DebatableRaccoon

It doesn’t invalidate what they’re doing in a karmic way, no. As for any legal precedent way, I’m genuinely concerned that it’ll very much be a “too little, too late” scenario. Many of us who have come from the school of Jim Fucking Sterling Son, or even those with their eyes open, saw how bad this could get a decade ago. It got bad enough to go to court where companies like EA produced pathetic stand-in excuses about “lootboxes” that manipulate the young, ill and weak-willed into spending insane amounts of money are actually “surprise mechanics” and thus totally different. Some countries were smart enough to put some amount of age limit on such things, others were even smarter and outright banned them but many just let it happen. It has kept happening and the biggest gaming corpos are now more than big enough to hire all of the lawyers in the world collectively and fight any claims off through the sheer force of printing money.

Yes, I’m possibly embellishing a little in that lot but after witnessing the gaming market slip further and further down the sinkhole the way it has with excuses of “it’s only cosmetic”, “it’s optional” and “it’s not required to experience the game”, I have every reason to think we’re not coming back from this.

Oh god, not them. Pick another producer, please. There are plenty out there… Most of them suck but at least most of them aren’t publicly known to be sex abusers.

Lots of gamers and parents have been going on about this for around a decade. EA was even in court over it. Where the heck have these ‘groups’ been? On an extended vacation with their distant relatives the mole people?

It’s amazing what having the potential of ownership ripped away can do.

Which means around 50 didn’t want to work for Krafton or already found jobs. Good for them.

Fire the C-suite… OUT OF A CANNON!

Sounds like a strange form of Stockholm Syndrome.

Being under the ActiBlizzard umbrella wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for a lot of employees either.

At least it’s not Kotaku but all this consolidation is far from good news. Heaven forbid reporters should get to stay independent, let alone being puppeted by a company that’s little more than a meme.

Short answer: money. It’s no secret devs are usually overworked and underpaid so even a large-ish group of developers from even some of the more popular companies getting murdered simply can’t afford to start a business. Some of them could go the Kickstarter route but few would be successful as is the way for Kickstarter.

That was rhetorical. I’m sadly aware of all the poor business decisions and practices

Jesus Christ, the fuck is wrong with this market

I couldn’t agree more. Back during the initial pitches of the Steam Machines, I was a supporter of the concept and was looking forward to the release. In my market, they took a long time to release and ended up being stupidly expensive. To give an idea, in my market an i3-powered unit was expensive as an i7-powered one in the US despite not having that problem with PC components or even prebuilts. Eventually I spent the money on a parts to build my own rig that was significantly more capable than what the Steam Machine of equal cost would have been. I found little ways to make being a couch PC gamer viable without breaking the bank on horribly expensive niche products like lapboards and it’s enabled me to become a PC gamer despite having been a console boy for so long. It’s a shame because I think Steam Machines would make PC gaming so much more approachable to the average consumer (which I was at the time) and I hope they still manage to in the future.

This screams so damn fake. If they ever wanted to make a good game, they should have made it before releasing it, let alone prioritising DLC for a game they are more than aware of being borked at release.

It’s amazing how much potential the world of Fallout has when not shackled to a terrible engine, isn’t it?

Can we keep in mind that back when The Crew launched, Ubisoft hadn’t quite established themselves as abysmal-tier company they are now.