dumpsterlid @ dumpsterlid @lemmy.world

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4

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674

Joined

2 yr. ago

To be fair being better than Deep Rock Galactic is an insanely hard bar to clear.

A decent enough artist to get hired by Triple A can absolutely get plenty of work elsewhere, and it’s getting easier every day.

Citation needed, ESPECIALLY with regards to it "getting easier every day" to earn a decent living making video games... or as an artist in general.

I‘m playing Monster Hunter World a worrying amount…

I mean going outside and family are important or whatevvvverrr, but also there is no guarantee whatever reality we zoom off to when we die will have Monster Hunter World. Play the shit out of now don’t be a fool and put off the important experiences in life.

Tried this one out briefly definitely really fun game mechanics and I have heard the story is great.

Well, this is a perfect opportunity to practice feeling empathy for artists pursuing their dream which as we all know often requires biting the bullet and doing something like working for a big soulless company to get enough industry experience to do the thing an artist really wants to do.

Also a great opportunity to just practice empathy for fellow workers, we get nowhere without solidarity.

Don’t worry, the business model of companies like Embracer is literally to strip mine “inefficient” businesses run by artists through short circuiting the positive feedback loop between game developers passionate about what they do and loyal fans, trashing the work environment for the employees by cutting everything, and ripping off fans until they realize the place that made the art they love is alive only in name.

Valheim will be fine!

They are doubling down on Game Pass, saying all their games will be on game pass day 1 Actiblizz games are coming to game pass, starting with Diablo 4.

One step closer to the dream of turning the video game industry into the music industry

Musicians in the age of streaming cannot, quote, "record music once every three to four years and think that's going to be enough." That pronouncement came from Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in a recent interview with the website Music Ally. His comment made a lot of musicians angry and reignited frustrations over how much Spotify pays artists. At a time when the company's business is doing relatively well, NPR's Andrew Limbong takes a look at how the cash is flowing.

Look for video game execs spouting this exact same copypasta class war bullshit going forward

Ref:https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901064434/comments-from-spotify-ceo-anger-some-musicians

Honestly, I don't.

I mean I survive, but besides the basics of taking care of my body, taking ADHD meds, going to therapy and doing yoga, there is nothing that truly helps me cope with the everyday quality of life disaster that is ADHD. I just survive it.

If we lived in an easier time I might say I had found things that help me cope and live a higher quality of life, but we live in a time where life is very hard and I have to think of coping mechanisms as more like little rituals I do to try to bring myself up than meaningful answers to the actual challenges I face and fail to meet everyday otherwise the incongruity of scale between the two drives me into complete despair or anger.

:)

CALLING ALL THE CONDESCENDING PEOPLE WHO KEPT SAYING "LETS JUST WAIT AND SEE" WHEN PEOPLE LIKE ME POINTED OUT THIS WOULD HAPPEN WHEN THEIR BELOVED GAME DEVELOPMENT STUDIO SOLD ITSELF TO EMBRACER

Fuck, just sign up with Mastodon and get it over with, you putzes. What is your issue with free software?

What you are partially seeing here is the fact that there is friction to the very idea of Mastodon not being owned by a massive corporation. People have been trained so well to expect their social media to be run by a massive corporation that even if an alternative social network like Mastodon did onboarding perfectly people are still going to get tripped up and feel confused about Mastodon simply because a bunch of rich people don’t own it.

It is maddening and there isn't much we can do about it other than treat that friction as an opportunity to help radicalize people into being more open in a broader sense to taking back aspects of their life from the control of rich people/massive corps.

Yeah flying around the country performing concerts is absurdly wasteful, but we are in an apocalypse movie, this subplot about a musician flying around maybe being selfish or not just doesn’t really register amid the thunderous sounds of corporations and the rich demolishing whole swaths of our planet.

Billionaires flying around on jets is disgusting because they don’t actually do anything they just tell other people what to do, fire people and collect the money. At least taylor swift or any other musician flying around actually PHYSICALLY gets up on stage and plays the gig in the cities they fly too.

Making games had become much more accessible than ever.

Making music has become MASSIVELY more accessible than ever, but you know what? It’s just a hobby now, capitalism has destroyed making and recording music as a livelihood unless you manage to get a handful unicorn jobs.

Just because it is easy for a company to enter a market doesn’t mean that structural, toxic issues with that market magically are nullified as problems. Gamers as a category seem to have a REALLY hard time wrapping their head around this.

Damn, if squirrels started going after fascists in uniforms we really could start getting some serious positive momentum couldn't we.

The New Original Xbox X-S Console Series was just announced with two levels, the X-S Pro-X Phactor or cheaper ST-X Pro-BoxX 2.

The previous gen Xbox X/S will be re-released as a subscription legacy product called Xbox One 2.0.

If you are only concerned about this from the perspective of having enough good games to keep you personally occupied and not a step further to the experience of human beings working in the industry (beyond the narrow range of game companies you directly buy from) that makes the art you love, then yes you and I fundamentally disagree and I would never want to be misconstrued as making the kind of argument you are making.

Also thank you for complimenting my flourish :)

How can you even measure some of the claims you’re making?

I don't know, my ideas are so wild and I am pulling them totally out of thin air. It isn't like there is a massive amount of scholarly work on this topic, a pre-existing history of legal cases pertaining to these issues that have caused society defining laws to be passed in most major countries and many political movements that explicitly attempt to define and critique these processes at our fingertips on the internet waiting to educate and inform us.

And you know, the funny thing is I really for once was feeling a little optimistic about this kind of material existing for me to read and educate myself with but I guess in this case my pessimism was well founded.

Look, you are describing a perfectly rational theory for how events could play out in a theoretical universe, but you are just stependously, horrifically wrong if you think this story corresponds to reality in a meaningful way.

The truth is these companies have so much power (money) behind them that they don't just keel over and die when they fail, they annihilate entire industries, catastrophically derail promising career trajectories for countless workers, structurally give themselves an impenetrable advantage with regulatory capture and most importantly utterly dominate the material reality of being a worker in that industry, even if the worker doesn't work at the company.

Look at Uber, remember years ago when Uber keeled over and died once it became apparent that Uber wasn't profitable unless drivers are exploited to an extreme degree? Then all those workers went and worked for other ride sharing companies that ran more effective businesses and treated their employees more humanely (in retrospect the by now well documented extremely sexist and toxic culture of upper management at Uber alone doomed it from the start).... The market solved the problem by rewarding rideshare companies with better technology and business models than Uber. I remember in California, Uber could have blocked legislation that was going to improve the lives of rideshare/gig workers immensely but they realized that the consequences of drivers and riders seeing Uber openly shit on their face and spend massive amounts of money to keep drivers from getting a tiny, measly amount more money and control over their work environment would spell utter disaster so they refrained. The wisdom of the market!

Wait... the exact, precise opposite of all that happened while Uber ran for years at a massive loss as a venture capital superweapon ripping millions upon millions of dollars into a gaping black hole and completely devastating the taxi industry without providing a truly humane or long term viable alternative for most workers or cities?

sigh do you really not understand what is happening right in front of you?

So the issue here is not capitalism, but non-free proprietary software, because it makes it easy to abuse users. Unfortunately most people haven’t even heard of Free Software. They don’t realise that they deserve certain rights when using computers. I think if more people were familiar with the Free Software movement, they would think differently and they would demand freedom. Not all Lemmy users have heard of Free Software, but many of us understand that freedom is important. So we use it, even though it’s not convenient and the UI sucks.

We are capable of competing with corporations and often making better software that them, but that’s not enough. If people don’t understand the issues we are trying to solve, they will just use whatever new shiny app that comes out next. That’s why some Twitter users migrated to Bluesky and Threads. They don’t understand that after a while they will be abused the same way as before.

The reason people don't understand the issues you are trying to solve is because yall that think like this in the free software movement won't talk about the issues in terms of a broader political context that is actually relevant to normal people, in a language they are going to understand. Too many prominent people in FOSS just want to create these weird libertarian fantasies centered on technical problems and technical solutions without stepping back and recognizing the inherently socialist thrust of free software and the power that comes from speaking directly to the broader public about software in those terms.

So long as libertarian style ideology in FOSS fumbles around with trying to reinvent the wheel from first principles while socialists, unions and leftists exasperatedly gesture at the already existing wheels all around them, FOSS will always be a marginal movement of hobbyists without real political power to enact change in the realm of software and improve the lives of everybody not just extremely technologically literate people.

If you try to sell the FOSS movement like you are, as a clever technical licensing method to give users more freedom over how they use their particular niche software, and don't connect these struggles in software to a broader class struggle or a related critique of why capitalism is so awful at creating tools and utilities we can rely on, than FOSS will always be an obscure island the broader public could care less about.

The thing that we all keep missing about this is even though EA sucks because it is an example of late stage capitalism hollowing out everything for profit, doesn’t actually mean the idiots with MBAs from Harvard or whatever running the company are actually making intelligent choices about profit.

The system of capitalism actually perpetuates itself better when things periodically catastrophically fail from wildly incompetent leadership since it keeps worker power from organizing, wipes out competitors that aren’t also massive corporations that can be easily colluded with, and provides a perfect backdrop for the rich to say “sorrrrrry it all broke again, guess we are the only ones that can fix it, so we will maybe take this chance to buy up more of the economy :) “.

So yes in a very real way I think EA functions to devalue the labor of game developers, keep competition of smaller game development studios categorically unable to create products like EA, and serve as a vessel to ritualistically dissect smaller game companies so that companies like EA have an infinite, desperate workforce and consumers have no better choice for video games. Just because these processes are twisted and rationalized under a story about the ruthless, noble pursuit of profit doesn’t make them have any real connection with efficiency or profit. One could perhaps say this all has much more to do with violence than it does profit.

That is the thing about ideologies, whether they have any connection to reality or not is actually not very important at all to the truly successful ones that permeate the way societies think about themselves.

Additionally, anything that can help massive corporations that are strip mining the gaming industry claim the gaming industry is sliding into a tough period where it’s hard to make games that turn enough of a profit to steadily employ game developers, is EXTREMELY useful to companies like EA because they see this whole AI thing as an opportunity to deal a permanent blow to the quality of life and general leverage workers have in the game development industry. Thank god the movie industry saw it coming a mile off, but video game culture is too full of toxic conservative little boys screaming at each other to understand what is about to happen (and is already happening).

It breaks my heart, but what is happening right now will likely deal a blow to the vibrancy of video games as an art form that will reverberate for decades. After all, once a worker exits the game development industry because they can't find a job it doesn't matter how passionate they were about video games, how special their talent is, how creative or unique their ideas are.... they sure as hell aren't coming back once they get that a job in an industry that doesn't hate its workers so much and besides a deep sense of burnout about something you love is truly one of the most awful experiences in the world... not many people are willing to revisit a place they experienced that.