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Here's what I say to the news of all of those Sony GaaS/"live service" games being canceled:


And yeah, the point Pat and Woolie made that these Sony wannabe "forever games" all would have been directly competing not just with the already established powerhouses from other companies but also with each other was a great point. Who the fuck has time to play seventeen different never-ending, time-devouring games at once? I don't have the time, interest, or inclination to play even one of those pieces of shit, but that's just me. And, fuck, I say to hell forever with even the "successful" ones, too, like Fortnite or whatever. In my not at all humble opinion, Fortnite was one of the worst things to happen to the modern video game industry as a whole, up there with shit like Denuvo and NFT games and such (and not just because it also let Epic fund the creation of Epically Gangrenous Shitpuddle).

Another name for the Modern Triple-A Video Game Industry™ easily could be "Sunk Cost Fallacy: The Industry."

The sooner all this shit finally crashes, explodes, and burns to the ground, the better. At this point, it's just gliding along, wobbling, stuttering, barely above tree level, belching smoke, engines on fire, parts falling off, and money spewing like a ruptured sewer pipe out of the cargo hold to be forever lost to the four winds.

When I turned on my computer this morning, this shit was waiting for me, i.e. a fullscreen notification about how Microsoft is basically abandoning Windows 10 next year (just under 5 years after I finally bit the bullet and "upgraded" my computer to Win10). It feels like we just went through this shit with Windows 7 and 8.

Oh, and like I said before, apparently my computer right now is too shit for Windows 11, so fuck me, I guess. But then, by the time I get around to building a new computer or whatever[1], they'll probably be about ready to give up on Windows 11 as well. *weary sigh*

[1] - All I technically need is a new CPU for Windows 11, but that will require a new motherboard and almost assuredly new RAM as well, at the very least. I can probably just install and keep using the "current" SSD drives, the video card, and hopefully the power supply and case. Still, all that is not something I'm looking forward to even a little bit, both from a financial standpoint and from a time-and-effort standpoint.

"In the wake of a controversial release of a single Starfield mission costing $7 as part of the game's new Creations program, Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard says the studio 'hears that feedback' from unhappy players and will 'take a look at that and how we deliver content like that' in future releases."

Oh, fuck off, Todd Howard. You already "took a look at that" and clearly came to the conclusion that this was a fine thing to do. Otherwise, you wouldn't have done it.

And here is why you came to that conclusion:

"While there's obviously some real unhappiness with the way Bethesda has handled The Vulture, I'm not sure I'd expect any big changes anytime soon. Much like the notorious Horse Armor DLC, people are complaining but they also appear to be buying it: The Starfield Creations page says the mission has more than 1.2 million 'plays' across PC and Xbox, and it currently ranks among the top-10 most popular of the more than 600 Starfield Creations released so far."

Just yet another example of how and why modern video game consumers are the biggest reason that the modern video game industry continues to do all the heinous bullshit that the modern video game industry does.

As for me, this is all still mostly irrelevant, on a personal basis, as I haven't touched anything related to Starfield with a ten-foot pole (aside from articles like this about it, of course), and the likelihood of me ever doing so is a continually shrinking fraction barely above zero. Maybe if I see the entire thing (including all DLC and "Creations" shit and all) on a Steam sale for sub-$5 or something, but other than that... the game and those who make it can eat shit and die.

Link to comic.
Link to blog.

I like that they're dunking on the Cybertruck and Elon Musk in the comic and the top bit of Tycho's blog under it, but honestly, for me at least, the not-Cybertruck/Elon Musk stuff in Tycho's blog is more interesting than the Cybertruck/Elon Musk stuff. That said, though, he keeps talking about "Obsidian" this and "Bethesda" that, and how one should be doing Fallout now rather than the other one, but what it really boils down to now is just... "Microsoft." In an ideal world where neither Obsidian nor Bethesda were owned by fucking Microsoft, I would agree with him. Alas, we don't live in that ideal world.

Microyuck.

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)

Yeah, it really does seem like we're just jumping from one scam to the next, over and over again.

They don't talk about the thing in the video title and thumbnail until the last three minutes or so of the video. The first 27 minutes consists of a whole lot of richly deserved shitting upon the utter asininity of the modern video game industry.

(Man, never thought I'd have a reason to bust out that "insane clown posse" tag again. It doesn't take much, though.)

Full headline, because Dreamwidth still sucks: "Minecraft players go full propaganda mode as petition demanding the end of the 'mob vote' draws 300,000 signatures in just a few days"

Honestly, between that headline and the article itself, that seems like a hell of a lot of words just to say "Minecraft has apparently gotten objectively worse since Microsoft bought Mojang." Or, at least, it hasn't gotten demonstrably better in any way. (Remember the days, though, when a video game would just get released and that was it? When they didn't have to be perpetually updated ad infinitum after release or else risk the wrath of gamers labeling them as "abandoned" or "dead"? Yeah, I miss those days.)

That said, maybe Mojang/Microsoft could probably put more effort into Minecraft itself, if only they'd stop wasting time with all the "franchising" attempts, i.e. releasing all those not-Minecraft spinoff games that are Minecraft in name only, at best, and all the merchandising and ventures into other media like books and movies and shit like that.

None of this actually matters to me, except to mock it, as aside from maybe five minutes or so last year after "upgrading" from the Java version to the "Bedrock" version or whatever the fuck, I haven't touched Minecraft at all in probably at least ten years by this point.

Out of all the games made by PlatinumGames, the only ones of them that I own are the first Bayonetta (I bought it on Steam a couple years ago for $5.33 [tax included] and have yet to even install it, let alone play it) and that kind of shitty The Legend of Korra game that doesn't even have a Steam page at all anymore (I got it for $3.74 on Steam back in 2015 and played it for a total of around two hours, according to Steam).

Basically, all I know about Platinum is the shit I've heard from the former Super Best Friends Play guys like Pat and Woolie here, and also Matt and Liam, talking about how great Platinum supposedly is/was.

That said, of Hideki Kamiya's Capcom/Clover games, Okami was great (enough so that I bought it three times for three different platforms over the years), and Viewtiful Joe was... ...uh... okay, I guess? And I played the first Devil May Cry game. I didn't and don't have any interest in playing any of the subsequent Devil May Cry games. And... I guess I played some of the earlier Resident Evil games back in the day, too? *shrug* They were all right, I suppose. I own a shit ton of the more modern RE games on Steam after buying them for dirt cheap, but I haven't felt bothered to play any of those. *shrug again*