UlyssesT [he/him]

“This is a case of a rare incel victory that led to Ubisoft having to take down its numbers,” they added.

Some analysts point to sheer number of games available today, their high prices, and the cost of living crisis for a slowdown in the gaming market. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot himself admitted that gamers now expect extraordinary experiences, and that “delivering solid quality is no longer enough.”

The lesson learned is pander even more and make the hog slop an even more finely liquefied puree of fanservice shit!

They’re so amazingly dogmatic, too. There’s this subtext belief that Nintendo’s business decisions are somehow profoundly and uniquely wise, such as the claim that there can’t be a new F-Zero game because “there’s no conceivable way to make it different each time, which is a Nintendo™® mandate” as if it wouldn’t be enough to add weapons to the vehicles, customization/performance modifications, power allocation, outright flying or even space segments, or even out-of-the-car gameplay.

Nope. Just the “make it different each time” of the Zelda plot rehashes forever and ever.

Or, make it “different each time” by making it janky in a way most people don’t like, like Star Fox Zero which was also a plot rehash, and then shelve the franchise because people didn’t like it. Nintendo is that infallible!

“And what games you can buy will be bundled with Ice Climbers. Always with Ice Climbers.”

I still remember when one of the founding developers of the Diablo series quit after too much corporate skullduggery and went somewhere else to make Torchlight instead.

The corpos he left behind, failsons and businessbros that they were, left a Twitter message regarding that founder’s departure:

“FUCK THAT LOSER.”

That’s what pieces of shit were left in Blizzard ever after.

When something you love gets slowly corrupted.

I wonder if those “corruption” cliches in Blizzard game storytelling throughout the Kotick regime were a sort of subtle cry for help, the way Origin’s developers cried for help during Ultima VII with EA-logo evil magic devices and the like and the massive dunking on Richard “Lord British” Garriot in the Serpent Isle expansion after he fucked them over and sold them out and had a cynically celebratory bonfire party where all their hard work on a Privateer sequel and other projects was set ablaze because he was cashing out.

Kotick was an enjoyer of Little St. James Island, which may come as no surprise to some.

Some of Musk’s bootlickers have said to me, offline in person, that the le epic Starlink debris in space fucking with astronomy (as it has for a while now) “will only encourage the exodus off planet” followed by the PR spiel about “humans must become interplanetary species.”

May as well say that the cradle must be burned with the baby in it so the baby is encouraged to compete in Olympic track and field.

At some point start introducing power creep so players want to purchase access to new classes and feats.

4th edition already pulled that grift, making each additional book full of Glowing Eyed Generic Epic People a bit more power-creeped than the last.

Updated for the 21st century: a status quo enforcer with police and presidential loyalty ties that really likes neon and having sex with people that like neon while maintaining the status quo in a way that makes them a Legend of Night City™.

Expect a lot of smirking, winking, and excessive use of “squelch” sounds.

They’ll probably try the “blind bag” monetization of minis again… or worse, do “blind bags” of subscription model virtual minis with log-in bonus and “battle pass” shit.

Digital art, at the least, didn’t uplift itself at the uncredited expense of the artists themselves, pushing them further into precarity.

you instead surrender the creativity to someone’s fickle whims

The corpos want entire game groups to surrender their own creativity to the diluted reconstituted slop churned out by the treat printers… and pay for that privilege.

I’m sure some will go for it, and never experience the joy of being creative themselves, or having a creative Dungeon Master for that matter. Just line up for more IP-regurgitating slop that burns down acres of forest amid all the prompt retries!

but for LD my daughter and I always skip to the nacelle-eating alien (we named him Yum Yums), yell “YUM YUMS!”, and then skip to the end.

That’s adorable!

It’s baffling to me too, but considering how much the post-DS9 “NuTrek” showrunners like to trot out Section 31 and give them more power and reach and even respectability among the protagonists each time they seem to show up (such as in Picard where for some reason Worf and Jurati were associated with them and they apparently “had all the best toys” in a way that sounded quirky and cool rather than an unaccountably self interested bunch of murderous criminals as seen in DS9), there’s a fair amount of overlap it seems between the “black ops special forces shadowy adults in the room that make the hard decisions and get shit done” power fantasies of typical right wing entertainment and whatever Kurtzman keeps trying to push on the Trek franchise.

That’s even more baffling because the average self-described conservative Trek fan seems to hate “NuTrek” anyway, even the stuff that I myself enjoy like Lower Decks, The Orville (yes I count that as Trek, it earned it), Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds.

The final 20 minutes or so of this video summarize how I feel about the Discovery/Picard’s preoccupation with edgy grimdark gimmicks that seem to be trying to appeal to a crowd that nonetheless can’t see past the “politicalness/wokeness” of having too many nonwhite nonmale characters and the like.

https://youtu.be/MdLHKdn0JTY?t=12063

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

I actually started to like that song.