Chebucto Regional Softball Club

> “games I don’t like shouldn’t exist”

'But arcades!' Are renting someone else's hardware. Different thing. This did abuse not exist fifteen years ago. 'But free games!' Can just *be free.* Or pay-what-you-want. Or cheap. Or something you already own. How's your back catalog on Steam? This Skinner-box horseshit where a game is \"\"\"free\"\"\" but somehow makes a billion dollars is weaponized frustration. The *handful* of games that were re-released with tiny updates at full price are now the entire industry's goal, thanks to this specific abuse. (And they still got you chumps to buy three 3D versions of Street Fighter.) You can pay the price of a whole-ass game for a *hat.* Lesser versions of that aren't better, just lesser. The opportunity to spend one hundred dollars right the hell now is shoved in your face between rounds. Or dangled each time a lootbox animation juuust misses. Or crammed into your inventory, as a *gift,* mmyes, if only you bought a key. If LoL wants to keep making money they can charge a subscription or sell expansions. Y'know - rational consumer purchasing decisions. Not playing keep-away and then tickling people's balls in a controlled environment where fireworks go off each time you click Confirm Purchase.

If you see a difference between two things, so can the law.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Ban the entire business model. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

The confusion of products and services has been awful in general. Publishers demand continuing revenue. A fixed subscription is at least an honest economic exchange, for customers - unlike any form of "microtransactions."

'This systemic theft is against adults.' *'Yeah, man, voluntary extinction.'* ????

Fuck them kids. Children aren't why these bastards are offering *financing* for this industry-swallowing abuse.

Bu-si-ness mo-del. Not: genre. Not: content. Not: players. We are talking about corporations committing systemic abuse for profit. Abuse that's gouging so hard, you might need FINANCING... to play a VIDEO GAME. How big a hint do you need that something has gone wrong?

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Ban the entire business model.

It's easy to mock the Xbox brand like it lost a fair fight and is on its last legs. But this is Sony acknowledging that consoles don't matter anymore. The war is over. Who won is irrelevant. There's just color-coded interchangeable platforms now, like releasing on both Steam and EGS. This was always the purpose of the Xbox project, from back before DirectX had a proper name... though admittedly Microsoft assumed they'd still control the PC gaming market. Whoops.

... right, and the reason nobody's done that, despite the aggressive availability of local models, is that even a few static assets lead to shrill backlash. Like this article. My man is frothing at the mouth because a complex systemic city-builder used a program to draw the "you can't cut back on funding!" guy. We can assume the same people would screech that any game with generative dialog was "written by AI." Like a text parser being able to respond to insults means the whole plot came from a ten-word prompt. It's not a rational environment for selling studios on a multi-million-dollar investment.

Huh, it's almost like this new tool is fine for placeholder art, and placeholders can be good enough to ship. Did you know The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" was supposed to have a brass section? That driving riff with the fuzzbox guitar was a placeholder. They released it as-is, the song hit #1, and distortion became mainstream. At what point do we stop lamenting all the horn players who were robbed?

Hard to convince a studio to embrace it if this article is the kneejerk response to some PNGs. Which leads the loudest complainers to act vindicated, because what could it possibly be good for, except the few PNGs they notice?

JokerPoolCue.gif

"Amazon got Lik-Sang'd" would be a fun note for this shite year.

Copyright is only a monetary incentive. If Riot's not going to do anything with all that work and art, it should be public-domain.

American politics are kind of fucked.

Bill Hicks was right.

> Minecraft but better > Minecraft but not Java Cautionary tales demonstrated by Minecraft itself.

Lady Marshmallow travels like a Wooloo.