aftermath.site

kat_angstrom, to games in IGN immediately lays off every non-UK person at their newly bought sites, including some key members like deputy editor Alice Bell

I hate how this is phrased as “redundancies”. IGN literally JUST bought these outlets, they haven’t had time to dig into and examine the organizations they acquired; it’s just straight into the Corpo playbook of “lay people off and let the dust settle where it may”.

These are people, not “redundancies”. They contributed in the old organization, and they could contribute in the new, but they never even got the chance.

simple,

Oh they’re redundancies to IGN alright, they literally bought their competitors and got to kill competition with zero resistance

TwilightVulpine,

There used to be laws against this shit.

mPony,

people also used to vote in their own interests

deweydecibel,

There never was a chance.

Generally when companies like this are bought it isn’t to acquire the talent. That’s legitimately what needs to be taken into account when it comes to things like antitrust. You want to buy out this company, are you buying it because you want their talent to join with yours to make something better? Cool. We’ll let you do that provided you do it today fair and competitive manner.

Any other reason for wanting to buy this company is going to need to be pretty heavily scrutinized.

MrScottyTay, (edited )

Redundancy means that they get paid for being made to leave the company. That terminology is used because it’s different from being fired.

Copernican,

It’s basically just British terminology for layoffs with a severance package.

deweydecibel, (edited )

It amounts to the same thing, though. Whether you got a few months pay to carry you through or not you still lost your income, and there’s no guarantee you’ll ever find a job that matches it in pay, benefits, etc.

MrScottyTay,

Read the guys comment again though. They say their issue is with calling them “redundancies” in a language sense. But it’s not sugar coating it or anything, that’s the legitimate term for what happened.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Especially because from what was said, the employees were told the sites will be bought “as is”, so everyone gets to keep their jobs.

It’s in situations such as these where C-suites being required to also apply to them what they apply to others would be nice:

  • CFO or CEO at IGN has to quit. Won’t hurt them much, but eh.
  • CEO at Reedpop has to sell themselves (into slavery I suppose, plus it fits what they do to their workers).
ColeSloth,

You generally don’t buy a business and then figure all of that out. You figure it all out and then buy the business. IGN already would have 100% known the managerial setup at these companies.

xkforce,

What should happen is not always what does happen. There are tons of examples of brain dead companies and rich people buying companies they dont understand and then ruining them because of that.

lud,

Is there anything pointing to that in this case?

xkforce,

Did you not read the title at least? How does firing all these people indicate they know what theyre doing?

db0, to technology in Media Companies Like Vox Are Feeding Their Journalists' Work Into An AI Wood Chipper

This is exactly what people like me warned about. The push for copyright-protections against GenAI is not going to stop GenAI. It’s just going to create a future where only the big players can make AI models because they can pay for “licenses” with those strong enough to threaten them (while scraping everyone else anyway) and just kill open sourced models.

We’re seeing it play it exactly like that. Y’all can’t stop GenAI. You literally don’t have enough power where it counts. The only sane solution is to push that any GenAI model trained on public data must have open weights by default.

flamingos,
@flamingos@feddit.uk avatar

If we don’t have the power to stop generative AI, then what makes you think we have the power the change copyright law? Generative AI uses up huge amount of power and water to the point of causing issues for national infrastructure. There is a clear climate case to be made against generative AI and unlike copyright law the public actually care about climate change.

db0,

You cannot stop GenAI unless you stop sales of all gaming GPUs and recall all sold ones world wide. You just can’t. That cat’s out of the bag. You can try to restrict big corpos like OpenAI, but your politicians and bought already. Therefore adding your voice to trying to “stop GenAI” via copyright laws is just playing yourself. You can try to restrict GenAI via climate protections, but that will go as well as efforts to stop supporting genocides (or as well efforts have gone to protect the climate anyway).

flamingos,
@flamingos@feddit.uk avatar

If our politicians are already bought and sold to the point that calling for these industries to be regulated is pointless, then why would politicians listen to our calls for ‘open weights by default’.

applepie,

Bro that OpenAI clown daddy literally went to congress telling them to regulate them straight of Faceberg's playbook. These parasites ask for regulation once they feel good enough about their position.

Regulation entrenches them, after that it is time to harvest profits from captured market and abuse the peasants to Z MAX

db0,

They won’t, of course. But they will use the pressure towards copyrights against AI to kill open source GenAI progress. But at least when advocating for Open models, you don’t hurt the people who are doing FOSS.

applepie,

Copyright/IP/patent law started as way to allow people to feed themselves off their labour but somehow this shit got turned into corpo fascist regime where "owners" own everything ever created indefinitely and they will use daddy Sam's BBC of laws to fuck any opposition.

db0,

Copyright/IP/patent law started as way to allow people to feed themselves off their labour

Check out what happened when copyrights were first enacted. It was another enclosures “gold rush” where scammers went around and copied traditional songs people were using and declated copyrights, then went around and sued those same people.

applepie,

there is never a shortage of parasitic rent seekers and money changers...

society has yet to find a good way to deal with them but we got this:

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.

kibiz0r,

Copyright law is broken. But I don’t think that means we have no obligations to each other as human beings when we build on each other’s work.

We had the same argument during the crypto craze. The financial system is broken, but 10 years later I think we all agree that crypto is pretty clearly not the answer.

db0,

Copyright law is broken. But I don’t think that means we have no obligations to each other as human beings when we build on each other’s work.

Absolutely! This is why I said anything built on public work, should be public goods as well.

We had the same argument during the crypto craze. The financial system is broken, but 10 years later I think we all agree that crypto is pretty clearly not the answer.

That’s not a good comparison. Crypto was a (bad) solution looking for a problem. GenAI already has use-cases.

kibiz0r,

This is why I said anything built on public work, should be public goods as well.

What if I don’t want certain people to build on my work, or to constrain the ways in which the build on it? (Non-commercial, share-alike, attribution, etc. clauses) Should I be able to?

That’s not a good comparison. Crypto was a (bad) solution looking for a problem. GenAI already has use-cases.

I didn’t mean to compare the technology – though there are some similar scam vectors, but that’s a different conversation.

I meant that there was a strong contingent of crypto fans back then who were saying – correctly – that “the mainstream system is corrupt and wields legislation as a weapon against consumers”. But their proposed alternative was a system that removed all regulation, including consumer protections.

I worry that there’s a trend in tech circles today that echoes that sentiment when it comes to AI.

I’m also rather disappointed that a substantial group of people who I used to assume I was aligned with – pirates and open-sourcerers – turned out to only be there for the free shit and not for the ethos.

An ethos which, to me, is something like: everyone has a right to participate in culture and be a part of the conversation, and everyone has a duty to acknowledge the work that enabled their own and do their best to be a good custodian of the upstream works.

db0,

What if I don’t want certain people to build on my work, or to constrain the ways in which the build on it? (Non-commercial, share-alike, attribution, etc. clauses) Should I be able to?

No. The idea that someone should be allowed to control what others do with their expressions and ideas is a very new concept (~100 years) and it has not brought any benefit to society

technocrit,

we all agree that crypto is pretty clearly not the answer.

Tell that to anybody holding crypto as prices hang out around all time high.

Not to mention solving the problem with energy consumption which LLMs are beginning to dwarf.

And if you think state currency is the answer, then I have really bad news about how that’s been going…

Endorkend, to games in I Want Better Games With Worse Graphics And I'm Not Kidding - Aftermath
Endorkend avatar

Thing is, looking at some games, Horizon and Elden Ring being a prime examples, we can have both great games with great graphics.

You don't really want better games with worse graphics, you want better games that don't use great graphics as an excuse to bad gameplay.

IWantToFuckSpez,

We can have both but it will cost hundreds of millions like Horizon and often this means shitty monetization practices if the company isn’t the size of Sony, or the employees are heavily underpaid like with Elden Ring. Seriously pay at FromSoft is lower than the already low industry standard. https://www.pcgamer.com/report-highlights-underpay-and-some-level-of-crunching-at-fromsoftware/

blargerer,

He wants the resources being spent on graphics to be redirected to engineers and game designers. There is a reasonable top end budget to put towards any given game, so it is at least mostly 0 sum.

BruceTwarzen,

Bethesta has the worst of both worlds.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Big budget of cash; small budget of time and talent.

Zron,

They take like 10 years to release a game

They have plenty of time, just not the talent or vision to do anything good with it. Their stories are extremely bare bones, the bugs are prolific, and the power creep is more a power slide straight into godhood by level 15 because of the short main quests.

Kolanaki,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

10 years not enough time for their level of skill. ;)

Serinus,

It doesn’t. You can do so much more in an isometric world than a 3D one. Modern games are more about the game engine than the game itself.

Spruce up some old school MUDs, imo. Make the original Legend of Zelda, but massively upgraded for what you can do with today’s tech. (Similar to Bastion, I suppose.) There’s a lot of room for a triple A game similar to Albion Online.

HubertManne,
HubertManne avatar

yeah also small team or even open source achievable.

DdCno1,

That's not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It's also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.

Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It's practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that's invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it'll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.

Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn't care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there's nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.

MotoAsh,

Tell me you’re uncreative without telling me you’re uncreative.

tburkhol,

You can hire writers instead of visual artists.

Voroxpete,

Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level.

What an absolutely batshit insane thing to say.

Arsecroft,
@Arsecroft@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

bro just have an AI do it

its just like, pixels or whatever

/s

GBU_28,

Actually, would the masses care at all about ai art that is finished by a human to make it work? For something like Fortnite?

Voroxpete,

So, the big problem right now with AI art is that there’s no real way to modify it without basically completely redoing it.

You can alter the prompts, but due to the intentionally chaotic nature of the models, what you’ll get out is a completely different image. You can’t just be like “I want her head tilted a little more to the left, and give her a bigger smile, but keep everything else the same.” When you’re working on professional art, generally what happens is the artist presents you with each version, from rough sketches to finished line art, to rough paint work, and you request changes as you go. There’s a collaboration as you guide them towards the result you want. But with AI you’re just shotgunning outputs and hoping that one of them lands close enough. That’s fine for your bedroom wall, but not for a professional environment.

And if you want to have a human artist go in and make those changes to the finished image, they have to contend with the fact that they only have a finished image, not any of the layers from sketch through to brush work to lighting and so on. So they’re basically stuck trying to seamlessly paint over the existing image. That’s harder than it sounds.

Can artists use AI as a tool? Absolutely. Generate like 50 versions of a scene, use them as references. Or ask it for a sketch, then paint over that in your style. You can correct mistakes and make adjustments along the way. But the idea that humans can just “touch up” AI art to fix the mistakes doesn’t really work.

GBU_28,

Ok but if possible would the masses care if it was ai generated is my point.

I would confidently assume that folks are researching having generative ai actually conducting the tasks of wireframing, skinning, landscaping, skyboxing, WFC tile generation etc

It’s not happening now, but absolutely will.

But again my point is most folks will not give a shit as long as they can unlock newer better glitter shit

Voroxpete,

You’re offering a hypothetical where AI art can actually reproduce all of the capabilities of human art. Not just broad aesthetics, but emotion, intentionality, subtext, use of imagery, understanding of the human soul…

Is that ever going to be truly possible? Maybe if we create real, true AI. Something that’s actually sentient.

But putting that aside, if we accept your premise, then sure, I doubt anyone would care. Then again, once an AI is able to create truly human art, what would be the difference between an AI and a human?

AI is fucking cool. The idea of living in a fully automated post scarcity future where advanced learning machines take away all of the need for manual or intellectual labour sounds amazing. But the goal should be to make a world where humans are freed from drudgery and given more time to create and appreciate art and beauty. Instead we’re creating a world where humans toil away our lives while searching for brief sparks of joy in mass produced, corporate owned art that barely qualifies as art. Seems kind of fucked to me.

Instead of asking how far we can go in terms of automating away our ability to create beautiful things, shouldn’t we be asking how far we can go in terms of automating away the barriers to people creating beautiful things?

GBU_28,

Im Not. Im saying when ai can create Fortnite quality skins and frames, then what. Will people care.

I don’t care about the tech, the art or the emotion.

Jarix,

Valheim

SuddenDownpour,

Programmer here. While scaling up the work of an increasing number of programmers is probably harder in a pure logistical way, I feel like you’re severely underestimating the difficulty in scaling up an actual artistic vision. Setting up piles of modelers to produce assets like they’re assembly line workers isn’t going to result in a compelling world.

taladar,

In either case communication is the limiting factor and that scales with quadratic complexity with larger groups (everyone has to be on the same page with everyone else).

DdCno1,

The studios who do this mostly aren't looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.

umbrella,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

tbf elden ring doesnt look that cutting edge.

ColeSloth,

The author has completely missed the MAIN reason the campaign was good in 2009 and isn’t, now.

In 2009 the mindset was still that you needed a good single player game to get sales of a game. By 2015 call of duty had it figured out that they could almost completely ignore shoestringing a half asked campaign together and still get massive sales because their players were buying it for the multi-player, and all the money to be made by their fan boys buying it was in the multi-player.

KuraiWolfGaming,

Funny thing is, most multiplayer blokes play at low settings anyways to maximize performance for some form of advantage.

Blizzard, to games in How A Small Video Game Narrative Studio Wound Up At The Heart Of A Massive, Anti-Woke Conspiracy Theory - Aftermath

Funny how all the mainstream gaming media (+ this 2-paragraphs long blog post [?]) only now decided to cover this story, when the curator list on steam exceded 200.000 subscribers and so SBI run to Kotaku to do damage control, and these mainstream media are only quoting PR slogans from SBI website, or interviews with SBI from fucking Kotaku, or try to ridicule the whole idea by calling it conspiracy theories, or calling hundreds of thousands of players haters, white misogynist, racists and all the usual stuff, but none of these mainstream media actually reported on this story in depth, show what SBI management have been actually saying before all of this came to light, what their founder and employee have been tweeting (tweets now conviniently hidden or deleted) or how THEY (yes, they - Sweet Baby Inc) have been trying to weaponize their followers to ban not only the curator’s list on steam (even while publicly admitting knowing it doesn’t break any steam rules) but also trying to ban the list creator’s account (in spite “because he loves his account so much”).

I know lemmy is not a place to argue such stuff because it seems even woker than reddit and everyone is in this little bubble, but if you’re curious then look up those who’s been covering this subject from the beginning, for example:

thatparkplace.com

www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJPFQdZwrOutnmSFYtbstA

www.youtube.com/channel/UCQeRaTukNYft1_6AZPACnog

Bottom line is - I can decide for myself what to spend my money on, thank you very much.

Spuddlesv2,

Ah yes, Reddit, the epicentre of all wokeness.

The mainstream media picked up on it when actual intelligent games producers chimed in to try to defuse the situation you fragile little man babies were trying to stir up.

It is nothing but conspiracy theories.

If you buy into the bullshit conspiracies then you are a hater. Or a moron. Or both. All 200,000 of you.

If you think the curator isn’t a bigot and/or racist and/or misogynist you’re a fucking idiot.

The CEO of SBI being full of hyperbole doesn’t change any of that.

You say you can “decide for yourself” and then list a handful of links to people pushing their own agenda.

BananaTrifleViolin,

Judging by your post it seems both sides of this issue are toxic. This seems to just be a microcosm of US identity politics at play, with you just hurling insults and outrage at each other over… not a lot it seems?

A boycott of games that a diversity consultancy was involved in, some low quality journalism from Kotaku, and a lot of outrage on both sides?

The whole thing is a pointless time waste.

Spuddlesv2,

Firstly I’m not American. Not even in the northern hemisphere.

Secondly I could care less about the article, nor the boycott in and of itself. My issue is with the massive man babies trying to turn every attempt at levelling the playing field of life a little as a sinister attack on freedom, justice and the continuation of humankind.

Fence sitting is all fine and dandy but in the end it just means you’ve got a pole up your butt.

Hovenko,
@Hovenko@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

And what is up your butt? There is definitely something since you are whining a lot.

ZILtoid1991,
ZILtoid1991 avatar

woke

Gaming's problem isn't wokeness, but are overbloated budgets and scope.

Contramuffin,

The complete lack of a period makes your comment really hard to understand

Blizzard,

Fair point, I wrote it on my phone lying in bed in the morning, didn’t think it would be this long.

Amphobet,
@Amphobet@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

What does “woke” mean?

Hovenko,
@Hovenko@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Woke means you spread hatred and discrimination against white (caucasian) hetero males.

Snowpix,
@Snowpix@lemmy.ca avatar

And you wonder why nobody takes people like you seriously.

Hovenko,
@Hovenko@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

This is how assumption presented as knowledge look like :)

punkisundead,

Based

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

Woke means you spread hatred and discrimination against white (caucasian) hetero males.

In that case show me an example of SBI spreading hatred and discrimination against white (caucasian) hetero males, seeing as they’re so Woke and all.

Hovenko,
@Hovenko@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Open YT write sweet baby inc and you get tons of videos giving you some examples. But in case you are that lazy, here you go: www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4p_O9dSJHw

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

Finally someone who tries to present an actual reason for avoiding SBI! The difficulty in trying to get someone to clear this very low bar is not a good sign.

To start with we have some tweets from @legobutts from 2016. The tweets are bad, I will not try to defend them. Deleting them was the right call, you say something stupid or bad or should delete it. I have no idea where in the SBI hierarchy @legobutts works, but he appears to be a consultant, not an employee. I suppose the argument is SBI should not have them as a consultant, but should SBI be searching the internet archives for everything someone has ever said in the past before working with them?

I will note: The tweets are from 2016, SBI was founded in 2018, so they were not working with SBI at the time. I will also note that @legobutts worked on Tunic, Untitled Goose Game, and Firewatch. I do not see any of those games mentioned on the SBI detected group, so whatever the curator’s issue is with SBI it is not this person’s past tweets.

Then, we have the reaction from SBI to the SBI detected group. Yes, their reaction is bad and was full Streisand effect. However their reaction to SBI detected is not the reason SBI detected was created in the first place, so we can strike that reason as well.

Moving on he didn’t like some of the things said at GDC, but the clips don’t seem problematic to me. They never said they were trying to eliminate all “white male” characters from games, and she gave a story about a cast full of white people and got push-back when suggesting making one a POC. I don’t see the problem with that story.

So the reason’s the YT leaves us with for people not liking SBI is because of DEI and bad writing. Bad writing doesn’t require a curated list. Reviews will tell you if the writing is bad.

This leaves us with, surprise surprise, DEI being the reason. Anyone boycotting a company because of DEI is a bigot. Even if you think DEI is pointless and wasteful, then the company is wasting money on it. Companies waste money on stupid shit all the time. To be so opposed to the idea of DEI to boycott companies speaks volumes about the type of person they are.

ltxrtquq,

The first half of the video is about context-less tweets that a consultant for the company made a decade ago, and the second half is about how they don’t like how some things were phrased at a GDC talk. The guy in the video also talks a lot about Sweet Baby Inc supposedly wanting to exclude straight, white, male characters, but one of the anecdotes they play from the GDC conference was about how some game studio had made a cast of all straight, white men and were thinking of diversifying by making one of those characters very stereotypically french, and so SBI consultant tried to get a little more diversity out of them by also making that character black.

I’m not seeing a lot of hatred or discrimination against white people, or men, or heterosexuals in this video you linked.

But there is the end segment, in the last 3 minutes or so, where he doesn’t understand that there’s a difference between being a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consulting firm, and a narrative/writing consulting firm that helps promote diversity and inclusion, so that’s fun. He also ends the video by saying that the consultant with the bad tweets from a decade ago is one of the company’s leaders.

All in all, not a lot of evidence that Sweet Baby Inc is doing anything wrong, really.

Hovenko,
@Hovenko@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

Denial is strong with this one.

ltxrtquq,

Seriously now, why don’t you provide some clearer evidence showing what SBI is doing and why it’s so bad? And why respond to my short summary of the video when @CileTheSane did a much more thorough breakdown?

We all know it’s because you don’t actually have any proof or solid reasoning for thinking these things, and you probably responded to me and not them because you’re too lazy to read their longer post and think up a lie. But Cile watched a half hour video because of you and put some thought and effort into applying it to your fake arguments, you could at least try to defend your bigoted views.

Hovenko,
@Hovenko@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

I don’t think there is any clear evidence that will satisfy person with your mindset :)

Trainguyrom,

some game studio had made a cast of all straight, white men and were thinking of diversifying by making one of those characters very stereotypically french, and so SBI consultant tried to get a little more diversity out of them by also making that character black.

Oh no! They had a cast of 12 straight white men, considered making it 12 straight white men with one who might not be American and in the end its 11 straight white men and one who is not white! Wont someone please think of the poor white children!

Outtatime,
@Outtatime@sh.itjust.works avatar

Ding ding ding we have a winner. People hate the truth

NikkiDimes,

Are you stupid…?

rekabis,

What does “woke” mean?

WOKE:

Wisdom
Openness
Kindness
Empathy

It is a state of awareness achieved by intellectually sensitive individuals who have empathy for the plight of others, especially those suffering from injustice and oppression such as racism or systemic bigotry.

This term is also used by people without functional empathy in an attempt to insult and mock those people with empathy.

But “woke” does not mean “persecution”. “Woke” just means that casual racism, sexism, religious and gender bigotry, and general lack of human empathy are no longer acceptable in polite society.

cyberic,
@cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Thanks for this, I had no idea it was an acronym. I thought it had to do with the phrase, “wake up sheeple.”

blackstampede,

It’s not an acronym.

It originally meant “awake” in English, kept that meaning in the American black community after it fell out of use among whites (e.g. “I was having trouble staying woke on the drive”), and was repurposed as slang. The slang meaning was “to be aware of prejudice or racism”, with the implication that many blacks were “asleep”, i.e. accepted excuses for racist systems, believed that racism wasn’t a big deal anymore etc.

I’m not sure whether the word was adopted seriously by leftists generally before the right, or immediately became a catch-all label on the right, but either way, it’s become the latter.

Conservatives and some left-critical leftists now use it as a broad term that refers to things like DEI initiatives, anything trans, etc.

nothead,

The term as it is defined today was invented by a militant black terrorist group called the Nuwabian Nation, a subsect of the Moors (sovereign citizens focused on their African heritage).

The word has been used by black Americans for at least a century as a synonym form"awake", but its definition as a political concept was first used publicly by the founder of the nuwabians, Dwight York.

blackstampede,

This is not correct.

The word “woke” as a political term predates that group- York started trying to found a group in 1967, and “woke” was first used to warn black men of threats from racially motivated whites in 1931, by a singer named Lead Belly, then even more directly as a political term in 1971 in a play called “Garvey Lives!”

Whether York used it that way or not, it’s clear that he didn’t invent the usage.

I’m pulling most of this info from Wikipedia and Google to save anyone else reading the effort.

Outtatime,
@Outtatime@sh.itjust.works avatar

😂😂😂😂

merc,

That’s an interesting backronym.

ampersandrew,
ampersandrew avatar

It's not a story when it's a couple of conspiracy theorists making horrifically inaccurate deductions. It's a story when it's hundreds of thousands of people led on by a bunch of horse shit.

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

show what SBI management have been actually saying before all of this came to light, what their founder and employee have been tweeting

And you don’t show that either. As someone who is trying to understand the issue people have with SBI, can you show something the founder / employees have actually said? I’m not going to search through a random webpage / Youtube page to see if they actually have something relevant.

Eyck_of_denesle, (edited )

They locked their twitter account. So internet archive is your friend.

The guy below me seems quite slow. I’m not OP.

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

You are trying to convince people that they said inappropriate things. Again, I am not going to go somewhere to do your job for you and dig through some random archives in case there might be something relevant. Especially if I think you’re making it up.

Internet archive is your friend, if it’s as easy to find as you claim then it would make your arguments significantly more persuasive if you just included a direct link to an archive of whatever it is you are concerned about.

Eyck_of_denesle, (edited )

I have better things to do fortunately. It’s pretty clear from other posts that you already made up your mind. So there’s no use. We can end the conversation here.

Also I’m not trying to convince anyone. I just wanted to help you.

BleatingZombie,

I swear people don’t understand the burden of proof and you’re one of them

Eyck_of_denesle, (edited )

Can you reference how exactly I hold the burden? Did I state anything that I have to back up? I only said their twitter is locked. I never said anything else. Looks like the room iq is quite low here.

For the people downvoting. I’m not op. I never claimed anything.

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

Can you reference how exactly they said you hold the burden? The only said you don’t understand burden of proof, (due to your statements implying that the person making bold claims doesn’t need to provide any evidence of those claims.) They never said anything else.

Eyck_of_denesle, (edited )

I swear people don’t understand the burden of proof and you’re one of them

Lmao. I’m losing braincells here lol. Where did I say or imply “the person making bold claims doesn’t need to provide any evidence of those claims”.

My only intention was to help you find those tweets if you were interested. Some of you behave so chronically online. Get a life.

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

Where did I say or imply “the person making bold claims doesn’t need to provide any evidence of those claims”.

Right here:

They locked their twitter account. So internet archive is your friend.

OP made them vaguest of all claims (“SBI leadership said awful things”) and I simply asked them for specifics and a link. You know, to “provide any evidence for those claims.”
Your reply to me was basically “look it up yourself”, which is not how the burden of proof works.

Lmao. I’m losing braincells here lol.

Some of you behave so chronically online. Get a life.

It’s always projection…

Eyck_of_denesle, (edited )

How did I imply it? Can you also reference where I refer to OP. I replied cause op’s comment was posted 2 days ago and it was clear they weren’t going to reply.

This is just a misunderstanding in my opinion. So let me make it clear that I’m not on op’s side. I don’t care if sweet abby inc is in a game I play. I do care about Kotaku tho. I have a hard time believing their stories.

I only called you chronically online because you have at least 50 comments on this topic in 2 days.

So I’ll end the conversation here. Idk why it was even dragged on this long.

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

I only called you chronically online because you have at least 50 comments on this topic in 2 days.

I only called you chronically online because you’re laughing like a lunatic every other sentence, and apparently going into my profile and counting each individual comment I’ve made on a given topic. That’s not the behaviour of someone who touches grass.

Eyck_of_denesle,

That’s not what chronically online means. It’s the internet , people say “LMAO” a lot. Scrolling a profile for 5 sec thread is not that hard and 50 is a guess. You seem quite troubled using the internet. You don’t need to take everything here to face value. I get the feeling that you don’t know when to stop so I’m just gonna block you for now.

CileTheSane, (edited )
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

I get the feeling that you don’t know when to stop

Says the person who’s being going at this just as long and needs to announce his leaving, twice, instead of just leaving.

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

I’m not trying to convince anyone. I just wanted to help you.

Pro tip: dO yOuR rEsEaRcH!!1! Has never convinced or helped anyone.

I am willing to have my mind changed if someone were to actually show me any evidence of SBI being bad for some reason. The Steam group says nothing other than “SBI worked on these games,” implying they are bad but not even making the step to say why. When I try to ask people why I should care if SBI is involved I get:

  1. “I don’t have to explain myself” which is true, but does nothing to discredit the claims of bigotry.
  2. “SBI is woke” which we all know is the dog whistle of the bigot, and
  3. "Do your own research" which is the desperate cry of people who believe things without evidence or sources.

Showing me one of these “terrible” tweets by SBI would sure shut me up if it was anywhere near as terrible as claimed.

Outtatime,
@Outtatime@sh.itjust.works avatar

Nailed it. You know how I know? I see all the down votes.

HolyDuckTurtle, (edited )
HolyDuckTurtle avatar

I love how parkplace is literally the kind of single-minded insanity this article talks about (which is significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw)

Like, skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this https://thatparkplace.com/wish-actor-harvey-guillen-says-he-believes-disney-will-make-a-queer-princess-in-his-lifetime/ where they relay the quotes then immediately jump to:

If this does indeed happen it’s likely to lose The Walt Disney Company millions of dollars as seen with Lightyear.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, it is perfectly possible that the studio's writing work might be a bit shit, I dunno. If you find they are consistently involved with writing you don't enjoy, then sure, whatever. The point of this article is the absolute insanity this kind of stuff gets taken to, like it's a massive conspiracy rather than just the work of another studio managing the struggles and interests of our age.

To quote the 2+n paragraph article:

It’s a conspiracy theory that checks all the boxes: It conveniently explains pretty much everything happening right now, ties it back to organizations of which people are understandably suspicious, links it to a much larger ongoing panic (DEI), validates preconceived notions like “go woke, go broke,” sprinkles in a few kernels of truth regarding powerful interests, and – most importantly – provides a clear and identifiable enemy. It’s also almost entirely bullshit.

Blizzard,

significantly longer than 2 paragraphs btw

This is all I can see

https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/4d4ba219-c839-43a9-83e9-fe7fe267f90e.webp

Pethaps it has some ads or paywall which causes adblockers to hide remaining content.

skimming through their articles and you get stuff like this

Why referring to other articles and not the ones releated to this subject? I honestly didn’t know any of the linked authors before but it’s great they did talk about the stuff the mainstream media failed to mention.

chloyster,

I’ve got an ad blocker on mobile and yeah the article goes on wayyyyyyyy longer than what you show there

CileTheSane,
@CileTheSane@lemmy.ca avatar

when the curator list on steam exceded 200.000 subscribers

They have a discord too.

These are the same people who say things like “I don’t care if someone’s gay, just don’t make it your entire personality.” Meanwhile I don’t know what the fuck these people talk about in a “SBI worked on these 16 games” Discord group.

Oh, and apparently they had to delete every post in their discussion forums and lock them to make sure they didn’t break Steam’s rules. Because that’s a sign of a group of reasonable people…

Grain9325, (edited )

Don’t forget the employee who led a harassment campaign against the curator, came back from Twitter suspension just to disrespect Akira Toriyama’s legacy.

Th4tGuyII, to games in I Want Better Games With Worse Graphics And I'm Not Kidding - Aftermath
Th4tGuyII avatar

Honestly, I have to agree with the article - while you could say graphics have improved in the last decade, it's nowhere near as much as the difference as the decade before that.

I'd easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I'd still bet the difference wouldn't be that noticeable for 4K either.

And what do we gain for that diminishing return on graphics?
Singleplayer games are being made smaller, or vapid "open worlds", and cost more due to more resources going to design teams rather than the rest of the game.
Meanwhile multiplayer games get less frequent and smaller updates, and that gets padded out with aggressive micro-transactions.

I hate that "realistic" graphics has become such an over-hyped selling point in games that it's consuming AAA gaming in its entirety.

I would love for AAA games to go back to being reasonably priced with plainer looking graphics, so that resources can actually be put into making them more than just glorified tech demos.

Shawdow194,
Shawdow194 avatar

Well it's a scaling effect and diminishing returns

To the human eye 480p vs 1080p is significant but 4k vs 8k is hard to tell

I think focusing on new technologies such as AI upscaling/world generation or VR is a better use of developers time and pushes the industry back into the innovative space it's supposed to be

taladar,

VR will always stay a niche technology just because of the limited circumstances where people can use it (e.g. not on the move, not while watching kids,…).

Shawdow194,
Shawdow194 avatar

I agree

I should've clarified VR/ AR. I do think AR will be a large part of daily life and apply much further than video games in the not too distant future

tburkhol,

Depends a bit on screen size and placement, too. I play on 27", 1440p, about 3 feet from my face, and my eyeballs are definitely the lowest resolution link in the chain. 32" screen on my desk, 60" screen in front of the couch, and 1080-1440 will start showing their pixels. I’m not anxious to upgrade my screen, because 1440p gives me great framerates with a cheaper video card. Also a 32" screen at a viewing distance of 3’ is hard to actually see everything.

I’d much rather have a good game that runs fast at 1080p than have to get a $700 card for OK framerate and style-over-substance gameplay just to get 4k.

Agree that using VR to get immersive, wide-field graphics from fewer pixels is a great alternative.

ColeSloth,

There’s hundreds of great games on pc to play without all the focus on graphics. You just can’t focus on industry giant game devs. Go play Stardew Valley, or Hades, or Subnautica.

Th4tGuyII,
Th4tGuyII avatar

Of course there are, and I do - but the focus of the article, and thus the thread was on the AAA gaming space and its obsession with graphics.
Smaller studios and Indies already figured out the whole "you don't need to be able to see every fibre of a character's hair in order for a game to be good" thing

AlexWIWA,

Subnautica is a game I play for the audio, and that’s really saying something because the visuals are great. I bought open back headphones for that game.

AlexWIWA,

Halo 4 at 1440p looks very good, and it’s 12 years old. Fully agree. I’d rather see more entities on screen, more particles, and draw distance. Polygon count and textures don’t really impress me anymore.

I’d rather see highly stylized games with a lot going on in the world, rather than wasting half of my frame render time on a character’s face.

Th4tGuyII,
Th4tGuyII avatar

Exactly. If my graphics card is going to be chugging, I'd rather it be because of the sheer amount of stuff to interact with in an area, rather than a beautiful but vapid landscape

pressanykeynow,

I’d easily argue that the average AAA game from a decade ago looks just as good on a 1080/1440p display as the average AAA game today - and I’d still bet the difference wouldn’t be that noticeable for 4K either.

If you just count pixels, yes. But what really made a big step forward in this decade was the realistic animation. And it does require a lot of effort and time to make it right.

Th4tGuyII,
Th4tGuyII avatar

Honestly I'd still argue there's diminishing returns on this front as well.
I play plenty of older titles, and I wouldn't say I notice that much of a difference - though that is my very subjective opinion

Aux,

I don’t have a 1080p monitor, but most games look like shit on 4K. Bumping texture resolution is not enough for 4K, you also need better geometry and much longer drawing distances. If it’s not an Unreal 5 game with their virtually infinite geometry detailing, then it mostly likely looks like shit.

guyrocket, to technology in Google Kneecaps Loads Of Very Big Websites After SEO Change
guyrocket avatar

But google is NOT a monopoly. Right?

avater, (edited ) to games in It's Exhausting Trying To Read Video Game Website Headlines - Aftermath
@avater@lemmy.world avatar

a headline from the same page 😅

I Don’t Really Understand What The Five Nights At Freddy’s Movie Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It

But in general I totally agree on that. Those clickbait headlines simply suck.

mcforest,

or

You Can Finally Fall for Rusty In This Armored Core 6 Dating Sim

avater,
@avater@lemmy.world avatar

from the same outlet?

mcforest,

Right now in the "featured stories" on aftermath

magic_lobster_party,

AC6 is already a Rusty dating sim

Goronmon,

I think for that title to accurately reflect the overall complaint it would be something more like “I Don’t Really Understand What This New Movie Release Was About, And It Wasn’t Good, But I Didn’t Hate It” or to use the lower level comment’s example “You Can Finally Fall for Your Favorite Character In This Dating Sim Based on a Popular Recent Release”.

Where the title is intentionally vague so that you need to read it to even understand what they are talking about. The original titles could be easily summarized as “Opinions on Five Nights At Freddy’s movie” or “Dating Sim based on character from Armored Core 6” just based on the title alone. So if you are aren’t interested in either of those topics, you can easily skip reading.

Seraph, to games in Welcome To Aftermath - Worker-owned video game journalism
Seraph avatar

Can we get worker owned game companies now?

PyroNeurosis,
@PyroNeurosis@lemmy.world avatar

Aren’t those called indie establishments?

Swedneck,
@Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

sadly most indie companies are not co-ops

Yawnder,

Can confirm. I’ve seen a small studio abuse one of the sole dev that wasn’t an owner and ducking him so hard…

dangblingus,

Indie just means you don’t have a major publisher like EA, Nintendo, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.

GoodEye8,

Not really. Technically Bungie was “indie” after the Activision split and before being bought out by Sony and some of the issues circulating the news today were the same management issues they had when they were “indie”.

Worker-owned is a term rooted in socialism. It means the majority stake (ideologically 100%) of the company is collectively owned by the workers. Thus it means the workers decide what the company does and how they will do it. If an indie company has an owner, who makes the decisions, and employees, who don’t have a say in those decisions, then that’s not really a worker-owned company.

jlou,

Worker-owned companies are certainly rooted in anti-capitalist thought, but they aren't inherently socialist in the 20th century sense because they are compatible with private property

GoodEye8,

I think it comes down to whether you believe in market socialism or not, as market socialists and non-market socialists have a different understanding of private ownership. Non-market socialists, such as orthodox Marxists, see any kind of privatization as a negative and as such promote public ownership. Market socialists make the distinction between private ownership and cooperative ownership, because cooperative ownership still tackles the worker exploitation at a micro level. In a private ownership the worker is exploited because the owner of the means of production can use their power dynamic to exploit the worker but in a cooperative that worker is a part of the ownership which would mean exploiting the worker is akin to exploiting yourself. In that sense the worker-owned companies may not be compatible with orthodox Marxism, but they’re still socialist in nature.

I will mention that it wouldn’t be the final state of socialism, I don’t believe we can switch to cooperatives and call it a day. Marx saw socialism as a process and we should see socialism as a process. Going from private ownership to cooperative ownership is just one small step in that process. There will be more steps in the future that might eventually end up looking more like orthodox Marxism. So I really don’t see it as not socialist.

qarbone,

So Valve, as game devs?

GoodEye8,

No. The main reason people are worried about what happens to Valve when Gabe passes is because Gabe is the owner, he owns more than 50% of the company. Valve has done well under him but once he’s out the picture and that more than 50% ownership is transferred to another person then who knows if the company will stay the same. After all that 50 makes the decisions about the company

If that 50 was split between the workers there would be less certainty about the potentially passing of ice person because the workers collectively uphold the company vision.

AdmiralShat,

I mean, unless something has changed in theater few years, Gabe owns only about a quarter of Valve

Buddahriffic,

I have heard rumours that his son has a similar mindset. Though who knows, those rumours were on this site, plus even if they are true, he could just be pretending so that Gabe doesn’t look into other options or he could change his mind after being told some enticing numbers.

Cybersteel,

No company survives the third generation.

Cybersteel,

So communists? Thought we had rooted them out in the nineties. But then again lemmy is run by commie tankies while Reddit is headed by far right nationalists. There’s no good platform nowadays huh.

GoodEye8,

Bro… For starters, not all socialists are communists. This video does a good job explaining the differences. Secondly, there’s a whole other world I’d have to explain just to get to how “lemmy is run by commie tankies” is wrong. For that I’m just going to leave that Lemmy is FOSS, which means the creators are not relevant to the continuation of the project, and Lemmy instances are individually ran and can be used to block “tankies” like lemmy.world did with lemmygrad and hexbear. And finally most people have a negative view of socialism because they don’t know (because it’s not being taught) Marx’s criticism of capitalism that is the foundation of socialist ideology. Marx wrote a whole book on it called Das Kapital, but you can get the general idea starting from here. It’s a summary of chapter 4 of Das Kapital and you should watch chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 (In total doesn’t take more than half an hour) to get the general idea. So even if you don’t agree with socialism as a whole you at least would understand what the core issue is that socialism wants to fix.

bighi, (edited )

Let’s go further. Let’s have worker-owned everything.

Worker-owned factories, stores, restaurants, etc. Worker-owned government!

Let’s cut out the people that do not work but take 90% of the revenue.

Veraxus,
Veraxus avatar

This. This. This.

100% this.

sadreality, to gaming in It's Been A Bad Year For The Video Game Industry, But A Good One For Unions

Shiti companies finally facing some push back.

Good!

Blapoo, to gaming in It's Been A Bad Year For The Video Game Industry, But A Good One For Unions

Therefore a good year for everyone

chloyster,

Except the devs who aren’t in unions yet :(

But, yes I hope the industry continues towards a unionized future!

ArachnidMania, (edited )

Having other areas of your field with better pay/conditions/benefits can put more pressure on even non union places. Since there will be better contions elsewhere, there will be an expectation of a level of compensation/more people looking at those union places, requiring even the non union locations to at least increase something to compete for talent.

hal_5700X, to games in Sony's Neil Druckmann Interview Shows Why We Need Journalists

Sony’s Neil Druckmann Interview Shows Why We Need Journalists

Says a game journalist. Yeah, no bias here.

We need good game journalists. Who care about video games.

nirvana1100, to games in Sony's Neil Druckmann Interview Shows Why We Need Journalists
nirvana1100 avatar

Naughty Dog needs to bring back Amy Hennig to filter Neil's ideas and make something coherent out of them.

Cybersteel, to games in Why People Don’t Catch The Politics In Their Favorite Games
@Cybersteel@lemmy.world avatar

Most gamers are fkin stupid that’s the reason. Radicalised by the right and don’t recognize political themes right in front of them.

RedditRefugee69, to games in Sony's Neil Druckmann Interview Shows Why We Need Journalists

After wasting 10 minutes of my life analyzing it… I don’t see the point of people getting enraged, nor how this relates to gaming journalism

Goronmon,

Without journalism (or just a third-party in general) providing perspectives and communication in some way, you are relying primarily on the information coming directly from the companies themselves.

In this case we see that Sony was willing to fabricate quotes about an interview.

guacupado, to technology in Media Companies Like Vox Are Feeding Their Journalists' Work Into An AI Wood Chipper

I just saw an Inverse article about Mario Kart that said “could of.”

I can expect random people online to do that dumb shit, but not someone whose job is literally to write things.

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