‘Seismic shift’: driving unaffordable for many in US amid push toward SUVs
Oh, yeah, for sure. The marketing they did for Guardians was also very bad, it really made it seem of a kind with Avengers, which it really wasn't.
There will be a lot to say about why Rocksteady is getting to the looter shooter space so late and why it was the exact wrong move for the studio and the franchise. Unless the game is great and everybody buys it, I suppose.
Oh, big difference there, though. Suicide Squad actually IS a looter shooter driven by a wish to chase a business trend from five years to a decade ago. Guardians is a strictly single player Mass Effect-lite narrative action game (which yeah, given the material that fits).
I'd be with you in the argument that it would have been an even better game without the Marvel license, because then they could have skipped trying to rehash bits from the movies' look and feel, which are consistently the worst parts of the game. But then, without the license it would never have been made, so... make mine Marvel, I guess. Well worth it.
Nah, I'm mostly kidding. About the being my enemy part. The game is, in fact, awesome, and you should fetch it somewhere before the absolute nightmare of licensed music and Disney IP bundled within it makes it unsellable on any digital platform forever.
Seriously, I bought a physical copy of the console version just for preservation, beause if you want to know what will be in the overprized "hidden gem" lists of game collectors in thirty years, it's that.
Well, then you're my enemy, because that game is great, Marvel connection or not. In fact it's a fantastic companion piece ot the third Guardians movie, because they're both really good at their respective medium but they are pushing radically oppposite worldviews (one is a Christian parable, the other a humanist rejection of religious alienation).
And yeah, holy crap, they made a Marvel game about grief and loss and managing them without turning to religion and bigotry and it was awesome and beautiful and nobody played it and you all suck.
Well, it depends on when they cancelled it and on how much it cost. That thing didn't sell THAT poorly, but Square, as usual, was aiming way above what's realistic. Estimates on Steam alone put it above 1 million copies sold. You can assume PS5 was at least as good.
Based on those same estimates it actually outsold Guardians. Which is an absolute travesty and I blame anyone who hasn't played it personally.
It's all usable when you get used to it, but this is a great thread to link for people who develop scripting and programming languages, or just text-based technical interfaces. Because yeah, all that crap is designed with the US layout in mind and screw whoever chooses to use and | as commonplace characters.
FWIW, I don't even code and I still keep a US layer in the background. I forget which one I'm using constantly, it's all muscle memory. I just Win-space and try again whenever I type a character and it's not what I expect.
Hey, at least that game came out. Plus Eidos Montreal also made the actually really, really damn good Guardians of the Galaxy game nobody played. I'd make that trade.
Man, these guys really can't catch a break. That sucks, they make pretty solid stuff.
I am honestly not super sure about this strategy of buying your way into being a major publisher by vacuuming up IP nobody else was bidding for. What did they think would happen? Did they think the old majors were leaving a ton of money on the table and then realized too late that these really weren't that profitable? Or was it just a bid that the low interest rates would last forever and the portfolion would just pay for itself if they bundled it large enough?
I don't know what the business plan was meant to be, and it's kinda killing me that I don't fully grasp it.
The only one remotely close to being a hit was the first reboot. I guess it depends on whether you count the "I can't believe it's not Deus Ex" franchises they kept spinning up for a while. The first Dishonored probably did very well.
For the record, this guy seems to be based somewhere in Europe and at worst he'd get government subsidies for minimum wage-ish amounts for a year, at best semi-indefinite support while he seeks new employment based on his previous income level.
If this teaches you something besides "don't make or read posts in LinkedIn under any circumstances" is that a sensible safety net really enables you to recover from shitty situations and everybody should have access to that. Because if you don't, then you DO deserve better.
US politics, often on both ends, semi-purposefully failing to acknowledge the difference between social democrats and socialists is both weirdly sticky and frankly makes it very hard to talk about politics with them at all.
Social democrats in places where this is not the case are so often considered borderline neoliberal, centrist traitors by communists and other far left people, and the distinction between liberalism and social democracy is seen as more a matter of nuance than between social democracy and communism.
Although I guess that's changing because American fascists exported their playbook and now conservatives all over the world talk about "freedom" and push anarchocapitalist ideas they've copy-pasted from the mothership, so if anything everybody else is drifting towards this nonsense now.
I came here to joke that judging by what toy stores look like, they probably just sell merch. I was extremely not ready for that to be the canonical explanation and now I feel more respect for the writers. More empathy, too, because... you know they know.
I mean, yeah, turns out that when you are in a quasi monopolistic position in many different markets and you get to decide the rules for all of your competitors you can absolutely integrate your "ecosystem" very smoothly. Go figure.
Their stubbornness on this makes the software/hardware divide the most obvious and a good place to start. Right now they're keeping the hardware hostage to benefit first party software and exclude everyone else's. That clearly has to change.
The stuff my dad made. My mom worked past our lunchtime, my dad did not.
https://media.tenor.com/WUwtwTKCvicAAAAC/reexamine-personal-biases.gif
I agree. Everybody is doing his shtick today and there's no more common water cooler TV anymore, so it's impossible to have the impact he had (if any, which itself is debatable).
If one needs proof, there's always the pretty obvious fact that he already had a show until very recently and it's not like anybody cared. I bet he'll do great for TDS' ratings, though. I'll probably watch.
I make a living off of media creation and have for over twenty years, across multiple mediums and in different capacities. Some of the stuff I've worked on has been DRMd and some has not.
The financial benefit coming my way has not been dependent on DRM at any point to any extent I can discern. You want to impact "the right to financially benefit from their creations"? Fix the fact that companies can just hire a creator to work for hire and own all their output in perpetuity with no requirement for additional compensation and indeed no IP rights staying with the people doing the actual work.
If you're gonna high horse me with the morality of financially compensating creators you better be talking about the actual creators, not the corporations keeping the bulk of the revenue.
With music it gets weirder because for some reason we've all accepted that anybody can just upload music to Youtube as long as they're fine with whoever owns the rights reclaiming the ad revenue, which is very weird.
But in any case I think the value calculation gets a bit weird for a number of reasons. TV was indeed overpriced in physical media, but movies were a different story. It's gonna depend on your consumption habits, but I can tell you there's no way my average viewing on each of the services I pay for at 15 bucks a pop (not ten anymore on any of them, unless you're ok with also watching ads) is anywhere close to one movie or five episodes on average. Across the whole lot, maybe, for each individual one? Probably not. Across the whole household... maybe.
Second, a lot of the media consumption was not made physically at the time, either, TV was a thing (and depending on the time period a source of home recordings, which are also fair game). But then those options haven't been technically removed, I guess, so... I don't know, it's hard to calculate.
Which I guess is part of why these services are so resilient. It's hard to figure out if you're over or underpaying relative to the alternatives, and since there's no way to grasp the core cost or value of what you're getting intuitively it's hard to understand if they're priced reasonably, either. Netflix was doing this at a loss in that "disruptor start up" style that broke the 2010s that who knows what entertainment should cost at this point.
Well, no. I was happily buying my games on discs and cartridges and my movies on DVDs and tapes and my music in CDs. If they're going to swing around, tell me I'm buying digital licenses and I can no longer do the legal things I used to do it's them who owe an explanation.
I have no idea why you feel the need to shill so hard for these things, but it's clearly not sticking. You're putting the onus on the customer and, as a customer I get to just say "no, screw you" and keep buying physical media instead. It's a shame that more people don't, but it's pretty obvious that having them take over my computer to limit what I do with my purchases is damaging to me, and I don't have to like it because you say so.
Because it shouldn't be on me to ask for permission to do stuff with my software that I bought.
Maybe I'm too old, because I remember when I bought a disk and I just copied it and used that. Which is legal, by the way.
Well, alright, I don't need to remember too far back, because I was ripping some movies today. Which, again, fair game. I paid for them, I get to use them. I shouldn't have to explain to you, Valve, Netflix or anybody else why I want to back up the thing I bought.
I had to use a unit converter, but I've lived in places housing up to seven people that weren't that big. Comfortably.
This is a conversation I had here recently as well when I pointed out to a car thread that for the money Americans pay for pickup trucks you can also buy a hatchback and a proper van, cover most use cases and not drive a tank to take kids to school. They did NOT like that.