• 0 posts
  • 67 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 18th, 2023
  • Exactly. Nintendo is not our friend, but it’s also playing by the rules it has available to it. It’s the rulemaker’s fault if the rules are shite.

    As a publically traded company in the current system, Nintendo is not in the business of making video games, it’s in the business of making shareholder value. Video games are just a tool for doing that, exactly how a PC is a tool for writing documents or developing software. At the end of the day, companies have more than one tool at their disposal, and are going to use all of them to compete.

    It’s on us to take away the tools we don’t think they should have access to, not on them to voluntarily not use the ones that are in play.

  • The fact that there has been so much noise over $80 video games makes me question the thesis here. There are a huge number of video games out there now, it’s true, but if gamers truly gave a shit about them, I think everyone would be rather quiet about the prices from the big publishers.

    All of the noise tells me that gamers will continue to prioritize big name, big dollar releases, rather than actually even glance at their backlog of Steam games. And $80 spent on games you never, ever play is not a better investment.

  • The game prices I’m ok with. When I was a kid, video games cost $70 CAD, and that’s almost $200 now. I’m perfectly OK with going back to buying fewer games. I have too many of them I shouldn’t have bought in the first place.

    I’m wildly upset with the console price, in no small part because Nintendo and other electronics manufacturers seem to be trying to smooth over the shock of Dorito Don’s tariffs by increasing prices globally.

    The Americans made their own bed. I’m not willing to lie in it with them.

  • It remains so incredibly alarming to me the number of “business leaders” who looked at consumer spending in 2020/2021, looked at the global context of 2020/2021, and then went “things will now be like this forevermore,” even as other “business leaders”, and even, very often, themselves, were doing everything possible to force everyone back into a pre-COVID context.

    My own employer was one of these businesses, and every time I’ve brought it up, I’ve been firmly told “everyone else thought the same thing we did, too”.

    I didn’t have a whole lot of respect for business people before that, but I at least – naively, it turned out – believed they knew how to operate businesses. I now have no respect for such people whatsoever, as they’ve demonstrated completely and thoroughly, even to the point where my dumb ass can notice, that the only thing that ever “qualified” them to “run a business” was having money.

    The fact that tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs because the ownership class chose to believe that they’d stumbled into an infinite growth hack is shameful, and these “leaders” deserve to be stripped of all that they own and tossed into the street.

  • Yup. The author is juuuuust missed in identifying the issue. The alt-right doesn’t take gaming, or gamers, seriously. But they do see angry young men as recruitment targets, and understand that a lot of gamers are much, much bigger losers than most of us imagine, and that they have a lot of pent up anger at not being taken seriously.

    The basement dwelling CHUDs don’t realize that Bannon’s brigade is laughing at them whenever they’re not in the room. They’re just that desperate for any kind of attention and validation, even if it’s painfully disingenuous.

  • This meshes pretty well with my feelings of thing. On the whole, TotK is more refined more of the same. I’ve enjoyed seeing how the world and characters have moved on, I enjoyed the side quests, and I enjoyed that feeling early on of the depths being new, mysterious, and dangerous.

    One of the things I decided early on was that I didn’t like the Lego Technic stuff, and I committed to using it as little as possible. Especially for speeding up travel. I’m an old, and my internal Hyrule is deeply and strictly… medieval? Mythical? Legendary? Electric drones just don’t fit into my schema for Zelda, even though the developers gave been slipping more and more magitech into the setting for going on 20 years now. I feel that this has given me more of a sense of the game as a meal, to use your analogy, but it’s definitely an indulgent one.

    I wasn’t looking for more BotW. I was just looking for more Link, Zelda, and Ganon. I got what I wanted, and I genuinely don’t understand the ire the game has drawn, other than, maybe, a lot of people getting what they wanted, discovering they were wrong about what they wanted, and being unwilling to accept that.