CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand
twitter.com
twitter.com
It looks like a constant war between developers and gamers now. Developers are investing a lot of time into making their games literally addictive in the worst way possible, and not even remotely by making it fun - it's all about overpriced DLC, gambling and weird reward systems. Which has ruined mobile gaming and is now making its way into console and PC gaming. As an intern I attended a company-wide meeting where the CEO proclaimed that game quality didn't matter and making money is the sole focus. On the other side of the war, a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing, or review-bomb even unrelated games into oblivion if the game publisher did something wrong. Which will hardly affect the giants at all (what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?), but can crush indie developers. Not to mention the whole work culture that expects any game developer to work 80h per week for less pay because you "love gaming".
CDPR devs must be close to a nervous breakdown by now. Crunching for months/years despite their bosses promising it won't happen, seeing their game released too early and then ripped apart by critics and fans, and finally getting their personal data leaked.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow#Philosophy_and_v...
EDIT: There's a minority of population (which is heavily overrepresented in our industry), which enjoys solving pure logical puzzles just for the sake of solving them. Just look at how much praise Factorio gets on HN. Also famously, Feynman enjoyed to figure out keylocks and ancient hieroglyphs as a past time. Puzzle games cater mainly to such audience I guess.
That's what he says, but not what he does. https://youtu.be/KZokQov_aH0 Haven't experienced a bigger author disconnect in gaming in the decade.
You could have at least picked out some particular puzzles like the backwards-moving-cloud puzzle piece in Braid or the Eclipse Film puzzle in The Witness. Those are tiny optional side-puzzles to games which otherwise very much do not waste your time. My interpretation is they are Jon's way of critiquing completionism.
It's befitting of the economic extremism and pessimistic zeitgeist of our time :(
Hope there'll be a corrective force to this sometime soon before gaming turns entirely into a soulless commercialized husk.
For all the talk there is about CP2077 superficial mistakes there's really a lack of discussion about the message it's trying to convey. Is anyone even trying to understand or are they just looking at graphics and bugs?
Just had to vent a bit because in my mind CDPR are (still!) the good guys who attempt to hold high standards of old, not least due to GOG. And then they receive this amount vitriol that they publicly apologize (what for? that they made a competent and highly relevant game?) and now this attack.
Can we please banish consumerist entitlement and corporate nonsense from the videogame world please?
That's gonna be a "no" from the world.
But in other ways, yes, the gaming zeitgeist does seem more toxic than what I had remembered being engrossed in it as a teen (or I could just looking at it with rose-tinted glasses).
Been playing into the wee mornings for a week now. Got into the logic system heavily.
I'm optimising production in my sleep now. Send help. Can't stop.
With logic I can connect the input or output inserter to the roboport and only feed items to the chests if the total number of items in the robot network is under a certain amount.
The other big use is cycling power between solar and steam. Plug in the steam power's water pump to an accumulator and set it to turn off when the accumulator capacity is over, say, 50%. This way you won't feed excess power to the network and waste fuel.
My base is a total clusterfuck and not a perfect city grid of maximised train-based transports to hyper-optimised factory blueprints. Just the way I like it.
It is possible but you can also squeeze the life out of your replaceable staff and hold them guilt hostage (if you don't work as hard as everyone else then you are making them work harder). If the project has crunch time for the most development time then its not a crunch its the norm.
You can't blame them for taking time exclusive money, they are a business afterall. And its not like they support their practices.
By your logic:
> You absolutely support their practices by doing business with them.
Life is not black and white.
If Nestle is engaging in child slavery and you buy their products then yes you obviously are supporting child slavery through indirect material cooperation. Behaving morally isn't easy, which is why it's so rare.
Whether or not you choose to adapt your purchasing decisions based on this knowledge is a separate question of your ethics and other factors.
Yes, I can blame them for that. When running a business you have to decide what your core principles are and which ones, if any, you are willing to compromise for money.
>And its not like they support their practices.
Taking their money and listing their game on the Epic store is an endorsement of Epic's business practices, just like listing your app on the Apple App Store is an endorsement of Apple's business practices.
Supergiant took the timed exclusive deal so they could afford to avoid crunch while developing one of their games. Do you take issue with them treating their employees well?
If you have an issue with how Epic treats its game developers then don't buy Epic games. If you avoid buying games from other developers out of some bizarre logic that this will somehow "teach them" to deal with Epic, you'll just end up driving them out of business or toward the crunch deathmarches they were trying to avoid.
Otherwise, by your logic, you should avoid buying games from any AAA developer, or from any digital storefront (including Steam), or for any console. Basically, you would need to avoid buying games at all except from a very small set of indie developers.
I don't understand the vocal support for Steam over Epic Games. Steam literally charges you more and there are no competitors as big as Steam. I'd rather have a de facto duopoly vs a monopoly. And yes, I'm aware of GMG, Origin, Blizzard, etc.
I'll take "boring" (but not too boring) and pays the bills any day before "cool but will be unhealthy mentally/physically"
When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimization goal is not "fun", but "making money off players". That very often involves making games less fun on purpose, to exploit player's psychology against them. You keep frustrating them on purpose - but not hard enough for them to abandon the game entirely - in hopes that over time, enough of them will break and buy the paid content or unfrustration features, to relieve their psychological pain. Explicitly additive aspects get included to maximize the time the player is exposed to these monetization opportunities.
Addictiveness is ultimately a red herring in these discussions. Factorio is designed as a win-win game, the devs wants to give their players the best experience in the game's category. Modern, pay-to-win, addictive games are designed by malicious people with no moral compass, who want to extract as much money as possible from people, as cheaply as possible.
(Like with many of the big problems in our industry, focusing on tech or immediate "sciency-sounding" consequences is missing the forest for the trees. These problems all stem from people being allowed to exploit others for money. Solutions to mitigate immediate consequences will be worked around very quickly. Real solutions need to involve restrictions on the types of business that can be done.)
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/356/
I just played a mobile game, and as usual it has a hundred different in-game currencies that you can buy with real money. Every time I finish a level there's an endless parade of meaningless "rewards", and I see some coins going into a piggybank. When it was full, I clicked it, and the game congratulated me for now being eligible to buy the contents.
The game is a clone of puzzle bobble. Like you said, none of that is making puzzle bobble a "better game". It's saying "Wow, you won/earned something! It's almost yours now, you just have to pay this tiny fee to actually have it...". I don't feel like I'm on the same side as the developer, and this is worlds apart from how Factorio treats players.
Since "addictive" still has positive connotations in gaming, I'll just call it "manipulative" from now on.
The intent is of course to form a habit, so that players habitually play the game no matter if it is still fun. Combine that with a good reward system that gives you positive reinforcement at random intervals, and you get something that is designed to addict you to the game.
You, personally, don't like time-gated content. That's fine. But it's another thing entirely to say that because you don't like it it's morally wrong. Tons of people have no problem with it and in fact enjoy being limited by how much time they can play a game per day and to slowly build up their progress over time.
Plus, for many games these things are this way for multiple reasons. For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. In such an environment, time-gating is a perfect solution for both the legal problem of not encouraging people to play for too long in a single day, but also as a way to prevent people from levelling too fast beyond what the game has to offer. In this latter case it's just another way of keeping people engaged until you release new content.
That's an interesting point I've never heard of before, thanks for bringing it up.
Still, I think there's more to tease apart about time-gating. As a high-schooler, I spent plenty of time on time-gated games (AstroWars and OGame). From that experience I know this mechanic alone is very addictive, and I make a conscious decision to avoid these types of games now. I had my fun (particularly social type, my fiends were hooked in just as much as I was). And, I don't consider this mechanic to be a problem alone. What matters is why it's there. Is it to make the game fun, in its particular way? Or is it to maximize the players' exposure to monetization opportunities?
The root of my point is this: particular mechanics a game employs don't matter; what matters is why those particular mechanics were chosen. Intent, not engineering.
I've seen a lot of people struggle with this concept over the years. so I want to clarify a few things:
- People equivocate the word "addicting." That is, they switch between two meanings: "specific behavioral addiction, as defined by a schedule of reinforcement," vs. "something I enjoy a lot of an spend a lot of time doing."
- I've also seen people confuse any kind of reward in a video game (eg: beating a boss, winning in multiplayer, obtaining a high score, etc.) as being "addicting" and equivalent to various skinner box techniques noted above. (schedules of reinforcement, time gating, etc.) The problem is of course, that these things are not equivalent at all. Someone addicted to Space Invaders high scores is very much not the same as someone who threw their life away to play World of Warcraft.
- Not all games that have loot drops should be considered addicting in this sense. I would say that in hindsight, this is pretty clear. Diablo II is very addicting, but look at the forums, and check out some gameplay videos. No one is highlighting the gameplay, or boss fights, or music, or setting. They're all talking about loot drops. Whatever the developer's original intent, the gameplay of Diablo II is loot drops. Compare this with something like Dark Souls. Yes, there is loot in this game, and enemies do drop it. But except for a few achievement hunters, no one is talking about all their time spent grinding in Dark Souls. Really, the core of Dark Souls' gameplay revolves around overcoming the various challenges presented to the player.
Maybe there just arent' many of us who don't mind paying for games as long as we don't have to buy hearts and diamonds and coins and what not.
There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence, the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over, are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.
Engrossing
Captivating
For instance, as a kid, I've spent some ridiculous amount of hours playing Unreal Tournament (and to the lesser degree, Quake 3 Arena) - some of it with friends in an Internet cafe, but a lot in single-player mode too. I'd consider these two games to be pretty addictive for their time. But they were addictive because they were fun. Not because they tried to lure me in with skinner boxes, keep me in with time-gating, and monetize me with microtransactions.
Or, more recently, I've spent countless of hours playing 2048. At some point it became my go-to activity for every moment I wasn't actively concentrating on something. It may sound like an "intellectual" game, but in reality it's pretty braindead once you get the gist of it. You could probably say that the time I spent with it was unhealthy, but again, at no point it tried to be anything but fun. There were no features in there designed with exploitation in mind.
Or, roguelikes and roguelites. Between Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and RimWorld, I'm probably approaching some 1000 hours of total play time. Both are fun and addictive, in the positive sense. Neither has any of the addictive money-making features in them.
I could go on. But the point is, I maintain that ill intent is a better way to categorize games than "addictiveness". And I hate to invoke the "you'll know it when you see it" cliche, but the difference between the games designed to be fun and the games designed to milk you is glaringly obvious. Entertainment has value, and good entertainment tends to be addictive (it's pretty much a tautology). But it takes more than good entertainment to create a problem.
You view roguelikes and roguelites as positively addicting because of your personality and the fact that those games test for the traits you care about, not because they're objectively better than other games that focus on another trait.
You probably don't view MMORPGs where the entire point of the game is just grinding mindlessly for months or years as positively addicting because your personality isn't the type that would like that, but there are tons of people in the world who aren't like you and like the average HN reader who would agree with you.
I've written more extensively about this before so I feel like keeping arguing here might be pointless, but in case you're curious for a more full version of the argument: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/66
In any case, I think making something that is emergently addictive or addictive because it is fun is different from engineering something to be addictive by liberally lifting from all the years of research that went into slot machine design.
I don't know whether you frequent casinos but if you sit in the slot area for a while then compare that to big budget mobile p2w games (including Clash Royale which is actually also fun) is quite alarming. There are so many design similarities that lootbox games are basically slot machines without needing to pay out money...
- Static/dynamic typing: borders -- I prefer static typing to dynamic typing; this is a change from preference for dynamic typing in the past; today, I find "mixing and matching" of types to almost always cause runtime errors, not new insights
- Engines/frameworks: no borders -- I dislike frameworks in general, gamedev or otherwise, I much prefer to compose libraries myself
- Roguelike/Roguelite: ??? -- I don't care about a strict definition, but having a somewhat clear definition is useful for managing expectations
- Progression/No progression: ??? -- I like both
- Grinding/No grinding: no borders -- Grinding is boring, though I'll do it if you hang a nice enough carrot in front of me
- Gacha Games: no borders -- As expressed above, I consider them immoral, and that has less to do with mechanics and more with why they're employed. That said, I don't think Gacha mechanics have any sort of special borders compared to many other fun, well-defined mechanics.
- Professions: ??? -- My professional software dev is mostly a borderful experience, but I also do gamedev on the side...
- Easy Modes: ??? -- I don't see how it fits in your argument at all, or how is it even a topic at all (except for competitive multiplayer games, about which I don't care all that much). Most games have "easy mode" in form of a wide variety of cheats to choose from.
It seems I'm leaning a bit towards "no borders", but then I think this borders/no borders split isn't really "carving nature at its joints". It does not factor personality cleanly.
Also, as additional objection, I think you could use this argument to justify getting people addicted to gambling as a matter of "personality difference". I feel this explains too much.
If this is done by being fun and enjoyable, and the developer doesn’t cross the line into preying on addictive behaviour, no problem.
If the developer implements mechanics that are designed to “hook” the player to the detriment of the enjoyment and their health, then we have a problem.
I'm familiar with all of these except for "time-gating." What is it?
--
Mobile games use time gating for "lives" or "energy" or something so you can only play so much then you have to wait. Then they try and get you to spend real money to circumvent the time gate.
MMOs use time gating to slow player progression, with mechanics where you can only earn certain rewards once per day or once per week or something. It slows players becoming too powerful too quickly, or from completing their collections too quickly or from grinding the new rare drop in the first week.
This type of stuff is even creeping into other types of games, unfortunately. Especially with every game nowadays being an online game, even the single player ones.
If you want to see a company that really walks the line: look at Digital Extremes.
To be fair here, their reasoning is that Factorio is worth the 25€ and that they don't want people to feel cheated because they missed out on a lower price. I don't think that's bad in any way.
But yes I wholeheartedly agree with your Factorio point. I've bought 2 copies of the game so far because I enjoy it, and I don't feel cheated even though I paid full price.
And I didn't even like Factorio. I'm just sick gamer-brand bullshit.
That said, once I had discovered that the Factorio devs said it would never go on sale, I decided to pick it up and was glad I did.
I'm looking forward to picking up Cyberpunk whenever it goes on sale. By then, maybe it will be a much smoother and more enjoyable experience.
Is there a parallel between the advertising industry and their ever increasing quest to mine more data and the games industry with their incessant need for DLC, microtransactions and whatnot?
It seems that middle-management/VC's in both of these industries are pushing the same processes (or could we use "dogma"?) without any empirical evidence that what they are doing is the right thing, all the while patting each other on the back because that's the way everyone else does it...
Edit: edited for clarity
There is: being "data driven", which is a short for "we need to tighten the feedback loop in our revenue optimization algorithm". The most annoying players in both industries are essentially trying to run a PID controller around the people they're monetizing. For that to work, interactions must be frequent, telemetry must be extensive.
Alternative exists, but probably won't make that much money...
How ? Competitive gaming requires intense uninterrupted focus for 30 min to 1 h periods (which is what got me out of it).
That said, I'm not a gamer and I rarely play games now.
CSGO? LoL? I play one game and 30-60 minutes of my day gone, half the time to a slow loss. I can't justify it as an adult steadily losing more and more of my free time anymore.
This is technically true, but in most team based multiplayer games you actually get much shorter focus intervals due to breaks and pauses like dying (time to respawn or end of round, which can take up to multiple minutes) or running to the action from spawn (games like Overwatch).
Also the team aspect hides much of it so a lot of players go "on autopilot" too in these games, you have to keep in mind that the far majority of players in the super popular games plays at a lower level.
Compared to this a game like Starcraft 2 (1on1 competitive) actually requires uninterrupted focus for a full game with basically no breaks or pauses, but 1v1 competitive multiplayer games are not as popular as team based games.
The chime you get from a last hit/collecting runes, The cosmetic loot boxes, e&.
I had to quit cold turkey after 1500 hours because I realized I was wasting my life.
It's sad that dota2 is far from the worst offender and I would argue one of the best f2p models, but it's addicting non the less.
That's a pretty wild statement. Dota 2 is one of the most supported games out there with giant patches coming multiple times per year. Perhaps only World of Warcraft can claim to be better supported. Games like RDR2 are build-and-forget. They get no long term support.
Additionally there is the difference between playing a game to experience some story (like RDR2) and playing a game because it is challenging and fun (Dota 2). These story based games like RDR2 can be great experiences in short bursts (up to a 100 hours tops), but are incredibly boring for someone who plays 4+ hours per day and puts thousands of hours into a specific game. It's like playing tic-tac-toe when you're a chess grandmaster. Mind numbingly boring.
We live in pretty much the golden age of gaming - the audience has never been bigger, the choice was never greater and there is no lack of evocative, emotional and masterfully crafted games.
But just like with every other medium, there's also no lack of cheap cash grabs. You movie cinema is also plastered with cheap romantic comedy dreck and not the greatest works of the year. That doesn't mean that there's nothing there though.
That reminds me of the gamers on twitter who lost their shit when cyberpunk was delayed... because they had already requested a week holiday.
I know it was not your main point, but it is ridiculous how gaming culture constantly blames mobile, but the actual addictive issue happen with games like WoW or LoL.
Yes.
The problems you describe are real, and damage both the developers and the gamers and it seems like "the only winning move is not to play". I'd argue that if you don't buy the next hyped title nothing of value is lost.
Wait out the hype, if you want to play the big title. The world might be better of if you get it as discounted, second hand or pirated.
Meanwhile, there are tons of nominally artistic games that don't really tread new ground or say anything. It often has more to do with chance (multiple factors and talented people coming together by accident) than careful artistic consideration. That's why game studios often struggle to repeat the same magic across different titles, and why even indie bands with the least corporate influence struggle after the first album.
I quit the games industry for similar reasons. I worked in a management position at Nintendo and couldn't see anywhere evident to step up, with very few options to even step horizontally.
All the potential step ups in the so-called extrinsic motivators of work (salary, reputation, nice places to work, etc) came from pay-to-win mobile studios and the like. I could never find the intrinsic motivation to go there - I felt it's not what I signed up for when I started to work in the industry.
To add, I don't think that all micropayment models are necessarily predatory. For example, Nintendo finally caved in to mobile gaming (it started under Iwata IIRC), and from what I hear (and have very briefly seen with their Fire Emblem mobile game) their microtransaction policy is pretty fair.
Hell, we had microtransactions when I was a kid with arcades. I feel a bit of pity about my former self and all the other kids spending all those quarters on fleeting moments of entertainment (the PC and home console were so much better value for money!), however I wouldn't call the whole affair exploitative.
But indeed, games as close-ended artistic works are a fairly small part of the market now, and if that's your jam, you may need to prepare yourself to navigate a niche rather than an entire industry.
Take these values down to 10-15%, and the game development business becomes a lot higher-margin, encouraging new entrants and supporting better salaries and conditions for staff.
The other problem is that games are unique that they are entirely B2C, retail products. As a result, the full taxation burden falls on them. Its not uncommon for developers to actually receive only 50% of spent revenue, after global sales taxes, platform commissions, refunds, chargebacks are taken into account.
By contrast general IT companies - if providing B2B services (including advertising) - have a much lower commission and taxation burden.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-12-03-indie-deve...
You are put at a fundamentally poorer economic position if you quit your AAA job and make Indie games and release them on Steam.
The few people I know from the mobile gaming industry tell me the margins are insanely high. They’d spend x on ads and get back 2~5x in microtransactions. Also development costs were even lower than marketing costs.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-01-08-ftc-wary-o...
""heavy taxation" by Apple and Google means developers are forced to use monetisation models that "rely on surveillance, manipulation and other harmful practices.""
For instance, PC games have microtransactions too. Many top-toxic companies are are mostly in the PC ecosystem and don’t have to pay to be on PC.
Yet you still listed Microsoft as one of the companies squeezing developers.
It doesn't help that the gambling industry chooses to use the euphemeism "gaming" as in "gaming laws".
Anyhow, there are more amazing games available now than any other time in history. (especially since all the old games are still available for the most part) The problem is that per capita, modern games are quite bad. In raw numbers, though, there are more amazing games out there than ever before. Much like the rest of modern media, the challenge is in filtering out the junk. There's more choice and abundance, and much of it is of poor quality.
Sadly, this is kind of the one part that I blame CDprojectRed for even though I think they delivered an awesome product, albeit super buggy and limited one; they built the hype up so much and pushed the narrative of an immersive in depth World on e day 1 with tons of layers in the storyline and took years to develop. Had they just been honest to pre-buyers and say,'listen, please understand we wanted all these features on launch, but they're just not on day 1, so this will be released as a beta with limited features and bug fixes to come. If anyone wants a full refund we will accommodate it.' Which they eventually were forced to do for physical copies, and then gave Sony a black eye by forcing them to issue refunds from the PS+ store etc..
The Watchdogs team did that, and they also delayed their launch date to October despite it being Q1 2020 with almost no backlash because they were open about it and the price of the digital version then physical copies reflected that set of circumstances, the media didn't even bother commenting on it either despite Online play not being available to this day.
Also, this shows just how sad most gamers lives really are, between paying twitch players and spending every waking hour either playing or commenting on video games on social media one can easily see they don't have much or any real social life.
It's actually really sad, and makes me think about that part of the anime 'Welcome to the NHK' about NEETism and the prevalence of dropping out of Society and creating your own virtual existence Online to fill the void.
It's sad because I was also a gamer up until Sophomore year of university when I just got way too busy going FT and Summer classes and running a business, preparing/repairing my car and going to and training for real motorsports events/weekends and being in even casual relationships--there was simply no time to put in the 5+ hours on Gran Tursimo to refine my lines at Fuji, Suzuka, Laguna Seca or the Nordschleife like I could when I was in HS.
Sadly, for me Nismo's GT academy would later prove it to be a proper outlet and use of my time had I continued as they picked drivers for their lineup in GT racing series from the challenges Online, but by then the eventual financial crash of 2008 crisis was already setting things into motion (early 2007ish) so I couldn't be bothered and I needed to graduate ASAP.
It's certainly possible to be the case, and I'm not even ruling out the hack being an inside job given what a clusterf--- this has been so far on a PR level. People gave nearly a decade to this Indie project only to see the same Corpo narrative play out with the dev's being the 'gonks' thrown under the bus when it came to it.
How come management and project leads aren't fore-fitting their pay and bonuses until these things are resorted, mainly because it's always the foot soldiers who are the ones that solve the problems and management overseeing it has an overembelished value, if anything, in ultimately delivering on a diesreable goal.
I can see a disgruntled team of devs saying 'F it' after all of this and just making sure the whole thing ends in a big flame and jumping ship.
Which sucks because I got back into gaming to play Cyberpunk 2077 after taking over a decade off and wanted to see it all pan out, but this may not happen.
ETA: Twitter and Reddit and Youtube are the social media platforms I mean. People also let their blog comments turn into free-for-alls. But doesn't a subreddit Reddit count a forum? Kinda. It's not really _run_ by its admins, like a proper independent forum.
The most visible aspects of online gamer culture is whatever some gaming "journalist" dug up on the internet and wrote an article about.
To stand by my statement, I've never seen a sewing subreddit send death threats and hate mail to employees just trying to keep a job, or stalk a CEOs wife out of the public eye, just because a video game has some bugs. It's not just one or two edge cases either, it's a bandwagon of hatred on the popular internet. You're right that it's platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Imgur et al, that enable it, but I don't think that diminishes the issue. There's enough of the "noisy minority" to be harmful.
Now I enjoy playing games and reading blog posts about their engineering techniques. But I won't regret working mostly 40h weeks with vacation I can actually take and not thinking I'm going to get laid off every time I ship a project.
>On the other side of the war, a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing, or review-bomb even unrelated games into oblivion if the game publisher did something wrong. Which will hardly affect the giants at all (what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?), but can crush indie developers. Not to mention the whole work culture that expects any game developer to work 80h per week for less pay because you "love gaming".
It bothers me that so many dysfunctional people occupy so much space in gaming culture, but it is a fundamental feature of the hobby given its structure, consequences, and accessibility.
That said, there has never been as much absolute human activity focused on making high quality games in positive settings. It's just that there are so many projects around that just getting an understanding of the market and which games would give you memorable experiences requires hours of research and discovery. Don't let the negative aspects that get disproportionate air-time color your perception exclusively.
Even as someone who never cared for their games, I really appreciated them as a developer. I can't say whether The Witcher contained compulsive/addictive elements, but CDPR was not incentivized to do so, which IMO is what matters.
I don't know whether or not this says anything about the industry, it's just a shame.
But I think gamedev clearly runs at two levels. There's AAAs and then there's everyone else. The smaller teams either running as a hobby or only just scraping by, and every so often there's a Mojang that makes it big.
But yeah, much easier doing B2B development work.
I suppose the IT team got overwhelmed with requests to open up the firewall for people working from home during the pandemic and just opened it for the whole internet.
CI runners (usually Jenkins) require a perforce user to function and those users often have very simple passwords, this is compounded by the fact that perforce itself does not have any backoff for brute force attempts.
Perforce assumes that it's being hosted in a secure environment.
The note indicates HR documents were stolen, but I have not seen any evidence of that, it is most likely posturing.
They’re the ones getting screwed over the most here imo
No access for anyone while you scale your VPN? Just wait while everyone pulls and pushes gigs of data over the VPN to perforce, you didn’t need that video meeting after all?
You’ll get a big fat nope to that when you try to do it; this is a pretty tough challenge you’re trivialising here.
Google “zero trust” as an alternative; clearly they didn’t do that properly either, but I can at least understand why they didn’t just demand everyone use a VPN.
Trivial VPN use cases like people who d/l source code and have then occasional 5 person video meeting and this use case are not the same thing.
The companies that do it well implement something like google's beyondcorp, the bad just uses direct authentication.
The idea is that drawing a clear line between outside and inside became futile and you are much better off with an approach that recognizes that fact. Their somewhat provocative slogan is: "The perimeter is dead".
For those working at FAANG: Do you have a corporate VPN? Do you use it? Do you need it for your daily work?
[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_dec...
When I was at Microsoft, you still needed a VPN to connect to your dev machine and write code, but more and more internal services were moving to a zero-trust model that didn't require a VPN. Not sure if they've gotten there 100%, but it felt like the clear direction.
I would expect access to source code to be strictly from a VPN with controlled IPs, people shouldn't be accessing such sensitive information directly from their IPs, exactly because it makes it very hard to control access.
Each client that connects to the VPN gets it's own IP, just the same as every PC plugged into the physical corp net gets it's own IP. When you access an internal service, it's no different to a desktop on the LAN accessing it in terms of ability to identity the end user.
I liked cyberpunk, if only because of the story. I like games with decent - excellent stories. Sure, I wish cyberpunk could’ve been even better but it was enjoyable.
It’s hard to find games with good stories and lore nowadays, I think.
Out of the top of my head: pillars of eternity, divinity original sin 1/2, what remains of Edith finch, firewatch...
The situations they were in was less interesting to me. Like, the main story itself is mediocre at best. Many of the side stories are good, but not amazing. What is absolutely top notch, though, is the characters: their personalities, how they're portrayed, their actors (voice and animation) etc. They are likable, believable and I got emotionally invested in them more than for many games with otherwise better stories.
Cyberpunk kinda filled that void a bit. Battle tech is another that I enjoy, but the story was mediocre at best.
I think one of the other posters here put it plainly; the cyberpunk story was just ok, but the characters really stood out and I got emotionally invested in them.
Maybe that’s what I’m really after. Characters I actually care about.
Let me introduce you to Disco Elysium. You're welcome.
Same, I'm glad I opted out of the pre-buy despite having looked forward to the game for the better part of a decade now, I'm a massive fan of genre and heard about it early on and fan boyed about the art renders from back in the day despite having given up on gaming years before.
But, I stopped watching the youtube videos after a few missions and now I'm waiting until they get things sorted and the features they promised as well as some others that will only be possible for Online play--there was talk about it including space exploration as the launch site is not currently accessible but looks likely to be as things develop with time.
Anyhow, I'm just glad they didn't use Bitcoin ransomware, and I hope they got their backup/image settings on before this hack.
The fact that some gamers and these hackers are angry that "a software company isn't immune to software bugs" is a testament to a) their lack of maturity and b) a sign of the times.
I hope CDPR pulls through and gets past this.
This was not the problem though. The problem was that they released the game regardless of those issues, and publishing a game that was not finished.
Not hosting on their blog because they just need to disclose this breach so it is public information for stock exchange and legal purposes.
Unreal Tournament 4 was kind of developed in the open too as far as I know.
You can see this with UnrealScript for example.
It's pretty clear why this is done, most game designers aren't experienced programmers and there is a very large push to simplify game development in both the code that needs to be written and allowing a lot of development to be done with visual editors.
If you want to add a new shader it's much easier to develop a shader generator and expose your internal engine functionality via DSL or a UI elements than teach everyone on the dev team how to write shaders, especially since your engine might need to support multiple platforms, so you have a compiler that can target different hardware/software platforms.
Same goes for every other aspect of game development like game mechanics, AI and physics.
So you end up having a small core team of engine and tool programmers and then 100's of game designers that can then work on a higher level.
And it's not that games are unique, this is how computer programming always worked, the core of C e.g. something like printf has to be written in assembly, same goes for your core C compiler (yes now you can technically write a compiler for C in any language including C but when you start from scratch you need to bootstrap it with something).
In fact this is how the web itself works, we have a core "engine" - the browser and DSL - JavaScript and HTML.
Watch Dogs will forever be in Cyberpunks shadow, literately everything that has happened with Cyberpunk has happened to Legion with no one, including those that bought and played the game (myself included, though I didn't buy it and actually got paid to play it), cares about it and just goes on about their life.
IMHO frame rendering analyses like this:
http://www.adriancourreges.com/projects/
...or working through GDC presentations, blog posts and whitepapers from those companies is more helpful to understand their technology.
(edit: better link)
They're trying to get the attention of whoever happens to see the mysterious file, and they often use that kind of extravagant tone with a lot of exclamation points. The goal is to extort as much money as possible and they think this is the best scare tactic to achieve it. Ransomers also may not necessarily be the smartest, oldest, or most educated people.
I'd be extremely surprised if it was somehow fake, given the company posted it all themselves.
I'm surprised the extortionists thought such a threat would work. Source code isn't really that valuable.
With the ransom threat rebuffed publicly, they might not be bothered to actually distribute the files, or they might choose to keep them privately for bragging rights.
And then it's entirely possible the source code might not be in a compilable state without lots of work.
But the biggest problems are the copyright issues. CDPR will be well within their rights to go after anyone publishing unofficial builds of the source code.
You could patch installed files and/or at runtime, no? With patches being wholly original work?
I'm not actually sure how IP law works for something like that.
Not an exact analogy, but if you translate a copyrighted piece of work, you own the copyright to the translation, but cannot e.g. publish that without the original work’s copyright holder’s consent.
Additionally, Cyberpunk is also being shat on for lacking mechanics or half-assing them. Cops being the more obvious one, or the complete lack of driving AIs.
Saying it's "hardly more bugs than most early access/new releases" is something that I've seen too often though. I'd be willing to assume my experience is way outside of the norm, if I didn't have a number of friends I played along with and that reported the exact same (sometimes worse) experience on PC.
I forget if it was right before or after the boss fight; in fact I think it was right after it but before the final plotline decision.
They were able to reload that and got better RNG the second time around. No idea what the actual odds of failure in it are.
I played it on PS4 and while I mostly able to enjoy the game with only minor issues, there definitely were many issues and I could imagine some people aren't as tolerant towards bugs as I was for a game they paid full price for.
My experience has been roughly this: every 4 hours, the game crashes. Guaranteed. Luckily I haven't lost more than a few minutes of gameplay, between auto saves and just saving very regularly. I have a lot of bugs related to content not loading in quickly enough: eg I can pass through objects/people (including doors!) before they load properly. This has occasionally meant I got into a place I shouldn't have causing me to have to reload (eg one mission you were meant to interact with the doorbell, but I glitched into the building by passing through the not-yet loaded door. Now I was stuck because the doorbell triggered the next part of the mission and I was now behind a closed door. I had to reload). I have experienced tons of audio glitches (subtitles not disappearing, audio playing on top of other audio especially multiple phone messages, etc). I have experienced tons of physics glitches, floating people/objects/cars. I've had at least one mission where a door wouldn't open (I actually "fixed" this by glitching through the door and opening it from the inside... I checked online and yes, it was definitely meant to open from the outside). I've experienced lots of times where things just weren't there and eventually loaded in and just appeared: objects, people, items people were holding (eg guitarists), cars.
I've also seen bugs other people have hit: lots of physics and animation issues (eg T poses, I haven't personally experienced many of those), corrupted saves, missions that couldn't be completed, performance issues much worse than what I've noticed (mine mostly plays well enough).
So, count yourself lucky that you only had one bug where you had to reload!
Even with the bugs I hit, I still enjoyed the game a lot, and didn't have it as bad as what many people report.
The threat in a hostage situation is not “give me money or I release a hostage.”
I really hope they take proper measures to quarantine, re-validate, etc.
For example some devs told that HL: Alyx has some hacks left-over from HL2... And I don't think CdProjekt is any better...
PS: For reference, I speak the language
Plus stories found in the shards - allusions to Q&A processes in games/software projects, rebellion in space against mandatory crunch…
(Also technically the game is called "Cyberpunk 2077". "Cyberpunk" is both name of the genre and name of the series of which it is a part of.)