Video Game Industry BS (AKA, GamerGate Thread 2.0)

This thread is for calling out the video game industry for the ever growing list of anti-consumer practices.
 
I’ll start.
 
Dungeon Keeper Mobile. It’s old bullshit, but it is still bullshit.

EA finally putting Mass Effect 3 “on Steam” but requiring an Origin account to play it, and not just a one-time activation. Fuck them. As a bonus, the system they’ve devised also causes the game to lag like hell and crash.

@Officer Hotpants  
is anyone even surprised by them anymore?

@Havoc  
Unlikely. When I posted that I was thinking “this will double as the EA thread”.

@Officer Hotpants  
I mean, they are an enormous and ever-present target at this point. But we could always discuss how Naughty Dog and its bandwagon are trying to cancel anybody that doesn’t think The Last of Us 2 is an absolute masterpiece, or how Ubisoft is utterly melting down right now. Just some launchpoints ^_

@Azure Fang  
Yeah, I heard about The Last of Our Games. What’s this about Ubi, though? More of the usual? Or did something special happen?

@Officer Hotpants  
Just before the weekend another three executives were fired resigned in the ongoing abuse scandal. “But hey, we’re being inclusive by allowing you to swap the gender of the assassin in Valhalla! No need to look any deeper into our internal issues!”

@Azure Fang  
What abuse scandal?

@Officer Hotpants  
Starting a month or so ago, another Ubisoft higher-up was accused of sexual harassment; rather than refute, the individual was “allowed to resign”. But rather than stopping there, more are being “investigated” and resigning, to the point that Ubisoft had to go out of their way to announce that they would not be addressing allegations during the Ubisoft Forward event. It actually got to the point that a couple weeks ago Jim Sterling stopped being his characteristically asinine self to publish a serious video for once.
 
Normally, I’d take it all with a grain of salt and a heavy bit of cynicism, what with how big we’ve seen “me too” events snowball. But the moment people started resigning without so much as an “I didn’t do it”, my ears perked up.

@Azure Fang  
Wow. They forced Jim to take a principled stand on something? That’s not something you hear every day.

@Officer Hotpants  
Forced if you mean “left no option”, yeah. It was surreal listening to him going out of his way to remain as serious as he could. Shows how personal the subject was to him, that’s for certain.
 
Ubisoft, Chris Avellone being outed, CDPR defending forced crunch, Randy Pitchford, just to name a few… can 2020 be over yet?

@Azure Fang  
I suspect it won’t ever reach its end. I mean years are man-made concepts; can’t reach the end of the year if there’s no one left to see it.

@Officer Hotpants  
Now I imagine forming epochs based off of video game industry drama:
 
“The Randocene Era began when Randy Pitchford’s thumb drive of legally actionable porn was found in a Medieval Times, and ended with the beginning of the Avellocene Era, when Chris Avellone was outed as a sexual predator.”

@Azure Fang  
I suppose the advent of Newgrounds & flash games would be the equivalent of the Cambrian explosion.

@Officer Hotpants  
That’s more accurate then it has any right to be. Why is it that random dudes on the internet can create more great and unique game ideas then AAA-companies with billions of dollars?

@Havoc  
Speaking of that, have a look at this shit. As I said in the comments, it’s like the Katamari Damacy people hired the folks who made The Neverhood to craft them an RPG. It’s beautiful.

@Havoc  
Because random dudes (for the most part) haven’t had their passion bled out of them to fuel the corporate money printers yet. I’m still in awe over CrossCode and the fact that it’s built (on PC, dunno about the recent console ports) in HTML5 and javascript and plays better than any “remaster” Squeenix has shit out in the past forever.
 
 
@Officer Hotpants  
I almost bought Hylics and Hylics 2 during the sale. Have you played it and is it any good aside from its great artistic direction?

@Officer Hotpants  
Holy shit that’s cool. I’m a sucker for claymation, but that is something else! Why can’t we have bigger games on this level of creativity? Oh I know. They focus test them until they become shells of what they should have been, all for the pursuit of more money then anyone would ever need.

@Azure Fang  
I really need to get back to CrossCode. I got about an hour in and ended up forgetting about it in favor of other games that I bought at the same time.
 
 
@Havoc  
I only heard about it a few hours ago when someone linked me that video. I’m planning on buying both later, though.

The new consoles are particularly bullshit. They are literally just mass produced PCs now, without any of the benefits and all of the drawbacks of consoles. Save for the switch, but that’s more of handheld. Also, what the fuck is up with Nintendo keeping their games at $60 price point years after their release? I feel like Nintendo gets loads of passes, but they still pull some shit.  
Oh, and the worst thing about modern vidya culture, resetera. Those people are insane, and the fact that they have connections with devs is pretty harrowing for the future of the industry.

@Aperture_tech
 
Consoles won’t be relevant for very much longer. The game industry just needs to solve the walking problem and then everything will be VR. We didn’t get augemented reality because Google tried to tack on their invasive monitering equiptment onto it and their competitors are no where near as close, however the people doing VR arn’t nearly as obsessed with data mineing and with HD wireless head sets and artificial resistance gloves all they need to do is work out how walking on the spot works and it’ll be ready.

@Aperture_tech  
I Honestly wish Sony and Mircosoft took the hint from Nintendo when it comes to consoles. Ever since the GameCube, Nintendo has been doing their best to make consoles that more then just boxes that play games. Love or hate the Wii, you can’t get that on a computer very easily.  
I think Nintendo gets passes for a lot of reasons. I believe it’s mainly because they do less shit then most companies, and has done a lot of pro-consumer things. Like that time the CEO cut his pay by 3/4 when the Wii U was failing, taking the responsibility rather than blaming the workers who had nothing to do with it. Not to say they don’t pull shit, just look at their mobile games.
 
@RavenandWritingDesk  
I don’t trust google with much of anything.

Companies releasing discs without the entire game on them, requiring you to then download the game you just bought physically. Off the top of my head, Toys 4 Bob did this with Spyro Reignited very recently, putting one game out of three on the actual disc or cartridge. and back in 2015 Activision released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 with like, almost nothing on the disc and everything was downloaded. Bethesda, ever a shining example of bad practices, just released a cardboard disc for Fallout 76, a game made out of anti consumer practices, there wasn’t a real physical edition, it was literally just a cardboard disc with a code.
 
id and Bethesda patched Doom Eternal one month or so after the game’s release with an excessive anti-cheat for a multiplayer almost nobody uses, active even if you’re playing in single player, this update also tanked performance for a lot of players though id insists it wasn’t the anti-cheat. And while non supported OSes are not their responsibility, it still sucks the update made the game unplayable for Linux users using Steam’s Proton. Massive backlash ensued and they actually removed the anti-cheat.  
Also, about a month after Crash Team Racing came out and the game got all it’s rave reviews, they added microtransactions lmao. If you’re gonna have’em at least be honest and ship the game with them so you don’t get praised for not having them first.

@Jomok0  
I still think they should have had the living shit sued out of them for those fake physical copy incidents. That’s straight up false advertising. Like offering to sell someone a coke, taking their money, giving them a bottle of water and then telling them where to go to get the rest of the ingredients.
 
As for the Doom thing, fuck them, it didn’t affect the performance. Is that why it was absent from their in-hosue copy that they accidentally released? Because it didn’t affect performance? Or did they only throw it in at the last second, in which case they couldn’t say jack shit about how it impacts the game? Which lie is it, Todd?

@Officer Hotpants  
You can’t make Todd choose between just one lie, man. He loves his lies. He loves them more than re-releasing Skyrim, more than removing roleplay from rpg series, more than not fixing the endless glitches!
 
At the very least with Doom Eternal, we won. The gamers rose up, the anti-cheat is gone.  
(On a personal note, I was playing it on Linux and beat the campaign the day before the update that temporarily left it unplayable lol)