This isn't even (remotely) limited to people who don't read the news stories. I have personally spoken with scores of people who will (for example) express displeasure over Ubisoft's culture of sexual abuse, and not blink an eye when it came time to purchase Assassain's Creed: Valhalla. Or of Rockstar's culture of abusive crunch and equally abusive Twitter presence while buying premium versions of TLOU2.
So long as they pump out decent-to-good games, no amount of bad press will impact the number of games (and microtransactions) purchased. And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again.
Bioware, as an example, is being lauded in the press and by gamers in general again because they announced that they're making another Mass Effect game. There's very little hesitation before gushing about it, even given ME: Andromeda and Anthem.
Even the press releases about The Witcher 4 are filled with praise for a company that just released a turd of a game (though you'll still find plenty of people who heap praise upon CP2077 because they have the blessed combination of PC components).
I agree that there is an injustice in the willful ignorance one must have to abstract the art from the artist during discussion -- but frankly if we were to focus more heavily on the damaged artist during the discussion of art :
A) the topic drifts from aesthetic appreciation to a mix of criminology/sociology/psychology/hearsay/pop-culture trivia information
B) it's an on-going philosophical/ontological debate as to whether or not the actions of the artist should be considered within the scope of the discussion of the art.
To expound on B : It's fairly well understood that if I showed a painting of nearly any skill level to 3 groups of people, and I differ the backstory between the three of them, I can easily manipulate the surveyed aesthetic appreciation from each of the test groups.
If that effect is well demonstrated, and the topic of study and discussion is 'Art', and i'm asked to create an analysis of the aesthetic of a specific piece .. should I consider the artist backstory as a confounding factor with regards to any analysis I might do on the art piece?
Some people consider those confounding factors to be within the scope of artistic discussion -- some people don't.
Personally I find that only classical depictions of artists get a lot of heat about their personal lives : painters, directors, photographers, writers.
Meanwhile certain industrial designers and architects are on record as being wildly racist or misogynist, and no one mentions it or bats an eye... but then again industrial design and architecture are on the fringes of art where many seem not to realize the artistry element exists at all.
Hey now, that's harsh. If you have a decent-spec gaming PC you have the "blessed combination". The console releases were a trainwreck but unless you're calling Skyrim and Fallout 4 turds as well I wouldn't put CP2077 in that category.
Besides, the issue at hand here is company reputation. CDPR knowingly released a game to consoles that is damn near unplayable. It was a blatant cash grab at the expense of their customers, and if you honestly believe they didn't know what the state of the game was prior to release then I have a bridge to sell you.
Sony actually has pretty strict certification criteria from what Ive read, so the assumption is that CDPR promised a day 1 fix for all of this stuff and they failed. Miserably.
People who call you an “asshole” tend to think you’re being an asshole. How is this surprising?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/20/22192375/cyberpunk-2077-...
Try not to... uhhh... collect too many items... while playing your RPG... I guess. Top notch QA, really (though I think we both know deep down it's not really a QA problem.)
8MB save file size limitation.
Every other bug aside, that you can crash your game by collecting too many items in the game, and your recourse is to “collect less items” is utterly inexcusable.
That doesn’t even mention getting kicked off an entire platform after being launched. A feat only achieved by one other game in history.
It was withdrawn from the PC platform.
char SAVEGAME[8388608];I work in a role where there is a real possibility that I might be woken up at 3am by an on-call alert. Or that I might have to work the occasional work week far past 40 hours due to an emergency. But it's in service of a critical infrastructure project (carrier-of-carrier ISP backbone links), not a video game. There is no video game on the planet that is so important people can't work a normal 40 hour work week.
If a video game developer can't build, QA and ship a game with a team of people working normal office hours, then in my opinion their priorities are grossly out of whack.
I have lost track of the number of instances I have seen of big video game development studios treating their employees in an abusive manner.
And yes, I suppose I'm somewhat of a hypocrite here. I bought a used copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for $20 on ebay. I bought a copy of Fallout 4 for $18 on the xbox one game store. Am I contributing to the problem? Very likely.
Look at the hours for drawing or animation. Or in the film industry, there are unions, but work conditions are similar in non union productions, and unions are often abusive to younger and newer members.
A good chunk of anime translators come from the fan translation scene, and the problem with that scene is that it's brainwashed people into think they should work for recognition instead of money. This results in some really fucked-up dynamics, such as:
1. Bootleg streaming sites that charge you for fansubs. This has been a particular thorn in the side of the licensed translation business because the old unspoken rule of "don't translate licensed works" has long since been forgotten. They rely entirely on unpaid labor throughout the chain, and are absolutely parasites on everyone. (If there was one compelling argument for "stop-having-fun-guys" levels of copyright maximalism, it would be these sites.)
2. Crunchyroll's absolutely terrible translator wages. This particular site actually used to be one of those old bootleg streaming services, so when they did "go legit", they kept the underlying mentality of paying people peanuts. They're basically parasites dressed up in a fancy suit.
3. People in the legit side of the business (save for Crunchy) having extremely negative aspersions on anyone who had a history of working in the fan translation scene. Occasionally this is for proper CYA reasons, but more often it's a weird form of elitism.
Quite honestly, I think we should start looking at any industry with fan passion surrounding it as a huge exploitation smell. For every person risking millions of dollars in copyright liability by making a cool fan project, there's probably 9 or 10 more people who became trained professionals the "proper" way and wound up getting jobs at these big companies where they were chewed up and spat out. Any business that has the potential to live off the backs of fan labor is probably doing so, even by accident.
It's possible it's impossible to make anime and pay a good wage I suppose but ... assuming it is possible you'd expect some animators to quit and start their own company and attract all the talent by paying well and not over-working their employees. So what's preventing that from happening?
Same with games.
One idea (which I don't like), the odds of making a game or anime that make it's money back is extremely small. Either you make Minecraft (game) or One Piece (anime) or you more likely make "Tower Miners" or "Comic Party" (I just googled failed games and failed anime).
Just like saying "I'm going to be a music Rock Star/NYT best selling author/Movie star", the odds that you will be the next hit star are extremely low. It's no different for games. And if it's not a hit you lose money which means you don't make a living wage.
Is that the reason those industries pay so low? Because the odds of them making their money back are like 1000 to 1 against and so they have to keep budgets as small as possible just to survive until they hit the 1 out of the 1000?
Is there some other way to get a $$$$$$$ budget to pay 10-15 people a living wage while the odds of making back that money on sales are 1000 to 1?
PS: I know the story in anime is that prices that broadcasters / publishers pay are low because of history but that seems irrelevant in 2020 when you can reach fans via the internet.
It seems obvious the games industry is manufacturing its own supply of naive young programmers who want to make games. People are drawn to work in this industry after years of consuming the product of the same industry. Extant exploited game developers produce the propaganda that will indoctrinate the next generation of exploited developers.
I think you kind of answered your own question. There are a lot more "young and somewhat naive people" interesting in working for a gaming company than your "critical infrastructure project". Sure, many of them may get jaded and decide it's not worth it so change industries, but there is a new crop every year.
You say this as if these people are being inconsistent. I'd argue they are not. Any individual sale of a mass market good has as-close-to-zero-as-possible impact on the publisher's bottom line. But it increases the quality of life of the purchaser who is then better equipped to make a difference through advocacy.
> And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again.
People buy individual games not reputation. Sometimes people buy nostalgia, but often regret it. Giving money to a company based on reputation is a donation. I think it's important to keep in mind that buying and donating are separate things with separate motivations.
They absolutely are. If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution). The second move is advocacy.
Citing mass market purchase numbers when buying from a company someone morally disagrees with is merely a justification to assuage their own guilt at making the purchase. And it’s a pretty a poor one at that.
> People buy individual games, not reputation.
CDPR’s release of CyberPunk 2077, and the hype leading up to that puts lie to that assertion. It was bought more off the reputation of CDPR based of the Witcher series than any merits it had on its own. This was evident in almost every discussion leading up to it. In fact, aside from marketing, CP2077 had no real reputation of its own when it busted preorder records.
As a general rule, I do find this is often difficult to actually put into practice.
However, you are exactly right when it comes to video games. It's a crowded market of entertainment products. You can find an alternative that you will enjoy just as much with less hypocrisy.
You can't even get refunds in their online store, period.
Once bought a game by accident, realized it wouldn't work (local-only party game, thought it was online), immediately requested a refund, and they flatly refused the refund because it was already downloaded and they claim the contract has been fulfilled.
Even if they're legally in the right (remains to be seen, they're currently being sued over this exact thing by a German watchdog), it felt very hostile and I'm not ever buying from them again.
The Switch has a backup feature, but the backups are hardware ID locked, so if you lose your Switch and get a replacement, lol, the backups are useless. This is made worse because even though you may have a physical cartridge game, the actual save files are on the machine.
Personally I had a run in with this when I upgraded to a 3DS XL, and I didn't check for dead pixels until after I transferred all my data. They locked the transfer feature for a week+ so I couldn't go and get my device replaced for a week, and my data was held hostage on a machine with stuck/dead pixels dead center on what is already a low resolution display.
It sucks because the X360/PS3/Wii generation of consoles supported saving & loading games off of external commodity storage (the X360 supported any USB drive, the Wii SD cards, and the PS3 both, if you had one of the earlier units with a SD card slot), but that was disabled as it became clear that save games could be used to jailbreak the systems and install bootloaders/firmware that disabled DRM.
If you don't pay Nintendo a monthly fee, the Switch has no backups. Console gets stolen (more likely than its competitors, since it's a portable system) or you have a hardware failure? Everything's gone.
I have a Switch, but the only games I'll buy for it are ones where I wouldn't particularly care if it destroyed all my save files. Had that experience after a Wii hardware failure and I never went back and finished any of the games I was partway through because I didn't want to replay the first 3/4 of them just to get to the last bit.
Because that's more important than making sure their customers don't lose literally all the game progress in all of the games that they've played.
I can't imagine pouring hours and hours into your Animal Crossing island on a console that has an SD card slot and doesn't let you make a backup. Someone's going to learn a hard lesson from that about where Nintendo's priorities are.
THERE'S NOTHING TO CHEAT.
Animal Crossing and Pokemon are outliers. The former has a backup system that only can be used if you call Nintendo customer support. If you plan your transfer ahead of time you can do it yourself, 3DS-style, but it took them multiple updates to implement that. (Part of this is because the island is owned by the system, not individual users, which is an odd design choice.) I have no idea how Game Freak expects you to keep your Pokemon saves safe.
I mean it sounds super sh!tty when you're accustomed to the extremely lenient returns / refunds policies of the west, while Japan (in specific) is on the polar opposite of that.
I know it's a difficult position to argue for practically, but I think piracy is vital to ensure the longevity of all forms of commercial art like video games, TV shows, and music. Luckily I think pirates will always find a way to keep content alive, but if every company were as aggressive as Nintendo then I would start to worry.
I'm not sure it is. It's a completely novel state of affairs that companies expect to have perpetual ownership and absolute control/monopoly over what they've created. It's completely unjustified outside of "well, we have the money to make it so" and the public domain is dead solely because of efforts of companies like Disney.
Not at all a difficult position to argue for. This practice is called a library, and it's a very popular concept.
We've got three options to preserve human culture:
- extremely harsh copyright limits (single digit number of years, so it's still in the public conscious and can actually be found again after copyright expires)
- copyright only applying for the duration that said content is widely available (no suing someone for publishing content you don't even sell)
- refusing to abide by copyright laws (community sourced archives)
I'd be happy to go with either of the first two options, but media conglomerates aren't, so piracy it is.
Though, I'd argue Nintendo's interactions with the west are really similar to another Japanese developer, From Software. They both have a massive, rabid western fanbase who orgasm at every bit of news these eastern companies hand out. Well, in the end, they give out very little, and a lot of their game releases follow a pattern of "we're making new game, here's a teaser trailer" (three years pass with literally nothing) "ok, game is out today, have fun". Contrast that to Cyberpunk and other western developers, which more follow a pattern of constant community engagement, developer diaries, release dates promised a year in advance, then missed, playable demos, marketing deal with Doritos, sponsored twitch streams, etc.
Its a rather interesting case study in how game companies should communicate with their base. You'd initially think that more communication is always better, but there's so much evidence to the contrary (Nintendo, From, Valve, and Team Cherry immediately come to mind). By rarely communicating these companies exempt themselves from a lot of criticism; obviously this exemption applies to the games they're developing, but it really does extend to everything they do.
This misleading claim is patently untrue. Dolphin has thrived for years.
Nintendo goes after hackers/crackers and ROM hosts. They legally don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to clean-room emulation, so they don't bother.
They also, to my mind, haven't gone after people who just download ROMs, which puts them on higher moral ground than the RIAA and MPAA of which Disney is apart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_fi...
Also, there's been lots of serious issues with the Melee community leaders recently with sexual misconduct, so it's also possible that Nintendo just wants to distance themselves from the whole scene.
And the sexual misconduct was mainly in the Ultimate scene. Very few prominent Melee players were involved.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/12/nintendo_cancels_s...
> There were no further details, but some fans seem to think they might know what's going on...
The evo shutdown was presumably attempted to avoid any comparisons between their newest game (Brawl) and Melee; similarly, the recent shutdown probably has more to do with how bad Ultimate's online is compared to emulated Melee, rather than the mere fact that they're on an emulator in the first place. Other emulated online Melee tournaments without Ultimate have gotten away with it so far.
The switch screen is too small for local multiplayer and hooking it up to a TV w/ power is too bulky and annoying because they're picky about adapters unlike laptops. You also need a case to transport them because they turn on too easily when their buttons are exposed. A 13" laptop is way better.
(I'm not doing local multiplayer today because COVID, but I know I will in during future trips)
Other than that the game is far more responsive than Ultimate, with only 3 total frames of input latency even online, unlike the 6 frames offline and at least ten online of Ultimate.
It would be nice for Ultimate to have better latency…
Regardless, only a very small few of the top pros (Hungrybox and Axe) seem to be sensitive to the minute differences when things are working properly.
I backported an earlier version of the Metal/MoltenVK backend to Slippi which should hopefully be in the next release, whenever they get around to it. This provides decent performance on Intel Macs and ARM Macs under Rosetta 2, and ideally tides the (mac) community over until Slippi finds parity with mainline Dolphin.
So is it any wonder then why they go after hackers?
Sadly there are a bunch of people that have a cult of a certain company and nothing will make them realize that their cult company is, in fact, a regular company trying to squeeze as much profit as possible.
All this stalking looks illegal though, that is really beyond acceptable.
The guy being stalked is a 26 years old person. Looking back at when I was 26, if I suddenly had known I had a multinational company sending out PIs to stalk me, I'd be freaking the f out.
I hope he's fine.
Although Nintendo hasn't been as bad about this in recent years, I vowed to never give them money again after they wiped out countless numbers of YouTube channels with walkthroughs for games they don't even publish anymore. It's like, WTF, you have these people promoting your games for free, games you don't even sell anymore, and you're punishing them for showing other people how great your games are. It comes off as so "old man get off my lawn" that I can't ever reward it or respect it. As far as I can tell, Microsoft doesn't DMCA remove videos featuring Halo: Combat Evolved, a game that's nearly 20 years old, but Nintendo ruthlessly removed tons of videos that showed games like Goldeneye 007 under fair use, which are now gone forever. That's an abuse of the public space. Screw Nintendo. (Ironically, Microsoft owns Rare now, but I'm pretty sure Nintendo has both rights to James Bond and the N64 game)
Because don't get me wrong, the internals are a factor -- the ARM/x86 gap was significantly wider in the Tegra X1's day, it was already multiple years old when the Switch shipped, and being the only console on ARM can't have helped with attracting third parties. But as a Switch owner who has played a lot of Smash on the thing, what's really holding it back as a dedicated console is that it has a lot of nagging quality of life issues -- things like the inability to get a good first-party D-Pad, and their persistently baffling refusal to ship Ethernet despite it being standard on every competing platform since the original XBox. Their solution for the latter when they announced the details for Smash Ultimate was to say "lol hope you've got an adapter!" Which also makes the netplay worse at scale by ensuring that even more players are going to just resort to WiFi instead. (Not that the game's netcode can't also be outperformed by an emulator that people are using to play its 20-year-old predecessor.) These issues are one thing for a phone, but there's a completely separate bar for a device that's literally built for this.
The problem with the Switch isn't just the audience it's made for, or that because of that target it isn't keeping up with games like Cyberpunk. It's that even when you get to some of the areas where it should shine -- titles like Tetris 99, or Hollow Knight -- it's also tangibly worse at playing them than its competitors, for reasons that have nothing to do with its frame rate.
> Although Nintendo hasn't been as bad about this in recent years, I vowed to never give them money again after they wiped out countless numbers of YouTube channels with walkthroughs for games they don't even publish anymore.
They're not much better now. Check out what happened to The Big House for trying to use said emulator's netplay to run a Melee tournament during a plague, and all the ensuing fallout. I'm genuinely starting to consider migrating back off Nintendo consoles over it myself.
I am super sad that there's no easy way to run Android (for steam link) on it, but I understand (if not agree with) Nintendo's position here. If I could play all my steam games on my switch, I'd never buy switch games except exclusives (which is most of my library anyway).
It feels like they designed themselves into a corner here.
The problem is there are more and better animations in Pokémon coliseum (an N64 game) than the latest release. When every move amounts to - Move Pokémon towards opponent - A few sparkles there's just no reason to care about any individual Pokémon (or even type) anymore.
That said, it is pretty hard to think of toon-shaded "bing bing wahoo" man as the mascot of shady practices.
It is one of most anti-consumer corporations in the console market and they are loved. I seriously do not get it.
Add another HN dropbox comment to the list
It doesn't excuse the state their online services are, and to be honest - most of their 1st party games are severely overrated if you take away the nostalgia for the series.
People are capable of recognizing a difference between the portion of the company creating quality entertainment and the portion doing a very aggressive job defending their IP.
The parody from outh Park's Mickey Mouse episodes didn't come from thin air.
No one cares about rest.
Most of your comments are opinion and borderline bad faith representations of their situation.
You're thinking of trademarks. Copyright isn't affected by enforcement in the same way.
That's wrong, or at least unsourced and unsupported by current facts.
> 2). Copyright exists and generally must be enforced lest the holder wishes to lose their rights.
That's also wrong.
That's not how copyright works. It's how trademarks work, but you don't lose copyright if you don't actively enforce it.
> Emulator writers don't get sued
Remember, Jack Valenti went to his grave still believing that the VCR was to Hollywood what the Boston Strangler was to the woman home alone.
To Nintendo, emulation is a crime. (Except when they do it, because they own or license the rights to the platforms in question.) As soon as their legal team thinks they can get a ruling that will overturn Sony v. Connectix, they will be on that like white on rice. Failing that, harassment, intimidation, and threats will do.