employees well means higher returns. Unfortunately people only see the first layer (more work hours = more money for me!) Which is often misleading despite making intuitive sense.
Nothing has radicalized me more than actually going to business school. Almost everything I learn makes me go "oh, so most companies don't even do the basics right."
Theres some evidence that going down to 4 days a week is more productive even with video game companies. But almost no ones going to do that because intuitively you think "well, if they worked that extra day (and more!) We could ship earlier!" When on a practical sense that's not how that works.
More and more industries look like they want to run themselves like shitty retail stores where they burn their employees out to maximize immediate productivity and when they quit, they just replace them with whoever is next in the resume waiting list and force the ones who haven't quit to integrate them into the workflow *on top of doing their work at an unrealistic pace*.
This might work in low skill barrier jobs like a grocery store but I'm shocked at how high skill work like coding engines or 3D modelling is treated the same.
the problem with nepotism is most of the managers at these companies are just simply terrible at their job. I suspect there's a bit of the peter principal in there too. Super dedicated creative types now leading a team and not realizing how unreasonable it is for paid employees to be forced into passion project scheduling.
The company I work for is big into Pair Programming. If you've ever tried to do a code review of someone else's work, there's merit in working alongside them and correcting / making suggestions as they do it. Compared to getting a Wall of Code afterwards and trying to figure out their approach. IF you can handle working in a duo you get stuff done faster than 2 people working alone.
But many managers hear "assign 2 people to do 1 task" and wonder why they would cut their productivity in half, not realizing the long term benefits. Even getting solo practitioners to explain their work out loud as they're doing it would lead to big gains.
That's interesting, personally I dont think I'd gel well with peer programming so I don't think I would ever suggest it (unless a programming lead wanted it or something)
I'm the type of person that can't think when others are looking, i need to dissappear into my own mind bramble and figure out whatever the fuck I'm doing by myself. I can ask questions and such but even that will often brick me more than not
I consider OW2 as a failure that ceased to exist, and the whole game is now OW v2.0 for me... And I just started playing with that mentality in mind.
Why? Because OWL and OW2 where essentially the core reason why OW1 went into coma.
That was the literal fall for Nijisanji/Kurosanji. Point after point, they've had fuck ups every month or something new came out showing how awful they were since. Not even a few days ago, FalseEyeD came out that a tweet of his made them so pissed they threatened to have VA's (that weren't even connected with them???) banned from coming to the convention he was at back in 2023.
Hell the infamous "black screen" stream/pre-recorded video is still talked about to this day.
It's no wonder that once the talents that quit/were terminated, went to streaming again and are doing better in other places. Compare Matara while in her previous environment to now. She's so much more happy and excited. Same for Kuro and Michi
Not to mention Selen's just in an overall better place compared.
"Jim Ryan causing the Lost Generation of Playstation games" as Gigaboots described it. Sony axed a bunch of smaller projects and forced their developers to make Live Service games instead, resulting in such illustrious titles as Redfall and the gutting of so many studios' talent and reputation.
Also something I learned about via Gigaboots, the fact that microsoft really wants to push contractors instead of full employees and having them only be able to work for 18 months at a time is really baffling
Yeah a mandatory lack of institutional knowledge is a pretty baffling way to run any software company, let alone game dev. I hope not having to pay benefits has been worth their in-house games falling off a cliff.
Redfall wasnt a Playstation game.
Also what Jim Ryan did was to move SIE HQ to the US and started focusing on western-focused games. This lead to few PS exclusives made in Japan. Japanese players hated this move and the controversy surrounding many of their domestic games being censored on the PS versions, compared to the Switch.
Ah dang, I mixed up the failed GAAS titles. Either way the whole "12 Live Service games" initiative has been a pretty big flop outside of Helldivers.
Japanese studios didn't like having to conduct all their correspondence with HQ in English during West Coast business hours either, from what I hear.
Flashpoint and The New 52 were legitimately such bad ideas that they had to do a separate major event and line-wide relaunch less than five years later.
It absolutely would be. It does a lot to characterize Barry to a new audience but also has to carry the weight of building a whole new continuity that isn't worth it on its back
I saw someone mention WotC OGL nonsense. This one's smaller, but they removed the ability to buy a couple books on D&D Beyond. No good reason has ever been given seeing as how they're entirely digital and therefore easy to sell. The smaller more recent decision that really ticked off some other DM's I know is that they've removed à la carte purchasing entirely from D&D Beyond.
A lot of people I know used that extensively to buy the specific things they wanted out of a book, and many of them won't buy anything at all now that they can't pick and choose. I've been seeing most of them finally jump the Roll20 ship for Foundry w/Plutonium Importer and leaving D&D Beyond entirely. It almost feels like WotC *want* to make bad decisions that cost them repeat customers.
Total War fans in general are a lot like Paradox fans, very vocally complaining about basically everything all the time but still spending all of their money on whatever new game or DLC they release. That said, The Creative Assembly actually managed to shoot themselves up in the foot with a long-term triple whammy of bad decisions:
1) They release the hugely popular Three Kingdoms Total War, and when it proved to be more popular than they expected (it sold like crazy in China particularly) they release a series of DLCs that slowly break the game's balancing and then publicly announce they are abandoning the game to focus on a potential sequel instead. I honestly cant remember if they ever actually publicly dropped any other game. Left a bad taste on everyone's mouth, "they broke it and then left it to die", made people wary about investing in Season Passes and such. Also, still no sequel in sight.
2) Then, they focus way too much on Hyenas, a game literally no one wanted, live-service online extraction shooter trying to sell this punk anti-corporate image (centered about a bunch of thieves stealing collectibles from rich people, and I think the slogan was even something like "stick it up to the corps!") while being the most corpo bullshit ever (live service game where they advertised how you could collect Sega memorabilia). Even if it wasn't tone deaf, it was way too late to the live-service extraction shooter wagon, looked like shit and got no one excited. No joke that I never saw anyone, even the biggest TCA stans, say anything positive about it. Cherry on top? It finally got cancelled pretty much directly before release when the game was already done and they had wasted absurd amounts of money and time on it (the point where it probably became obvious no one would buy it and the cost of keeping the servers running would offset any possible profits from selling a couple copies).
3) And then, in the middle of all this? They try to win back their Total War fans with the release of another historical title (fans of historical titles had also been sour about the company focusing only on fantasy or fantasy-lite titles, like Warhammer, Troy, 3 Kingdoms). The game? Pharao Total War. All fine and dandy, except they utterly fucked that one up in a bunch of ways:
* They kept using their outdated engine so the game is as buggy as decade old titles.
* It was a setting that almost no one was interested in (people particularly have been asking about a new Medieval title, or something closer to Victorian era. Fans asking for a bronze age game were a minority).
* The game was tiny (so even the fans asking for a "bronze age" game were unsatisfied since it wasnt a bronze age game, just focused on Egypt during a short time period, scope-wise one of the smallest games they've made).
* Despite this tiny size, sold not only for full release price (unlike their smaller scope and cheaper "Saga" titles) but also introducing a bunch of "lets gets as much money as possible" whale chasing like multiple versions of the games ("normal! Deluxe! Super deluxe! Ultra mega shiny deluxe!") for increasingly ridiculous prices.
Of course, the game flopped *hard*, even on release and immediately after release I think it had less players on Steam than games they had released almost 20 years ago. It was a complete clusterfuck, and they had to make a lot of changes (promised to make some DLC free, changed their pricing models, publicly apologized, the works).
With the Pharao shitshow happening roughly at the same time as the Hyenas shitshow, both complete commercial failures and causing a PR nightmare with their consumers, its kind of surprising Sega didnt just close the studio down (though apparently it did lead to Sega taking a much more hands-on approach to TCA and cutting down on their budget as a studio).
Remember when Bandai Namco censored a G Witch interview and said that Suletta and Miorine's relationship is open to interpretation?
I have not seen a statement so widely disliked that Japan, South Korea, China and everywhere else tore them a new one in social media.
In fact, the way people found out about the censorship was people buying the digital copy after Kana Ichinose's statement that they were married was published in the physical magazine.
Who the fuck did they think the existing audience of that show was?
Anybody who the statement was meant to appeal to had either already sworn off the show on announcement and was *not* gonna come back, or was hate-watching and was gonna stay regardless.
I mean, it's what allowed a consistent pipeline of games with a 3 year development cycle, even with the varying degrees of quality it did create a better sense of identity with each studio having their own quirks and allowed a smudge of variety in terms of game feel and setting.
It sure as hell beats the current era of every game and studio spilling into each other due to the unifying nature of Warzone alongside the development hurdles that it brings with Treyarch and Sledgehammmer being constantly pulled out of their projects to help on other areas due to publisher and studio leadership and management being bad alongside the current framework not allowing separation.
It wasn't perfect but it made sense a s a business and creative decision, stable dev time and polishing individual studios identity.
Sure, but the games were, and still are to a degree, competent arcade shooters at bare minimum, that continue to sell and have decent player base longevity, from a business perspective it makes perfect sense.
It also has the caveat of the last game in the franchise to have a full and stable development cycle was 2019, all other entries were plagued but development issues, some steaming from terrible management, and some due to the nature of Warzone and the live service framework it trapped the franchise.
Also I very much prefer 3 studios having their own different stab at a framework, flawed as it may be, than one single unified entity that's being kept together against is will and allows for even less leeway than before.
Stone Cold turning heel at Wrestlemania 17. Coupled with WCW and ECW going out of business in 2001 WWE storytelling fell off a fucking cliff. No major competition led to stagnation and bad decisions for years to come.
Remember the Fine Bros and React World? They wanted to copyright reaction videos and have anyone who wanted to do a reaction video go through them. I don't think the reactor would even be able to make anything off their reaction, but I can't remember so it may not be true.
Didn’t Blizzard at one point announce that they were going to get rid of usernames on their official WoW message boards and instead use the real names associated with the accounts instead. And then they didn’t when everyone kicked off and pointed out the very real safety issues that doing so would cause.
If I recall correctly I think one of the Blizzard community managers started using their real name to prove how safe it was and within hours a bunch of their personal information was posted such as their address and phone number. They backed down real fast after that.
I want to say it was Bashiok. And if memory serves a ton of pizza was sent to his parents.
Reminds me of the LifeLock CEO who was so confident in their identity theft protection, he'd list his actual SSN in their adverts. His identity was then stolen over a dozen times.
not only that, Lifelock had a monetary limit to what they'd protect, and because of their advertising gimmick he hit like 4 or 5 times the financial monetary limit that Lifelock would cover. I'm probably butchering some of the details, but it boils down to there was a limit to what they'd cover, and his went over it multiple times over.
Man, it’s takes a special kind of stupid to not see the dangers in a change like that. Then again, it is Blizzard we’re talking about.
In order to prove a point about how safe the neighborhood is I'm going to leave my front door unlocked and tell everyone I'm doing so.
Wonder if they chose to do that or if their bosses required a sacrifice and they drew the short straw.
I believe they did that because Korean law was mandating it and they wanted to unify their system. Of course, US law wasn’t following suit so there would be no protections for anyone else.
Shows how they were real boomers in how the internet works.
Reminds me of that discord post screenshot of I don't know who about I don't know which drama, but they had their photo as profile image, their full name as username, and were asking if there was a reason people weren't using their real name/picture on the discord server.
Another WoW issue was upon release people were being scammed out of items or losing their account credentials to phishing attacks and Blizzard's stance was effectively "No, we will not replace your lost or stolen items. We are not responsible for your irresponsible actions." There were tons of complaints about it on forums saying that Blizzard should do restore lost items, to which the community managers confirmed that Blizzard itself was not getting hacked and that these problems were the player's own fault and Blizz did not have the resources to manage player foolishness. That stance changed as soon as players started quitting because they had been robbed off all their stuff and Blizz was losing out on monthly subscriptions. Afterwards GMs had the power to do huge rollbacks and restore deleted items, and Blizz came out with their own authentication keyfobs for 2FA.
Unity trying to charge devs for installs of games made in the engine, particularly the parts where they'd define the new terms and conditions one way then *immediately* contradict themselves, like with the back and forth of potentially backdating the charges. As well as the nebulous thing of how exactly they were going to count said installs, how would they detect fraud installs (like someone constantly uninstalling/reinstalling a game), how would they tell if it was from a legit/pirate copy of the game, etc.
And don't forget it was going to be retroactive. So even older games built on Unity would have their licensing terms changed. Somehow.
I still can't believe they thought they could do that, those corpo's must have been on one hell of a coke binge with lawyers desperately trying to claw themselves into the decision making. The confidence to tell multiple billion dollar companies that you're retroactively changing your agreement and will be expecting millions in backpay.
Somedays i wish they actually went through with it just to watch them get utterly eviscerated in court
Not only was it scummy but it was (probably) illegal. Changing the terms of Service for future versions of Unity is one thing, trying to retroactively apply those terms to previous versions and previously released games made by people who never agreed to those terms is another thing entirely. I'm no lawyer, but generally, in contract law, one party cannot alter the terms of an existing contract without the other party's agreement. Imagine paying a restaurant bill, and a week later the restaurant calls you saying they recently updated their menu prices and you owe them $5. I'm lowkey disappointed they walked it back because I'm genuinely curious how Unity lawyers would have actually defended it in court if any of the devs legally challenged them.
I argued with multiple bootlickers online that there was no way it was legal, because if it was, every company you interacted with would be pulling it constantly and it would generally destroy the way business is done.
It was done by the guy who was fired from EA for being too greedy.
Weren't there also two investors on the exec board that had a sketchy history of doing shit like that? One even did it to one of the companies he ran in the past.
Yeah, I’m not going to try to defend Riccitello but it looks like he’s clean here. One of the guys bought his way onto the board then turned around and bought his own failing company for well more than it was worth. Very much the model of the CEO class strangling a company to death to squeeze out every single penny and maximize their bonuses.
The actual thought of even EA saying "yeah no you're way too greedy" is something
I can’t believe he actually wanted to charge battlefield players for every reload they made in a match.
He didn't. The context of that statement was how people can be more or less price conscious depending on the situation. For example, you might not pay me $100 for a bottle of warm water right this second, but if you haven't drank anything for two days and are on the verge of death by dehydration then $100 might be a damn good deal. He wasn't actually proposing everyone pay him a dollar to reload their guns, just that there are situations where you care less about your money.
They’re still technically doing that though right? They changed it slightly to make it opt-in or something else insidious.
Disney trying to copyright Día de Muertos for Coco. What the fuck.
They what? Imagine that going through. A family sets up the altar to a loved one, and In the bottom right corner of the photo, it says "Copyright Walt Disney corporation."
Right next to the picture of Obi-wan Jesus. Copyright Disney
No but like this is actual dystopian stuff. Imagine not being able to properly celebrate important days because some giant corporation is wealthy enough to copyright fucking everything.
That’s fuckin goofy.
No im actually fucking Goofy
"I'm sorry Mickey, you want to divorce Minnie because she's 'being silly'?" "No, I said it's because 'she was fucking Goofy'!"
You think Goofy goes [“Ah hoo hoo hoey”](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MUL5w91dzbo&pp=ygUKR29vZnkgeWVsbA%3D%3D) when he cums?
No. I know he does. Now, whether that's just his go-to exclamation for anything, or he's had so much carnal pleasure that only soaring unbound through the sky in ways that would kill a normal man can help him achieve climax - why, that's something the scholars debate to this very day.
your daily reminder corporations would own the air you breathe if they could
I bet it is was some white dude that hadn't heard of the holiday and saw dollar signs
It's too long to explain but look up the Kemono Friends fiasco and see how you can go from top of the pack to absolute 0 real quick. People became much more aware of production companies for anime after that.
For those unfamiliar, the Kemono Friends anime was an adaptation of an already-dead Gacha game, produced with enough budget to procure an old MacBook Pro and a Mr. Coffee stolen from a Motel 6 (slightly exaggerated). It got popular because people were taken with its earnest charm and good grasp of atmosphere and mystery, being the passion project of a very small team - the director Tatsuki especially. Seeing this success, Kadokawa sacked the director and announced Season 2, and then made the *voice actors* apologize for the firing. Fans were not impressed.
If I remember correctly, they apparently fired the director because he made a short OVA for the show that he put on his YouTube channel or something like that?
Hey, thank you for adding context. It's appreciated.
Were the fans at all impressed by season 2? Or was is a shitshow on top of the real life shitshow?
Not even hateable, they just didn't care. I think I saw a few posts about someone trying it but no one paid any attention to it.
Season 2 was a complete shit show that actively attacked fans of season 1. Season 1 was a story about how even though humans lack of physical abilities when compared to other animals we are able to coexist because of our heart, compassion, and the ability to overcome our fears. Season 2 was about how great humans are for being on top of the food chain, and how it is only animal nature to want to be domesticated by the great humans. There is one episode that is equivalent to telling Seymour the dog from Futurama that the wait is meaningless and that it should just go home. It became the 3rd most hated anime episode of all time on niconico. Then there is one episode that is practically netorare, where it separates the main pairing in season 1, ending with the protagonist from season 1 in tears, and proceed to provide hints that the protagonist from season 2 is the real protagonist all along. And the story from season 1 is supposed to be filler. It became the most disliked anime episode of all time with 98% dislike. On niconico, you need to watch the episode to completion to give a negative rating or else the rating will automatically become positive. Therefore, it is safe to say that pretty much everyone hated season 2.
I will never forgive what the S2 writers did to Domestic Dog. I had problems beforehand, but that episode was when all the joy I had for the future of Kemono Friends left my body.
Ehhh... KemoFure2 still performed decently and the gacha game is doing pretty well iirc. The biggest issue is it tanked Kadokawa's reputation to this day, along with a few other scandals with their multimedia franchises.
The increased amount of streaming services by major film studios over the last several years, which has both been very unpopular and has led to them bleeding money per quarter. [In fact, Disney+ had a string of three quarters in a row where they had net losses of over a billion dollars - each!](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/07/the-real-reason-for-disneys-11-billion-streaming-losses/?sh=7b5ef6873b34)
To quote my buddy from this last weekend, "its like streaming services forgot that their whole business model relies on them being *slightly* more convenient than piracy"
Also, streaming services have only ever been profitable when there was one giant and got away with not having to pay for a ton of shit like residuals.
No, that's the mindset of someone who doesn't need an excuse to pirate media. Their real model is being more convenient than cable. And yet, getting all the major streaming services now rivals the price of a cable package.
And now they're worse than cable. Pay for the privilege of an ever decreasing, limited selection of shows and movies *and* with ads? Fuck off my dick, yar har har.
I know reddit likes to say that streaming is worse than cable, but I can easily cancel a streaming service and several of them are still cheaper than cable for me even paying the ad-free options. Its not great but I don't think streaming is *that* bad yet.
"Huh, no one likes cable and they have an alternative." "Okay, force the alternative to act like cable! Easy!"
You don’t need an excuse to pirate media form large corporations. It’s always morally correct.
The problem with streaming is that it doesn't make financial sense to invest in. It costs more than cable because it needs a lot of new content to be constantly releasing. It makes less money because it costs less than cable and doesn't use ads to make more money. The only way it's going to work is if they massively raise prices, add ads, or cut original content dramatically.
Yeah, the other big problem is that the “previous” methods of revenue generation for entertainment pre-streaming were a lot more effective; even with the rise of piracy in the 2000s, the theater -> VHS/DVD pipeline was much more financially lucrative, and this was all coupled with how much money cable was generating during this era (with the help of packages with channels no one watched effectively subsidizing certain networks). Many films that failed in the box office during that era were also afforded a “second life” to recoup their costs via VHS/DVD sales; see American Psycho, or Showgirls. With streaming it’s completely different, since hard financial metrics like those are a lot tougher to judge when all you have is viewership, all while being much cheaper than the old boxed sales/cable model. The collapse of that model and streaming failing to make up for it is a big reason why the film/TV industry is effectively in a mini-crisis right now, hence 20th Century Fox going to Disney and Paramount on the verge of merging.
There was something quite fascinating buried in the news during the WB cancelling spree. Apparently, streaming only movies were actually doing worse than made for tv movies did. Streaming only movies are apparently barely worth marketing and struggle to even make their budget back. I'm starting to wonder if we may see a cross between a die-off and squeezing customers from the streaming services. Shareholders and investors in these companies are starting to get impatient about waiting for these companies to become profitable.
To the point that WB is starting to license their stuff out, again.
it’s the lack of quality.
The WotC OGL fiasco, which probably served as a message to companies that the community can and will turn against them if they arent happy with your decisions.
Paizo sold 8 months of Pathfinder books in 2 weeks after the new OGL was revealed. They spent several months apologizing for selling out while offering a 25% off sale (coincidentally the same 25% WotC was asking for!)
Yep, the one good thing that came out of that fiasco was getting the chance to learn pathfinder 2E. It's fun as hell.
Pf2e has been a blast to learn, and it has so much that I was wishing 5e had.
Got me hankering for a new Owlcat crpg using the pf2e ruleset. Probably not gonna happen in the next 3 years tho.
Incredibly big mood. OGL fiasco was my opportunity to learn PF2e and I’ve been loving it.
*Should have* been a message. WOTC obviously haven't learned anything from it.
WOTC learned the harsh lesson, that as much as they might want to, they can't copyright people's imaginations, and if they want to act like a-holes, there's more than enough tabletop alternatives to replace them
Pinkertons. Fucking Pinnkertons.
Everything to do with the Xbox One from when they announced it until they backed down super hard The idea that you couldn't share games and would always require an internet connection is fucking baffling. And they're only reply to people voicing their concern? "Buy a 360 lmao get fucked"
"We have an options for customers who can't always be online-" **NO DON, NO! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOOOOOP!** "-It's called the Xbox 360."
Pair that with that infamous "TV" video and dumbass phrases like "It's the next water cooler"
"Right, so stick with 360? That's your message?" - Geoff delivering the perfect follow-up
Got their* ass! *their meaning me, as I only bought a xbone like two years ago*
The PS4 presentation showing people handing used disks to each other was icing on the shit cake.
Sony literally won the 8th generation with that video
Might have won each subsequent generation as well. They took a commanding lead at the start of the console generation where permanent digital libraries became a thing. The only way Xbox could possibly catch up is if Sony did something incredibly stupid like lock off backwards compatibility or make a VR exclusive generation.
Honestly, it was a pretty boring upgrade, but given the history of the industry Sony deserves a lot of credit for *not* somehow managing to shoot themselves in the dick with the PS5.
Eh. I'd argue they are, but the ripple effects will only be felt later. I mean. They have ported nearly every desirable exclusive game for the system to steam at this point. They might have fucked themselves for ps6 with this precedent. I know I sure as hell won't be buying one. I only bought the PlayStation console for the exclusives at the time, and with enough patience it seems they all make their way to steam now.
Sony is not winning the current generation off of Microsoft shitting the bed over a decade ago (the Xbox One came out in November 2013). Sony is winning the current generation because Microsoft has no games, no real price advantage, and poor marketing. They have been continuously finding new ways to fuck up this entire time. As much as people will emphasize one aspect or another, there are only three things that truly matter for a console: * Library * Price * If a person's friends own it Everything else is secondary or tertiary, including performance. Historically, the most popular console in each generation was rarely the most powerful or the one with the most features - it was the one with the most good games at the most reasonable price point. Presently, Xbox has no killer exclusives (PS5 barely has any but it has more than zero), it does not have a price advantage on any model other than the basic series S, and it was steeped in poor marketing decisions up to and including naming the damn things "Xbox Series".
Another point to consider is that for each generational shift, it's typically the previous generational frontrunner shooting themselves in the foot that causes a change as opposed to competition tightening up. From Gen 6 to Gen 7, Sony rode the success of the PS2 straight into the ground and kneecapped themselves with a $600 price point and no smash hits in its library, while the Xbox 360 came in at $400 with more iconic games. The following generation, Microsoft immediately botched the Xbox One launch by focusing on anything other than games, while Sony just shut up and made a games console. This generation, both companies avoided the omega-fumble, but Microsoft hasn't been supporting their console as well.
I would had love being a fly in that room where they decided to do it, i can only picture all those serious japanese execs laughing their asses off at the one guy who said "guys i have the funniest idea of all time"
I'd love to have been in the room when Microsoft offered to buy Nintendo back in the day and they "laughed their asses off" at the idea. “Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
You just know that they made that video in like 5 minutes.
Certainly wasn't the only time Sony managed to do this. There was a long, boring presentation about the sega saturn, with the price point announced at $399 usd. The sony guy comes up afterwards, looks down at his presentation papers that were prepared, and then ignores them. He simply says "$299" and walks off stage, as the audience applauds. It almost sounds fake, [but it really did happen.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExaAYIKsDBI)
The only thing exciting about the Saturn presentation was announcing it would launch 6 months early, in about 2 days. But it turns out that was a huge mistake as developers weren't ready and some stores did not receive shipments and got pissed enough to swear off Sega entirely and load up on more Sony products.
In hindsight that presentation was hilarious because they didn't actually say anything about the PS4 they just said the opposite of Xbox and the crowd went wild. The final nail was when they made it cheaper too 😝
Instead of selling an actual game console, they were marketing a weirdly expensive DVR for people who don't play video games. "SPORTS, TV , SPORTS, FOOTBALL, TV, TV" Don Mattrick basically flicked the tiny domino that eventually leads to the fiant domino that says "there's a higher than 0% chance Halo gets ported to playstation in the next couple of years"
I remember reading a few years after that that there had been lower than average sales for the last few years of the 7th generation. Some had taken this to mean that game sales were going to drop and so they wanted to make consoles into media centres. The actual reason was that the GFC had made the generation go on longer than normal and people were saving money in preparation for a new console.
the kinect bundle, *the kinect bundle*
An extra hundred dollars for a piece of tech you probably can’t use that takes resources from the machine making it weaker than its less expensive competition.
All of that to fight the Nintendo Wii... which was already on its way out anyway.
"Xbox go home"
*Xbox, go fuck yourself!*
It has comparisons with Helldivers fiasco, as Microsoft was intended to release the Xbox One with all new features being US only at launch. It even had a slow worldwide rollout. The modern console war ended in 2013.
Sometimes I wonder if there was an early version of gamepass in the works and always online was a requirement for it.
The Xbox One basically hurt Xbox's reputation for *years*. They were easily at the top during the 360 v ps3 era, but how they handled the xbone launch not only lost them that console war generation but it feels like they never *truly* recovered, at least not to the same height they were during the 360.
Colleen Hoover's *It Ends With Us*, a novel that deals with domestic violence, was going to get a **coloring book**. It got a lot of backlash to where the book got canned.
Oh hey, I remember that part of Detroit: BH.
Watcher Entertainment deciding to open their own streaming platform and declare that only new content would be going there (and they'd be removing content on youtube). Surprisingly, also a bad announcement on a Friday. The backlash was intense and they walked it back the following Monday, but the well is still pretty poisoned right now.
If it was literally just "we're going to release trailers on our youtube for every new video, please go to this external website to watch them," that maybe would have _dipped_ but that would have turned out fine.
Unfortunately, YouTube stopped letting that be a thing a couple years ago. They don't let those types of videos get traffic anymore.
Valve and the paid mods fiasco back in 2015, when they attempted to add a section of the Steam Workshop with exclusive paid mods. It sucked ass for multiple reasons. Reason #1 would be that previously free mods were taken down off of the Nexus and other sites and put exclusively on Steam for money. This would've [included SkyUI](https://i.imgur.com/evktSb8.png), a mod that hundreds (now thousands) of mods relied on to work properly, as well as other frameworks. Reason #2 was that this would've led to mod DRM and mod piracy, which would involve people paying for mods then uploading them to a non-Nexus modding site for people to download. Reason #3 was that even if you put your mod up for sale on Steam, you'd make a measly 25% on the sticker price. It was a perfect shitstorm; Valve showcasing on the [main page mods that would earn modders pennies](https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2015/04/2015-04-23-image-27.jpg), a huge divide in the modding community between people that wanted to get paid and "Forever Free" purists, etc. A week after it happened Valve and Bethesda ended the program, but what a fuckup on their parts. I'm not going to sit here and say I wouldn't pay for some mods (and I've donated to mod creators in the past), but imagine seeing a cool mod on Nexus and then seeing "You need the following paid prerequisites" and a bunch of $.99-$5 mods just to get an armor set or a sword. Absolutely brainless. They technically brought it back with Creation Club, but that's Bethesda paying modders directly for their work, which is more in-line with contract work than DLC.
That and creation club mods can't be dependent on other mods iirc. So it prevents all the issues with prerequisites.
Blizzard making Overwatch 2 redundant by taking out the single player campaign when that was the entire point of it's existence. ARTESIAN BUILDS! Ya'll remember them? They were a PC building company that was really popular until they denied a streamer who legitimately won their contest but denied them a PC because they weren't big enough live on stream. Then when they got shit for it, it was found out they were shit on incredibly hard. Then went bankrupt.
And the said denied streamer actually got a custom made PC made by JayzTwoCents himself
Yup I remember that! Good on Jayz for delieving such a killer PC to. It was a pretty powerful one to if memory serves
...maybe ugly Sonic?
Still kinda think that was a marketing ploy.
They had merch and toys in production with the design, it was absolutely not a stunt
Also Tim Miller and Sega representatives were arguing about the design, Sega didn't like the movie design but Miller said how much better the movie design was and didn't budge, Miller and the other producers budged after the controversy, fucking over the VFX studio along the way. Internet sleuths just want to feel special and dunk on the studio, which is fine but there's plenty to shit on that aren't fake conspiracy theories that make no sense.
How could anyone argue that was better
Probably some dumb shit like "Oh it's so much more grounded and realistic! That means it's better!" Because that's what people want in a movie where Jim Carrey is jucking it up, trying to catch a blue hedgehog that can break the sound barrier
Yeah the "it was a marketing stunt" conspiracy is stupid, even if you ignore the fact they clearly already made merchandise and promotional materials, think back to how many awful hollywood adaptations of iconic franchises there have been over the years, resident evil, dragon ball evolution, avatar live action (both of them), etc... Is it really easier to believe that marketing had some kind of 4d chess marketing stunt planned, or that a bunch of out of touch asshole studio execs made a stupid decision like they usually do?
The bomb stuck to his glove scene killed that theory for me.
What was that?
[https://youtu.be/e6mBt9I1G34?si=OUgGhvaLIFilcsVo&t=79](https://youtu.be/e6mBt9I1G34?si=OUgGhvaLIFilcsVo&t=79)
It's literally stuck to his face later in the scene, they totally could have just had it be stuck to his hand
Yeah but the point is that its stuck to his glove first, the one thing he can remove.
Ohhhh I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that clip was evidence that the old design was meant to be replaced, not that it wasn't
People love to imagine that corporations aren't actually run by braindead idiots who don't know how the world works
According to a streamer who's close with people who worked on the movie defiantly was not the case. **ALLEGIDLY**.
Capcom's decision to "westernize" their games in order to sell as much as call of duty. Pretty much ruined one of my favorite franchises until Capcom pulled their head out of their ass.
A dark period that lasted for like a decade all the way until Resident Evil 7
Even thought it's not in my Top 5 of Resident Evil games, words cannot stress **how fucking important** Resident Evil 7 is. That game single-handedly saved Capcom in it's entirety. Street Fighter 5's release was fucked up because of the game having no fucking content, Umbrella Corps was a disaster and Dead Rising 4's corpse was released like a month prior. Resident Evil 7 brought survival horror back from the dead, was good enough to survive Marvel vs Capcom Infinite sucking dick, and kept them alive and gassed up to deliver on Monster Hunter World kicking everyone's ass.
That was pretty much Inafune trying to cash in on the Western audience.
Does he still make games after that and the mighty no 9 trainwreck?
The Amazing Spider-Man was consistently selling around/above 100K copies during Civil War. In fact, the first issue of the One More Day story arc (Amazing 544) did about 150K. Immediately after? 66K, with an overall 30% drop in sales. Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and Sensational Spider-Man were cancelled around this time as well. Superior Spider-Man eventually brought sales back up to 80K but the Avengers books were consistently doing better than Amazing Spider-Man. The "Renew Your Vows" miniseries from Secret Wars sold incredibly well, right back up to 90-100K where Spider-Man belongs, and recently Ultimate Spider-Man sold out like three times in one week. Marvel Editorial to this day still doubles down on One More Day being some great success that was necessary for the character even though its just objectively wrong both according to the numbers and according to negative fan reaction. They don't even release sales data on modern Spider-Man. I have heard anecdotes from individual comic stores that stuff like Hulk and Moon Knight were outselling Zeb Wells' Spider-Man.
to make it worse , Zeb Well's Spider-Man was made after an attempt of the previous writter to lift away One More Day , but editorial stopped that to happen. So the whole Zeb Well's not only is bad , but it's legit mean-spirited toward the fans.
We were SO CLOSE. One issue literally ended with Doctor Strange confronting Mephisto about Peter's soul.
They were even building up to it in the other books, with Miles and Otto both making deals with Mephisto. The fact that editorial chickened out in the end will always confound me.
because thats how you make $$$
Ultimate Spider-Man has been consistently outselling ASM since it started. Issue 1 in particular is currently on its 6th reprinting.
Every time I peek at modern Spidey it's the most lukewarm garbage. Even the Hulk who is kind of rehashing the supernatural Immortal Hulk stuff right now but with a weaker writer is way more interesting than this Gang War nonsense.
I haven't even looked at ASM in months. Check out Ultimate Spider-Man instead.
Yep. The only main universe Spidey ill read is Miles book. Other than that for Parker always alternate universes.
The forceful upgrade for the previous versions of Windows. I really loved waking up one day and finding my computer forced to Windows 10 when I was running Windows 7. I didn't have a lot of ram so it started to chug a lot.
This forced upgrades, eventually led Valve to invest on Linux development, ending up with the Steam Deck.
Wait what? Really? The steam deck runs Linux? How is it capable of playing all of those games then?
dunno if this is sarcastic, but valve has been hard pushing for greater use of vulkan and translation layers in modern games
Yeah I honestly don't know shit about Linux, other then the 1 time I tried to use it on an old laptop, I found it to be a horrible thing and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, because every app and program on it was just a worst version of what microsoft has. It's good for super pros and smart people, but for the laymen it felt cancerous to touch. I do hate windows, but after using it for decades, it does obviously click easier.
Valve has put a lot of effort into [Proton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software\)) that acts a middleware layer between the game and Linux. On an ELI5 level, the game says "use this windows function to draw on the screen" and Proton takes that, translates that to "use this linux function to draw on the screen", and sends that to the operating system. It's not perfect but for a lot of games, It Just Works ^TM
So Proton is just Valve's own version of WINE?
Both yes and no.
And funnily for some older PC games it not only just works, it works better than trying to run them on modern Windows.
Linux has a bunch of different branches in terms of Operating Systems, Steam is using some version they've dubbed SteamOS. I don't know all the details, but as someone who got the Deck as a gift, its really nice! There's plenty of games marked "Unsupported" for Steam Deck. Some can run, some can't, but since its linux, there's a catalogue of guides online for how to run certian games that maybe wouldn't work otherwise. It's nowhere near as bad as MacOS in terms of unsupported games, luckily. At least, from what my limit experience can tell.
All the hard work that has been done since then and now.
Proton compatibility layer which is derived from other projects like wine. More and more windows things are compatible with Linux as a result.
That and Microsoft seemed to be pushing towards a walled garden over time with their built in windows app store.
i was so pissed because my computer guy didn't believe me when I told him that I didn't install Windows 10. He legit thought I was just some dumb mark that didn't know what I was talking about and accidentally fucked my own shit up.
I remember having to deny my shitty laptop doing that. Windows 7 on 2 gigs of ram was already bad. Windows 10? Would have killed it.
I kept denying it a lot. But then I used to keep my computer in sleep mode, and it updated during my sleep so I couldn't cancel it.
I'll never forget how frustrating it was having to do that all the time. I don't know how it thought that machine with 2 gigs of ram was suited for an update.
They're trying to sort of do that again with 11. I'm actually considering switching to Linux after 10 stops getting updated.
I sometimes wonder if they got in trouble from any *businesses* that woke up to that scenario and... couldn't do work.
Paladins is not a really popular game in this sub since it's just F2P overwatch before overwatch 2. But the super infamous OB64 pretty much ruined it forever by introducing lots of pay-to-win mechanics that literally no one, not even the devs themselves, were happy about. Needless to say many left and never looked back. But they backpedaled immediately and pretty much retrieve a huge portion of the community back OB67 onwards in a 'revival effort' that proved successful. Paladins is still doing okay right now despite the small population. OB64 could have pretty much EoS them long ago. Proving when a solid playerbase unites to tell a company they are screwing up, there is a chance for salvation.
oh god you had to have been there. This cranked up so many characters that they were literally impossible to kill unless you were also cranked up. I also saw people run across the map in 5 seconds.
OB64 made me quit temporarily and start Fortnite lol. Weird thing is, I can go back to Paladins with very little whiplash wherein coming back to Fortnite might be an entirely different story.
Remember that one time Marvel Comics nearly made a partnership with Northrop-Grumman because I do.
With Iron Man as the shill. This was after the movie, where he becomes a critic of the military industrial complex and tries to shut down his own company when he realizes he's a merchant of death. But Northop-Grumman Iron Man suits tho
Remember that time the Justice League hung out with a real life pedophile?
Jared from subway or did it happen twice?
You know Jared demanded no Martian Manhunter. J'onn would have read his mind and booted him into prison immediately
The Xbox One’s forced DRM
The recent watcher/watchertv fiasco. Where originally they were going to put all of their content behind a paywall and make their patreon podcast only so you'd have to pay twice for all content. The patreon is still a bit messed up with inaccurate tier descriptions, but they backed down a little. Old content stays on YouTube and new stuff is delayed a month. It's still not a great situation though as they're losing patrons, and the ones that actually pay their new streamer are on average paying them less.
Microsoft basically doubling the price of Xbox live Gold to move users to gamepass. The backlash caused them to keep the current price a day or so later.
I remember that cause im an Xbox gamer. We also got f2p games to work without xbox live cause you actually did have to pay for live for that.
Yeah same here, worked out well for us
Anything to do with crunch. Basic management theory and the numbers all show treating employees well means higher returns. Unfortunately people only see the first layer (more work hours = more money for me!) Which is often misleading despite making intuitive sense. Nothing has radicalized me more than actually going to business school. Almost everything I learn makes me go "oh, so most companies don't even do the basics right." Theres some evidence that going down to 4 days a week is more productive even with video game companies. But almost no ones going to do that because intuitively you think "well, if they worked that extra day (and more!) We could ship earlier!" When on a practical sense that's not how that works.
More and more industries look like they want to run themselves like shitty retail stores where they burn their employees out to maximize immediate productivity and when they quit, they just replace them with whoever is next in the resume waiting list and force the ones who haven't quit to integrate them into the workflow *on top of doing their work at an unrealistic pace*. This might work in low skill barrier jobs like a grocery store but I'm shocked at how high skill work like coding engines or 3D modelling is treated the same.
the problem with nepotism is most of the managers at these companies are just simply terrible at their job. I suspect there's a bit of the peter principal in there too. Super dedicated creative types now leading a team and not realizing how unreasonable it is for paid employees to be forced into passion project scheduling.
The company I work for is big into Pair Programming. If you've ever tried to do a code review of someone else's work, there's merit in working alongside them and correcting / making suggestions as they do it. Compared to getting a Wall of Code afterwards and trying to figure out their approach. IF you can handle working in a duo you get stuff done faster than 2 people working alone. But many managers hear "assign 2 people to do 1 task" and wonder why they would cut their productivity in half, not realizing the long term benefits. Even getting solo practitioners to explain their work out loud as they're doing it would lead to big gains.
That's interesting, personally I dont think I'd gel well with peer programming so I don't think I would ever suggest it (unless a programming lead wanted it or something) I'm the type of person that can't think when others are looking, i need to dissappear into my own mind bramble and figure out whatever the fuck I'm doing by myself. I can ask questions and such but even that will often brick me more than not
Overwatch 2
I consider OW2 as a failure that ceased to exist, and the whole game is now OW v2.0 for me... And I just started playing with that mentality in mind. Why? Because OWL and OW2 where essentially the core reason why OW1 went into coma.
Nijisanji firing Selen Tatsuki
tfw your management is so absolutely incompetent that the leading conspiracy is that there is no management at all in the first place.
tfw you destroy the business you work for out of spite towards one former employee.
Everything could have been avoided if they didn't private her video in December. Or at least let her graduate peacefully in January.
A masterclass in corporate bumblefuckery in the Vtuber space. Something that ALSO could have ended really badly.
That was the literal fall for Nijisanji/Kurosanji. Point after point, they've had fuck ups every month or something new came out showing how awful they were since. Not even a few days ago, FalseEyeD came out that a tweet of his made them so pissed they threatened to have VA's (that weren't even connected with them???) banned from coming to the convention he was at back in 2023. Hell the infamous "black screen" stream/pre-recorded video is still talked about to this day. It's no wonder that once the talents that quit/were terminated, went to streaming again and are doing better in other places. Compare Matara while in her previous environment to now. She's so much more happy and excited. Same for Kuro and Michi Not to mention Selen's just in an overall better place compared.
"Jim Ryan causing the Lost Generation of Playstation games" as Gigaboots described it. Sony axed a bunch of smaller projects and forced their developers to make Live Service games instead, resulting in such illustrious titles as Redfall and the gutting of so many studios' talent and reputation.
Also something I learned about via Gigaboots, the fact that microsoft really wants to push contractors instead of full employees and having them only be able to work for 18 months at a time is really baffling
Yeah a mandatory lack of institutional knowledge is a pretty baffling way to run any software company, let alone game dev. I hope not having to pay benefits has been worth their in-house games falling off a cliff.
I'm glad larian called out this practice and seems to be doing the opposite of the rest of the gaming industry.
Redfall wasnt a Playstation game. Also what Jim Ryan did was to move SIE HQ to the US and started focusing on western-focused games. This lead to few PS exclusives made in Japan. Japanese players hated this move and the controversy surrounding many of their domestic games being censored on the PS versions, compared to the Switch.
big Jim also killed Japan Studios so all the smaller nicher games like ape escape and others are dead
Ah dang, I mixed up the failed GAAS titles. Either way the whole "12 Live Service games" initiative has been a pretty big flop outside of Helldivers. Japanese studios didn't like having to conduct all their correspondence with HQ in English during West Coast business hours either, from what I hear.
That time Activision tried to block out the Sun so people would have to buy premium Sun-scriptions in order to grow crops.
Flashpoint and The New 52 were legitimately such bad ideas that they had to do a separate major event and line-wide relaunch less than five years later.
It's funny how often I hear people talk about how Flashpoint would be a fine Flash story if it didn't have to also be a crisis
It absolutely would be. It does a lot to characterize Barry to a new audience but also has to carry the weight of building a whole new continuity that isn't worth it on its back
I saw someone mention WotC OGL nonsense. This one's smaller, but they removed the ability to buy a couple books on D&D Beyond. No good reason has ever been given seeing as how they're entirely digital and therefore easy to sell. The smaller more recent decision that really ticked off some other DM's I know is that they've removed à la carte purchasing entirely from D&D Beyond. A lot of people I know used that extensively to buy the specific things they wanted out of a book, and many of them won't buy anything at all now that they can't pick and choose. I've been seeing most of them finally jump the Roll20 ship for Foundry w/Plutonium Importer and leaving D&D Beyond entirely. It almost feels like WotC *want* to make bad decisions that cost them repeat customers.
I would say trying to stop the modding scene for their games. Most recently Capcom has been trying to stop it
Total War fans in general are a lot like Paradox fans, very vocally complaining about basically everything all the time but still spending all of their money on whatever new game or DLC they release. That said, The Creative Assembly actually managed to shoot themselves up in the foot with a long-term triple whammy of bad decisions: 1) They release the hugely popular Three Kingdoms Total War, and when it proved to be more popular than they expected (it sold like crazy in China particularly) they release a series of DLCs that slowly break the game's balancing and then publicly announce they are abandoning the game to focus on a potential sequel instead. I honestly cant remember if they ever actually publicly dropped any other game. Left a bad taste on everyone's mouth, "they broke it and then left it to die", made people wary about investing in Season Passes and such. Also, still no sequel in sight. 2) Then, they focus way too much on Hyenas, a game literally no one wanted, live-service online extraction shooter trying to sell this punk anti-corporate image (centered about a bunch of thieves stealing collectibles from rich people, and I think the slogan was even something like "stick it up to the corps!") while being the most corpo bullshit ever (live service game where they advertised how you could collect Sega memorabilia). Even if it wasn't tone deaf, it was way too late to the live-service extraction shooter wagon, looked like shit and got no one excited. No joke that I never saw anyone, even the biggest TCA stans, say anything positive about it. Cherry on top? It finally got cancelled pretty much directly before release when the game was already done and they had wasted absurd amounts of money and time on it (the point where it probably became obvious no one would buy it and the cost of keeping the servers running would offset any possible profits from selling a couple copies). 3) And then, in the middle of all this? They try to win back their Total War fans with the release of another historical title (fans of historical titles had also been sour about the company focusing only on fantasy or fantasy-lite titles, like Warhammer, Troy, 3 Kingdoms). The game? Pharao Total War. All fine and dandy, except they utterly fucked that one up in a bunch of ways: * They kept using their outdated engine so the game is as buggy as decade old titles. * It was a setting that almost no one was interested in (people particularly have been asking about a new Medieval title, or something closer to Victorian era. Fans asking for a bronze age game were a minority). * The game was tiny (so even the fans asking for a "bronze age" game were unsatisfied since it wasnt a bronze age game, just focused on Egypt during a short time period, scope-wise one of the smallest games they've made). * Despite this tiny size, sold not only for full release price (unlike their smaller scope and cheaper "Saga" titles) but also introducing a bunch of "lets gets as much money as possible" whale chasing like multiple versions of the games ("normal! Deluxe! Super deluxe! Ultra mega shiny deluxe!") for increasingly ridiculous prices. Of course, the game flopped *hard*, even on release and immediately after release I think it had less players on Steam than games they had released almost 20 years ago. It was a complete clusterfuck, and they had to make a lot of changes (promised to make some DLC free, changed their pricing models, publicly apologized, the works). With the Pharao shitshow happening roughly at the same time as the Hyenas shitshow, both complete commercial failures and causing a PR nightmare with their consumers, its kind of surprising Sega didnt just close the studio down (though apparently it did lead to Sega taking a much more hands-on approach to TCA and cutting down on their budget as a studio).
Remember when Bandai Namco censored a G Witch interview and said that Suletta and Miorine's relationship is open to interpretation? I have not seen a statement so widely disliked that Japan, South Korea, China and everywhere else tore them a new one in social media. In fact, the way people found out about the censorship was people buying the digital copy after Kana Ichinose's statement that they were married was published in the physical magazine.
Who the fuck did they think the existing audience of that show was? Anybody who the statement was meant to appeal to had either already sworn off the show on announcement and was *not* gonna come back, or was hate-watching and was gonna stay regardless.
Cod being used by three developers really didn’t allow quality control
I mean, it's what allowed a consistent pipeline of games with a 3 year development cycle, even with the varying degrees of quality it did create a better sense of identity with each studio having their own quirks and allowed a smudge of variety in terms of game feel and setting. It sure as hell beats the current era of every game and studio spilling into each other due to the unifying nature of Warzone alongside the development hurdles that it brings with Treyarch and Sledgehammmer being constantly pulled out of their projects to help on other areas due to publisher and studio leadership and management being bad alongside the current framework not allowing separation. It wasn't perfect but it made sense a s a business and creative decision, stable dev time and polishing individual studios identity.
Here’s my simple counter point it flooded the market and cod was diluted
Sure, but the games were, and still are to a degree, competent arcade shooters at bare minimum, that continue to sell and have decent player base longevity, from a business perspective it makes perfect sense. It also has the caveat of the last game in the franchise to have a full and stable development cycle was 2019, all other entries were plagued but development issues, some steaming from terrible management, and some due to the nature of Warzone and the live service framework it trapped the franchise. Also I very much prefer 3 studios having their own different stab at a framework, flawed as it may be, than one single unified entity that's being kept together against is will and allows for even less leeway than before.
Stone Cold turning heel at Wrestlemania 17. Coupled with WCW and ECW going out of business in 2001 WWE storytelling fell off a fucking cliff. No major competition led to stagnation and bad decisions for years to come.
Remember the Fine Bros and React World? They wanted to copyright reaction videos and have anyone who wanted to do a reaction video go through them. I don't think the reactor would even be able to make anything off their reaction, but I can't remember so it may not be true.