Castle Magus

WB Games has been utter, absolute shit for years now.

I don't, and never did, give a flying fuck about MultiVersus, but I think this sucks just on general principle. And I always like to see a good dunk on modern video game industry bullshit, provided once again by Pat and Woolie here.

The worst thing about these stupid takedowns is the automated nature of it. Funko doesn't like that some rando user uploaded something to itch.io? Just fire off a bot that results in the entire site being (temporarily) removed from the Internet. Some dipshit doesn't like your Youtube video content? Just fire off a few dubious DMCA takedown requests that results in your entire channel being permanently shitcanned without so much as a "Hey, just to let you know" response to you from Google/Youtube.

Also, Woolie and Paige seem to be very vexed by Funko Pops in particular.

I don't think I have ever seen a Funko Pop in person. Just images of them on the Internet.

Pick your poison as far as articles about it.

PC Gamer: "Sega is delisting a huge number of its greatest classic games on Steam, probably so it can sell you a new collection"

Gamesradar+: "Out of nowhere after 14 years, Sega's killing off one of the only sources of legal ROMs on the entire internet as it delists 60 classic games"

TheVerge: "A whole bunch of Sega classics are being delisted"

Probably a lot of other places in addition to the above where one could read about this, but those are the three I immediately saw via Google News App today.

As for me, I fall into the category of already having most of them and not caring that much about the ones I don't, but I still think it sucks, just on general principle, that Sega is doing this. Oh well, it's not like the games are forever lost, in most cases, thanks to unofficial/unsanctioned emulation. *shrug*

Full headline: "Another reminder that your digital library isn't forever: Oxenfree will be completely removed from Itch.io next month"

"The Netflix-owned studio has already delisted the game from the site."

By that, it means the game will be removed for everyone, including people who paid cash money for it already, not just that it won't be available for future purchase by anyone else (which is the "usual" meaning for "delisted"). Sure, you can download the game before it's removed entirely, but if you fail to do that for any reason, you are apparently shit outta luck.

More Glorious Digital Future™ bullshit, in other words. I wonder if itch.io will refund everyone who bought the game for the full purchase price. No mention of the word "refund" in the article at all, but that doesn't mean it won't become a thing in the near future, if enough fucked over customers raise a big enough shitstorm over it.

I would say remind me to never buy anything from itch.io, but it's not like I've ever done that in the past. I'm certainly not going to start doing that in the future, after this.

Also sounds like Night School Studio is just yet another developer that sold out to a yet another big company (Netflix, in this case) that inexorably turned said developer and said developer's IP into a steaming shitpile, because of course they did.

As for Oxenfree itself, while I do "own" it on Steam, the last time I tried to play it, I had dealbreaker problems with it.

Full headline, due to the inexorable fact that the Dreamwith subject field size is inadequate: "If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe"

"A European initiative is now underway for videogame preservation and consumer protections against publishers 'killing games.'"

As a bonus, I'll embed the Ross Scott (remember him?) video they mention in the article:

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Europeans can save videogames from being destroyed! The European Citizens' Initiative has just launched and represents the biggest and most ambitious chance to create new law against publishers destroying games they have already sold to you. Get EU citizens to sign it!

Link to sign EU initiative:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu...

Guides on how to sign EU initiative:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

---

(EDIT) See also: this, to which all of this is a follow-up. (/EDIT)

I'll just say it again. Companies have been gravitating toward online-only games (multiplayer-only or otherwise) not because they believe that's what people actually want to play. They've been during it purely for DRM reasons. That's also a big reason why games are split up into DLC now, rather than being released whole. Well, that and all the extra money they get from selling the game piecemeal at inflated prices, but also because of DRM reasons (i.e. the game having to phone home all the time to "verify" the DLC and all that shit).

As for me, I'm in the US and can't sign the petition, and thus this doesn't directly apply to me, and I don't personally know anyone who lives in the EU, but if my posting this here helps even the tiniest bit, then... *shrug* ...great! That said, I'm not going to be holding my breath until this thing succeeds, that's for sure.

Just for the hell of it, I signed up for the newsletter on the Stop Killing Games base-level site, too (or, at least, tried to, as I haven't gotten any kind of confirmation yet or any other indication that it actually went through [EDIT I tried it again later and actually got an email verification almost immediately, so I guess the first one just got eaten by my aggressive spam filters or something /EDIT]). And I also added the Accursed Farms Youtube channel to my Feedly, which I hadn't already done, for whatever reason.

The comments under the PC Gamer article are about half and half between people saying this is a bad idea (i.e. reputation management drones, utter fucking morons, etc.) and people who can't believe that there would exist anyone who would say this is a bad idea. I think my favorite interaction was the one between one guy (one of the "this is a bad idea" guys) saying something like "But this could have a chilling effect and just end up with them not making multiplayer games at all anymore. They'd go back to making single player games." (Despite the fact that that's not even what was being discussed here.) And a few of the replies were something like "Yes, and? That would be great, actually." (Personally speaking, I don't care if multiplayer-only games exist, I just also wouldn't care if they didn't exist, either, especially if they're being made instead of/at the expense of offline singleplayer games. But again, that's mostly irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand.)

Full headline, because reasons: "Super Mario Maker fans got to say goodbye to their game, but Sony just unceremoniously pulled the plug on LittleBigPlanet and 16 years of community creations"

"The temporary shutdown is now permanent"

I only ever played the first LittleBigPlanet game(EDIT)[1](/EDIT), way back when I still had a PS3 (which hasn't been the case for almost a full decade now), and it was okay, though I never really got into the "community creations" aspect of it. Since then, I haven't even really thought of the series much at all, until now. As such, this does not directly affect me.

That said, even so, this sucks, even just in principle. Just yet another shitty example of the Glorious Digital Future of the modern video game industry.

(EDIT)

[1] - Wait, no, I also had the PSP version, or at least so says my hasn't-been-touched-in-almost-a-decade-now Backloggery page. I shall defer to it over my own memory.

(/EDIT)

Here is yet another """""feel good""""" article (with a way too long headline that I didn't even try to put up there in the subject field) about fans rallying together and doing a thing that they wouldn't have had to do at all had Nintendo not been shitheads about the whole thing and had just made all that stuff available offline by default.

Follow up to yesterday's post about this.

So... WB is allowing the individual devs to republish the games, which is good, but they are not lifting a single solitary finger to help simplify this process in any way whatsoever from their end, which is bad.

Oh, and WB is apparently telling these devs that they have to remove names from the credits if they want to republish.

This still warrants the new "warner bros sucks" tag.

Ignoring the "markdown in game prices probably wouldn't have been enough to sway people to accept the online only shit since any markdown would still have been more than buying used games even cheaper" bit... look, I don't care if they'd marked down the price to $0 per game or even -$60 per game (i.e. them giving me $60 per game to play their games on the X-bone), I still wouldn't have wanted the online only X-bone.

"You know, Don Mattrick really just shit in a bucket and gave it to Phil [Spencer] and told him to hold it, so I feel bad for him, but I don't think that the solution was for him to continue shitting into the same bucket and then complain that it's really heavy."

Pat always has the best quotes.

(EDIT) Oh, and they discuss this sort of shit a little ways into it, too. (/EDIT)

This is all academic to me because I had no interest in this game to start with, but if I had, the infestation of it with Denuvo would have killed my interest utterly dead. But then, the main reason I had no interest in it in the first place is because of fucking course it was going to be infected with Denuvo. It's a Warner Bros. game released within the past 5 years or so. Like, no fucking shit the Denuvo contamination was going to be there.

On a related note, along with the above, this other headline here was the one that I saw in my Google News App today that got me to add the topic of "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" to my "show less like this" list[1]: "Suicide Squad devs say despite being a live-service game it'll respect players' time because 'We all love playing games, but we also have lives'"

Any game that is a "live service" game is pretty much just as dead to me as any game that is poisoned with Denuvo, and this game happens to be both of those things. (Why the fuck an always online "live service" game even needs Denuvo at all is beyond me, but whatever.) But then, even aside from all of that stuff, everything else I've heard about this game (even just today alone) has given me the impression that the game is utter dogshit, so even if it weren't a "live service" game or a game polluted by Denuvo, I would've had next to no interest in it. Only because of the legacy of Rocksteady and the Arkham games (up to Arkham Knight anyway, but even that one had an incredibly shitty launch on PC initially) would I have even given this game more than a glance, but even that isn't enough for me to care about all of this rancid horseshit.

This game is a textbook example (among many similar examples) of why I think the modern video game industry is nigh worthless and in dire need of crashing again like it's 1983.

[1] - I would've said "ignore list," but there is no "ignore list" in Google News App. Telling Google News App that you don't want to see a particular topic anymore is only the merest of suggestions, at best.