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So Trump meeting with people int he video game industry turns out was a whole big nothing burger. This is more about politics, but honestly I think the reason why he even did this was cause it was low hanging fruit.

The white house made a video filled with video game violence without context to try and do something I guess in hopes of getting people on their side maybe it not clear
what point they are trying to make beyond violent video games exist.

There's no evidence anywhere.

I believe their best proof was a t-shirt that he wore of a white supremacist musician who I think murdered some folks or something.

That and mocking them for forced representation in a time period

Thanks to popular demand by history revisionists & for the sake of accuracy let me introduce you to our protagonist! pic.twitter.com/OKteKrDj5f

— Daniel Vávra ⚔ (@DanielVavra) February 24, 2015

Like there were hints of black people in Europe here and there (Spain, France and Italy), but they'd need quite a good reason like John Blanke who was one of the African attendants of Cathrine of Aragon who came to England in 1500s or be a pilgrim and visit the St Stephen of the Abyssinians church or be an African Moor in Spain and Portugal which Moriaen of King Arthurian legend seems to be from .

http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/morien-weston.pdf

Which also made me puzzled as to why that recent Arthurian movie didn't just name the black knight in it to Moriaen rather than Bedivere.

Also, I am not sure personally if there were no black people in 15th century medieval Bohemia, I'd imagine maybe there could've been a tiny few who were travelling pilgrims, merchants or mercenaries and their main location would be probably Prague which was pretty big and important in the medieval era.

From what I understand, according to Varva and the historians he consulted with, there were no high melanin individuals in the section of middle-aged Europe he was trying to portray (Bohemia)

There were stories and drawings of people from those (at the time) far away places but the early 15th century (1407 I believe) show pretty good evidence that even artist had no idea what darker skinned people looked like.

One example of proof that 15th century Bohemia had little to no idea, is an artwork from the era and area titled "the Queen of Sheba" (1405) it depicts a dark skinned person with european features including long flowing blonde hair, wearing clothing of the Europeans.

So, if youre looking for even hints of anyone whom isnt pale, (as stated above) it wouldnt happen for about another century AFTER the game is set.

Or in short: baseless accusations and claims can be disregarded because they are baseless.

Oh and Fem FREQ is in full backpedal. "Video games don't cause violence just objectification of women."

At least with Bohemia, in my mind, if it isn't close enough or has trade ties to Iberia, Rome, France or any place on the coast that has a large emphasis on a trade route (or that black person is with an important person and doing something well regarded and important), then you are not going to be seeing the few black people that there were around in Europe.

Even then the game does have a lot of different cultures like Cumans, Hungarians, Jews, Slavs and Germans. Which is sort of the European idea of diversity where it is less about skin colour and more about culture and nationality.

Also, wait for SJWs to complain about a game set in Medieval or Dark Age Ireland having no POC, it would be like complaining about there being no Europeans in a game set in South Africa during the medieval era.

As to Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I do dread that its own fanbase might end up ruining things or scaring away potential new fans. Also a good video about the game's historic accuracy which gets some things right and wrong

I had a cool discussion with someone I know, tangentially about gamergate but also about porn. The reason why sjw's throw such a shitfit about sexuality in games is that in the USA the video game industry is a $25 billion a year industry; right now video game porn industry in the USA is $200 million a year and projected to grow to $2 billion a year in a decade.

To phrase it simply put: when AAA video game companies stop being afraid of making those sorts of games the company that does it will see a drastic winfall. The only way to stop this from happening is for sjw's to scream and yell at any game developer that puts any sexy stuff in games to the point that the game developers are afraid they'll get a bomb in the mail if they do actually make a porn game.

Basically what sjw's are worried of is that eventually a major video game developer is going to go "fuck politics I want money!"

I should be laughing and smirking at the idea, but I can't help but dread game publishers doing their usual anti-consumer business practices to that idea of making more porn games.

Like some sort of porn lootbox or DLC.

And if you are suggesting AAA game devs and publishers making video game porn rather than sexy content like how they often have done I honestly don't see that happening due to them wanting to avoid both conservatives, liberals and other groups having a backlash towards the idea of graphic interactive sex in a video game (we're still having a problem with people blaming RL violence, sexism and racism on games along with that). Like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, the three biggest publishers, have strict guidelines about what can be shown on their consoles and won't sell AO games and stores won't sell em.

@Rustic
More realistically speaking if a video game developer/when a video game developer does this they'll make it for personal computers only for that reason. I don't think we have to worry about lootboxes in such games, cause they would probably be minor projects meant to be cost effective rather than AAA budget games. When a video game publisher makes such a game chances are it's only going to be a twenty person project to test the waters.

To phrase it another way: when we do eventually see a AAA video game developer do this chances are it would be a side project where a small team works on it rather than a major project with hundreds of people and tens of millions of dollars put into it.
To use an analogy Portal 1 was developed in a single week by Valve as a experiment.

I know I'm getting a bit offtrack here, but I just realized something AAA budgets are for the most part dead at this point. Five years ago companies spending a hundred million dollars on a game was totally normal; now most major developers are making games that cost less than $50 million to make. I wouldn't call major video game companies AAA game devs anymore; they're more like AA game devs.

Ah I see. Was wondering since AAA game of that type would be quite a splash, although hard to say how it would play out after the splash if it does happen.

Wait, don't video game companies and publishers say that their budgets are larger than before or has there been some new development in how AAA game budgets work now?

Nevermind, I found it.
https://twitter.com/anitasarkeesian/status/969344502589677569

Got it from here:
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2018/03/anita-sarkeesian-criticizes-trump-anti-violent-game-rhetoric-despite-sharing-trumps-views/52757/

And as that article says, Ben from Polygon was also doing exactly what you'd expect.
https://twitter.com/mombot/status/966879619012964352

If someone could archive the Twitter stuff, that would be greatly appreciated.

Easy: they're fucking lying. That whole "video games take a bajillion dollars" crap was started by companies that abuse lootboxes. After all when was the last time EA or such told gamers the truth? If you look at AAA game companies that publicly post how much they spend on games vs game companies that keep their budgets private and abuse lootboxes to death the companies that keep their budgets private put not even a fraction the amount of content in their game.

If those companies abusing lootboxes publicly posted the amount they spend on the games gamers would riot at the highway robbery.

$50 million nowadays can get you hundreds of hours of gameplay, massive open worlds, good graphics, years of support and so forth. Are other game companies really trying to convince people that a four hour game costs as much?

Porn games aren't exactly something a respectable publisher would want to be involved in for a number of reasons.

1) They mostly suck.
Most porn games are either text-based RPGs (with or without some art), "choose your own sex video" things, or dating-sim type games with generic anime art. There are a few who try to do more, but it's not exactly… good.

2) Competent gameplay/good writing is hard.
Sex as a feature in normal video games is extremely hard to pull off, if not impossible. Experience-wise, it's like hitting a pothole. It deviates from the meat of the game so hard that it's always very obvious. As you can see in the video game above, it's difficult to make a compelling game centered around it, too. It's a subject that's bizarrely hard to write for and make good game mechanics around. Unless you went a fetish-y route and made things way more tongue-in-cheek, then you might have something to work with. However, then you alienate 90% of the already small market.

3) The market for sexy in games has been damaged.
The SJWs/feminists may have lost against GG, but they're not going away anytime soon and their damage has already been done. If you made a game based on porn, the campaign that will be risen against you will be historic. You will get stalked in the streets. Advertising for it would be very difficult, as would finding a good platform to sell it. The best you'd get is some dank corner some shifty porn site or store.

4) Reputation.
It will be very difficult, if not impossible to distance yourself from this once you make it, should you ever decide to try something more. Unless you can keep out of the spotlight, you will be forever known as that dev that made the porn games.

If individual game genre markets having games earning tens of millions of dollars how is that the game market for them being damaged? That's like how sjw's said that Kingdom Come would never sell well, that the company's reputation would be forever ruined, that the gameplay would be bad and so forth.

Sjw's continuously spill this garbage that making any game they don't like isn't profitable, that any game they don't like will have damaged reputations, that any game they don't like suck and time and time again they're being proven wrong.

To phrase it another way:

I think a lot of that is them VASTLY overestimating their influence and how many people agree with them. They tend to ignore or dismiss the greater gaming public and think only the people around them are a proper representative group a fact that isn't helped by them trying to block people who disagree on twitter.

SJWs who think that backwoods Central Europe in the middle of a medieval civil war is going to have the same racial demographics as modern America.

A lot of the cites go back to "MedievalPOC" a Tumblr blog written by a (white) women who thinks it's totally plausible that Beethoven was black.

It's so bullshit that Mike Stuchbery, a man who literally endorsed mud huts as form of dwelling in order to "stick it to the Drumpftards" stepped in to defend the game.

They've been smearing this game for 4 years now and it's just gotten more & more successful. Polygon actually published a hit piece claiming that the free DLC was canceled even though those are still going to happen.

They are in full-fledged panic mode because this might be the most blatant example of SJW & game journo outrage failing to harm (or even outright boosting) a game yet.

It's also funny that KC:D actually has "people of color", the Cumans":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumans who are Asian. Presumably they don't count because they're blond with blue eyes.

@YourHigherBrainFunctions

> Easy: they’re fucking lying. That whole “video games take a bajillion dollars” crap was started by companies that abuse lootboxes.

Looking at some of the most expensive games to produce they're spending up to twice the budget of the actual game on marketing.

Now some marketing expenses make sense but when your $250 million game has $200 in marketing and $50 million for the game something's got to give. And it's not like putting up billboards everywhere is going to sell much more than the occasional billboard.

And of course with government regulators looking at lootboxes that's not a safe form of extracting money from gamers.

A large part of the problem is that outside Japan the B-studios for video games collapsed, the ones that aren't pumping out $50-$100 million AAA games but aren't a dude/couple dudes in a garage making indie either.

That's a niche that needs filling and KC:D is an example of how profitable it can be for those who do it right. We'll be seeing a lot more in the future.

Wow; so sjw's are hard backtracking now. Even well known feminists like Laci Green and such are starting to go "Well if video games caused violence how come the USA has seen a massive decline in violent crimes since the 90's?"

It just goes to show anti-gamergate was never about actually trying to as a whole change the video game industry, it was about identity politics and sycophants trying to earn "I'm a good person" brownie points. Now that Trump is talking about violent games they went "OH!!! I can score even more good person points!"

I will say this though; thank fuck the gamergate fight is closing down now. It's not ending how I would have liked, but the sjw movement fucking off to go after a bigger target isn't a bad end; it's more of a neutral end.

To be fair to Laci Green she hasn't been nearly as bad lately and is even dating Chris Ray Gun and has become akin to persona non grata to SJWs for saying maybe not all everyone who disagrees is an evil person

Well you get what I'm getting at; sjw's would rather go after Trump than go after gamers.

It is better off that way. If they focus on fighting Trump we could use that to our benefit and let them hit the man who gladly take hits.
Also, given the situation with Green I have noticed many SJWs are not such because of will, but because they were forced by their peers. I met such a person. I once loved her, now she hates me, but I still hope someday she will break free from her views forced upon her through peer pressure and be my friend again.

The stupid thing about this is that sjw's wanted to effectively borg gamergate now saying stupid shit like "welcome to the resistance against Trump". Those idiots attacked gamers for fucking years, called us all sorts of horrible shit, got people fired simply for not being progressive enough, destroyed entire companies, destroyed people's careers, etc. How they're trying to pretend to be allies of gamers is if anything insulting.

Turns out 80% of school shooters have no interest in video games.
https://wccftech.com/80-school-shooters-not-interested-games/

This is more about the video game industry and shit, I'll admit it's drunk thoughts, but the initial cause of gamergate and the continuation of it was companies continuously getting caught trying to do ponzi schemes and it never fucking working out.

Paying reviewers with sex to try and get positive critic feedback cause as we all know journalists drive video game sales? Nope
Crowdsourcing games and never delivering a working product? Nope, amount people spend on game crowdsourcing declined drastically.
Pay to win lootboxes and shit? Nope, gamers only like cosmetic lootboxes and microtransactions.
Spending $50 million on the actual game development and $200 million on advertising? Nope

We're probably going to see the most profitable era of video gaming coming up, but the problem is that so many companies are stuck in the concept of 2007 ponzi scheme marketing it's going to take a while for the industry to unfuck itself.

Monster hunter world and such performing better than AAA western games is pretty much watching the final nail for the companies that go "dubstep playing in the background This game is for l33t hardcore gamers! eating doritos and drinking mountain dew Spend $200 on your mother's credit card to get advantage playing! Donate to our kickstarter!"

I'll admit I'm extremely drunk at this point I can't even walk, but basically what I'm getting at is that so many shitty video game companies all they had going for them was their name value and all they have left is their ponzi schemes to milk money out of gamers and such. Without those it's no wonder why so many particular companies are siding with sjw's. Cause if the video game industry returns to being a meritocracy they will get shoved out. With EA we saw a drastic example of what I mean; despite Battlefront II having al the namesake in the world and having every video game critic sucking it's e-dick the game failed miserably to the point it drastically effected EA's stocks.

Basically, "If we side with this obnoxiously loud political minority they'll defend us against any and all criticisms of us! Oh wait that political group doesn't actually buy our product anyhow thus even though they're defending our shitty business practices at every turn we aren't turning a profit"

We're starting to see a couple "indie companies' get a positive response to the shittiness of these companies I'm talking about; there's a couple "indie" companies that five years ago weren't even on the map, but because the continuously put out good products and were adamant about the things they produced they wound up with a drastic windfall.

We're returning to the era of video game companies HAVING to put out skill based, non-p2w, working games that aren't glitch ridden, that aren't ponzi schemes with a new coating of paint, that are actually worth the money the buyer pays. However in such a market a lot of video game companies can't compete in such a market so gamergate probably isn't going to go away anytime soon, it's just going to be a constant cycle of shitty game companies who refuse to put out functional games doubling down.

Tldr; Gamergate as a concept probably isn't going to go away for another good five years cause at this point the only reason why it's continuing is shitty game companies who refuse to put out functional products are making bed with people who will defend them no matter what so long as you continue to suck their dick

The smartest thing to do is just ride it out at this point. The reason being is that five years ago people en masse justified digital downloads costing as much as physical copies, five years ago people en masse justified on disc day one dlc, five years ago people en mass used to justify pay to win lootboxes, people used to justify sexual favors for positive reviews of their products. The reason why riding it out will work is that with how ever increasingly irrelevant "reviewers" are, because youtubers will review your game just for a free copy whereas journalists will request you suck their literal dick, in five years from now the people perpetuating this shit will be totally irrelevant.

Drunk tldr; Five years ago charging $60 for a digital download of a game was normal. If the industry shifts towards getting all their coverage from letsplayers then that would effectively reduce the amount of money they need to spend to get the same amount of coverage as paying reviewers physical money. Without video game "journalists" and those "ermagod I'm so l33t n woke (eating doritoes) look at my killstreak" tv ads and such in ten years we'll probably see a drastic reduction in costs for games

In order to defeat a rapidly dying industry all you have to do is outlast them. When you get down to it gamergate was the dying gasps of the video game journalism industry trying to fuck over the thing replacing them.

edit
I apologize if I made any grammatical errors or didn't well verse my thoughts, I'll admit I'm very drunk right now.

I read some posts of these nostalgic conservatives on twitter. They keep parroting that video games indoctrinate people and that it's all liberal propaganda.

Ok so an update on Gamergate Related things.

First off Count Dankula, The guy who compared Magicgate/thotgate to Gamergate, has been convicted in Scottish court for being "Grossly Offensive." For details here's Jonathan Pie doing a report: (warning contains mockery of Nazi's and lots of cursing and rude gesturing)

As for Magicgate? Turns out that banning a guy who was through to have offended a cosplayer so that she could get donation money for college was not a good move. As a result Unslealeaved Media/the Quarterling exposed numerous convicted pedophiles in the Magic the Gathering Judges system and managed to push for background checks. Then get his money back through paypal on the chargeback system after being banned from Wizards of the Coast. Granted the battle appears to be still ongoing as Magic is now replacing the wording on all the cards to be more inclusive by removing HE and SHE from the card descriptions.

Oh and It looks like Comics are having a gamergate as well

As for Things going on with Ethics in gaming? KIA's made a list of the panels at the GDC in SF, the one that banned Nolan (atari co-founder) from an award on hearsay for being white and having consensual relations with females, that are all about how to be more inclusive and empowering with gaming

Expect more of this to pour out along with more references to "Gamergate" as a past instance/recently defeated movement that's still somehow ongoing.

@Garde on comicsgate
Oh wow it's almost as it a fanatical group of people who will blindly and fanatically defend it's members no matter what will attract people who would normally be shunned by society.

I have been following magicgate, since apparently a certain kind of people is eager to ruin everything I like.

Apparently it all began when an SJW in the company got involved with HR employees and began to use them as her personal army (Ethics much?). Slowly she began to get others like her in positions of power and fire, or abuse, anyone she didn't like.
Most employees are silenced, but are tired of her actions and resulting environment.
Unfortunately Mark Rosewater, who betrayed the player base before with art direction, went full SJW and called for "muh representation" in the game and to censor skimpy outfits on women. Of course, the art direction sucked before that with the whole homogenizing of art, but this is worsening.
Said SJW is also related to bad gameplay mechanics since… Guess what?… Kaladesh (A MTG expansion). Yes. Kaladesh was when this actually began.

Fuck my post got eaten. I was going to post a long explanation, but rather than type it all out I'm going to summarize now.

Something I found out is that while gamergate is kind of inactive right now sjw's are kind of pissed off about something currently going on. A comment I saw by a non-troll sjw was and I quote "…racist gamers are ruining video games cause they want to play by those ching chong…"

Leaving the obvious racism aside what appears to be happening the past two years is that game companies that both metaphorically and literally got in bed with video game journalists are starting to drastically under perform sales wise. Furthermore pay to win games are under performing sales wise also. What we are seeing though is that games without pay to win mechanics are drastically outperforming pay to win games, games made by asian countries and indie game companies are drastically outperforming projected sales wise. Obviously I'm not saying all indie games are good or that every japanese game is good, but rather that competing companies saw the opportunity to drastically undercut their competition and took it. If McDonalds started charging $5 just for french fries burgerking and such would offer french fries for either $2 or have fucking amazing fries for $5.

The only thing a lot of these companies that jumped in bed with sjw's have left for them at this point is their name brand, but if all you have is name brand you are nothing. While it's not a american company Konami tried using their name brand for Metal Gear Survive and it failed miserably.

Well why are we seeing a lot of AAA western game companies slowly dying?
A lot of them are refusing to put out quality games for $60
They're putting pay to win on top of $60 games
For every dollar they're actually spending on developing the game they're spending three dollars on marketing so unless the games sell ten million copies it's a financial failure. (Why Prey was a financial failure)

Tldr; Capitalism giveth capitalism taketh away.

To phrase it another way: EA lost a shitload of money cause of Battlefront II. Because western AAA companies are faltering competing companies are taking advantage of the situation.

Archice for archives sake, there's been a doubling down that Anita was threatened by gamergate, using quotes from the Dobson account. Its important to note that this happened August 26th 2014, 18 hours before #Gamergate was created by Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb) and 2 days before the publication of the Gamers are Dead article.

I will start off by saying I'm not really invested in Gamergate anymore for personal reasons, but I still figured this was worth bringing up:

MidBoss CEO Matt Conn accused of exploitative practices and sexual harassment

For those unaware MidBoss is the company behind the adventure game 2064: Read Only Memories, and yes the CEO of the company, Matt Conn, has a history of mostly catering to "SJW crowds."

Conn was infamously known for being against GG from day 1 regardless if the people involved in the movement were actually sticking to GG's original core goals, and he also infamously stated he wasn't going to bring MidBoss' games to Nintendo consoles after the firing of former NoA marketing employee Allison Rapp (who was fired from NoA due to moonlighting which is against NoA employment policies, but it was also discovered Rapp was using her social media to say things like "sexism against men doesn't exist" and defending pedophiles who possess "CP").

Conn has stepped down after many former employees brought these accusations to light, in particular taking advantage of LGBT employees by paying them less, engaging in harassment despite promises of a safe work environment, and just in general being a huge dick to his employees.

@Mistress Fortune
Nah really another sjw gets accused of sexual harassment? Who would have thought? /s

Joking aside there was a lot of sjw's that got found out to be not good people the past year so I'm not really surprised whenever I hear about another one getting found out to do this shit.

@Misstress Fortune

At this point, it's expected the leading hypothesis is that a lot of the people who rail against these things are doing it to cover up their own crimes, not unlike the politicians who rail against gay marriage the hardest being gay themselves

Good to see you again! I missed you!

Well. I am glad I never dared buy that infamous game. I was told it was bad and decided it didn't deserve my cash. Now that I know the people working on it are at least jerks if not criminals, I am glad they never got my money.

You know. SJWs and especially male feminists seem a bit to prone to do really horrible things which cause harm and distress to others. I think they are, deep inside, aware that they are the bad guys and are trying to cover their tracks.

Super ironic that the dude preached about being inclusive and progressive, but was actually quite regressive and just a terrible person. I believe he did the SJW stuff to make money off of certain people, and maybe to raise his self-esteem. It's another example why those who grandstand like a bunch of idiots are more likely to have skeletons in their closets.

I don't know of a single male feminist who has done nothing wrong or at least feels guilty over something harmless but which he was convinced of being wrong.

I am 100% sure of it.

I thought the name of that game sounded familiar (particularly because it's an SJW game) so I looked it up and found that I was right.

Zoe Quinn was also involved in this mess as a voice actress. Not that that's particularly relevant, but it is worth noting how things like this keep, you know, coming back around.

It IS very relevant. You see. These people do that. They get along with some people and start climbing into positions of power. Most of them are tied in a web of corruption. Bet if you followed the breadcrumbs of every single one of them, you would find out all are connected.
Trust me, it is not coincidence. In fact that is why they have it so easy to get inside the UN and to get involved in so many media content production. Thy lack merits, so they have contacts and ties to certain groups.

Now. I just want to remind you. I WAS an SJW, and a male feminist. All the claims I make I make them as an insider.

Why was I a male feminist? Because I felt ugly and considered myself an ugly fat loser who couldn't get love otherwise and because I felt guilty over my normal male sexuality and normal masculine aggression (Which thanks to Jordan B. Peterson now I know can be focused to do good).

I know many of their tactics. Intimidation, abusing the rules, forming ties with powerful people, and many of their dark secrets such as all SJWs having skeletons in the closet. All because I was an insider. I generally don't mention it too much because it feels somewhat shameful and could be used against me.

But that is why I oppose the collectivist left and its forms such as social justice and communism. Because I was part of the hivemind… And it was painful. It was ugly. I felt ugly (Now I don't), I felt I was alone, I felt I was wrong in everything. I was miserable. And most of the lower tiers feel like that.

The constant suffering product of both one's mediocrity and one's desire to not offend fellow mediocres hurts. SJWs are either miserable or evil. Sometimes both.

Well there's been an update to the list of antigamergaters

Looks like Matt is resigning immediately.

I myself was more of the idealistic SJW who wanted to help people and probably make up for some past mistakes and beliefs.

I then found that I didn't like how some of the SJWs I knew treating people like how I was treated for quite some time in my life. I knew and know plenty of them who are genuinely wanted to try and be good people for a good cause but have ultimately become their own brand of terrible people due to tossing out ideals, treating everyone who isn't in their group as a potential enemy, forgetting that people who might disagree or oppose them are human beings too.

Then again, it is a type of behaviour I have seen people in many things, be it politics or anything else, do because everyone wants to be the good guy and fight the monster (real or imagined) and save the place from the said monster only to end up in this situation:

"He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

And it is why I am cautious about groups, people and myself, as when you start seeing the signs that they don't give a shit about being good or better people improving themselves and that they are willing to go as tvtropes put knight templar and kicking several of their ideals and morals out the window in pursuit of killing their white whale, then it is a good time to abandon ship or get ready to do a schism.

It is also why I am always a little cautious and concerned about what the fates of anti-SJW groups will be since I do expect some of them to become something like the pigs of Animal Farm just like most of the SJWs did who got drunk on popularity, money and power (a good amount provided by the gaming journalism and industry since most businesses in those are quite amoral I find personally).

Meanwhile at the GDC in SF:

That's right. According to this GDC panel, the PC master race is white, privilaged and problematic

Here is something from Kotaku about it https://compete.kotaku.com/why-aren-t-more-black-kids-going-pro-in-esports-latoya-1824130772

And Undefeated https://theundefeated.com/features/why-arent-more-black-kids-going-pro-in-esports/

For more context.

Seems like they've studied or something about how the demographics between PC and console esports are different, like how Asians and whites seem to favor PC esports more and latinos and blacks go more for consoles esports and the whys to it. Along with the difference in prize money PC or Console gamers get if they win an esports game.

Well this is going to be fun. Washington state's federal court found that gambling using virtual currency is gambling.

This doesn't directly effect lootboxes and shit, but game companies could find getting their ass sued over this.

Even without reading the articles I think economic factors will very likely play a big role in that. This actually isn't the silliest race-related thing I've ever seen in videogames.

The thing is, most of the things that SJWs claim to be bigotry are actually the result of economic factors. Samuel L. Jackson could buy a gaming rig better than most, I play on a toaster, and I am white.
I did face racial discrimination because of my skin color as a child, and by recalling it as an adult I realized that such bigotry was actually an excuse for the dumb kids to rally the group against me because I was kind of a smartass back then.

On the gambling thing. Well. If it costs real money, and there is gambling in it, it should follow the same legal rules as normal gambling. It is simply common sense.

This is more about video game news and shitty tactics, there may be some good news going on cause a lot of shitty tactics by companies are getting replaced by other tactics to cut corners that don't overtly screw over customers.

But first:
Trying to say that cellphone gaming was the future is dead. While there are some games that bring in a lot of money there's simply too much competition for the market. Only about one out of ten cellphone games find financial success and rather than moving on to making other games a lot of companies are still refusing to make different sorts of games. The sane thing would be for these companies to start making console or pc games, but apparently sanity is much like common sense so rare it's a super power.

Crowd funding failed to catch on. Crowd funding games now only constitutes about $10 million usd annually.

Early access as to generate hype fizzled out.

"Indie games are inherently better regardless of quality of the game" fizzled out. A lot of the better companies are using their money to expand their businesses and become A developers, not AAA just like how everyone knows Unknown Worlds now. What a lot of indie companies are doing is that originally they were a bunch of people working at home, now they have a office and shit.

"ALL games are going to be VR" fizzled out. There's the thing how it's still expensive and also the thing about how it doesn't work with most video games. If I'm playing Monopoly online why the fuck would I need VR?

Relying on players to bug test kind of fizzled out… Kind of. A couple years back there was a couple shitty companies that would put out pretty much a alpha and then when people complained they would ban them. I don't think this will go away so much as it's slowly being fixed by not having people who hate their life and hate everyone in charge of your technical support.

……

Here's the new stuff going on:
Bitcoins for games never took off.

Lootboxes may be fizzling out. With how entire continents are banning them, how the esrb now labels it on physical games, and how hard gamers pushed back against pay to win lootboxes there hasn't been a lot of new games announced for this year to contain them. Even a year ago this shit was fucking everywhere. I don't think it's going to go fully away, rather with how many countries it's banned in and how bad of a stink gamers raised about it we probably aren't going to see this craze come back anywhere near as to what it was.

A shitty tactic a couple of companies tried recently was giving youtubers access to early demos of their games. HOWEVER the thing that people didn't realize is that youtubers aren't video game journalists, just cause you give them a game doesn't mean they'll blindly praised you regardless of the quality of the game. These companies are smart enough to realize that say Markiplier alone has a hundred times more viewers than the entirety of Kotaku, but the companies aren't smart enough to realize he won't blindly praise your game.

Let me clarify before this last one becomes a argument. There is a difference between a game looking good and the pixel count of characters in the game. You can have a 8k resolution game and it look shitty, there were some ps1 games that still look good to this day. What may be fizzling out is "We have 8k resolution! That means our games are inherently better games! (drinks mountain dew and eats doritos)". There's some pixel art games that look ten times prettier than a lot of games. Before someone says that I'm saying that low resolution games are better; rather that it doesn't matter if a game is 8k or only 1080p if it looks like shit it looks like shit. If your game is shit then your game is shit.
The past year we saw a lot of games that rely on "we have 8k so that makes our game fundamentally better even though we didn't put a lot into the actual gameplay" fizzle out hard.

…….

I don't think the video game industry will be better off or worse off five years from now rather companies will be more sneaky about how they're cutting corners rather than being so overt with it like they are right now.

What a lot of fps games do to save money, that I wouldn't be surprised if we see other genres doing this, is make all the characters completely covered so they don't have to animate the character's mouth moving or such. Currently most of the time we see this it's enemy npcs covered completely so they don't have to animate them, but we're seeing more fps do this to even player controlled characters to save money.
"What are they talking about now?"
"I don't know with their helmets on it just looks like they're moving their heads about. It looks ridiculous" -Red vs Blue

What I've been noticing in MMOs and such is the way they're cutting corners is a tad ridiculous. A couple of new ones they reuse npcs for turning in quests/doing quests and such. The new trend I've been noticing is that for side quests or shit like that you go to a quest board to pick up a side quests, go kill something or collect something then turn it into the quest board. You know how in world of warcraft you talk to a npc, start a quest chain then do a task like save someone then turn in your quest to the original person… That is kind of dying.

What a lot of games are starting to do is rehash animations for a lot of characters.
"Why is that woman npc walking like a man?"
"That's just your imagination"
"She's scratching her crotch"

More humanoid enemies/characters to rehash animations.
"Why is that bird alien have a humanoid skeleton?"
"The god seed?"
"Then why does she have breasts? Last time I checked birds don't have breasts"
"Uhhhh yeahhhh she's totally mammalian and not cause we're reusing the female human character model"
(cough cough) Like how all the important characters in the new star wars films are humanoids to save money and how there's almost no four arms aliens anymore or such (cough cough)

Something that I am kind of pissed about though is we're starting to see companies rehash characters and just giving them a new skin then charging for cosmetics on those reskined characters. This is a tad controversial, I like Overwatch, but the best example of what I'm getting at is Brigitte is a reskined Mercy; someone took two photos of the different characters in similar poses and they both arm length, leg length, fingers, etc have the exact same body. Kind of a dick move Blizzard.

……..

Realistically I think in the long run video game companies will not dick over customers as overtly as they are currently, rather they'll be more covert about dicking over customers. We probably will see games go down from $60 to $40, but the reasons why they'll go down in price is that if you look very carefully they'll be cutting so many corners that a fair price for the game would only be $20.

2023 gaming will replace lootboxes, microtransactions and pay to win with "Why does that alien enemy character look human except for a mask on it's face" to rehash animations and so we don't have to animate it talking is the answer

Gamergate's the reason Ready Player One's a cringy reference-filled vapid nostalgia trip.

The best part is when the author admits the book's writing "was never very good" a third of the way in, but, damn it, he's got a four year old internet controversy to connect.

Clearly, the fucking journalist or author of that article fucking gave up on writing something that makes sense.

Like… what does Ready Player One have to do with Gamergate? It seems more about popular culture and the book and that were likely done without the idea of the after effects of Gamergate.

Also, why the fuck are some people (who are not SJWs) acting like massive assholes about hating the movie when the trailers gave you a good idea of what you were going to get?

Bet if you followed the breadcrumbs of every single one of them, you would find out all are connected.

This was one of the original complaints. They all come from the same cliques, they are giving undue preference to each others' games, they are all pushing the same party line, etc. People found that they were interconnected, which they all kept denying while they were scrubbing the evidence off the web.