Crucially, they said, a jury rather than a judge decided the Google case, meaning the gaming company’s underdog narrative likely held more sway. Google was also repeatedly caught misbehaving. From damning internal documents to missing and deleted evidence, the company seemed to take every chance it could to present itself as the very archetype of a powerful monopolist sneakily trying to muddy the truth, experts said.
And here are some examples of those internal documents:
In particular, Epic repeatedly pointed to an initiative called “Project Hug” where the company paid major game developers like Activision and Nintendo millions of dollars in incentives to keep their wares in the Play store and persuade them not to create their own rival stores. The stakes were high. Activision alone was reportedly offered $360m. Epic was offered $147m to keep Fortnite on Google Play. Google documents reportedly referred to Epic in this case as a worrisome “contagion” that could cause other developers to defect.
A jury is going to see that as bribery and not look favorably on Google.
That setting automatically deleted messages within 24 hrs.
Google’s sloppy handling of documents struck a nerve with Judge Donato during the trial. Around a week before the verdict, the judge slammed Google’s handling of evidence as “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice”… Donato said Google action’s amount to “the most serious and disturbing evidence I have ever seen in my decade on the bench with respect to a party intentionally suppressing relevant evidence”.
The judge calling out the defendent certainly doesn’t help.
"The big difference between Apple and Google is Apple didn’t write anything down,” Sweeney said, according to CNBC. Epic Games did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
That says all I need to know about the difference between these two cases.
He later did donate the money, but only after being publicly called out, and his excuse was that he was trying to find his right charity to donate to, not that he forgot.
He’s still a scumbag, but don’t oversell it, the truth is bad enough.
I don’t see what that has to do with the premise, which is the somehow donating to charity gives you a net profit because taxes. The real issue here is that people don’t seem to understand taxes (understandable, it’s complex).
Here’s how it works WRT to taxes:
you normally make $X
you receive $Y in charitable donations, and donate that $Y to charity
your taxable income is: $X + $Y - $Y = $X
Middle-manning charitable gifts is net zero tax-wise. The only potential for profit has nothing to do with tax write offs:
pay people involved a salary for operating the charity - only works if you own the nonprofit, and then there are issues if you have people getting paid by both wings (lots of tax scrutiny there)
charity event increases sales of your for-profit venture - e.g. more people watch your other videos or buy your merch - this is why YouTubers do it, but this still has nothing to do with taxes
charge the nonprofit for a spot on a for-profit stage - again, not sure if that’s legal, but they’d have to pay taxes on that income
In short, donating to charity doesn’t somehow make you better off in terms of taxes, at best it helps you with your branding.
I’d rather just donate to the charity in question. Why funnel it through a middle man when I could just donate it straight to the source?
If they’re selling other merch and profits go to a charity, I evaluate it as a sale, not as a charity, and only buy if I want the item for that price.
People like to make the argument about the money going to admin costs instead of productive work, but I think that’s silly because that admin costs will need to be paid by someone. If I trust a charity to allocate bulk funds properly, I should also trust them to allocate other funds properly as well. Money is fungible, so all that earmarking does is make their accounting work harder.
Present the facts, discuss possible explanations, then provide a conclusion based on both. No need to attack anyone personally, just discuss the facts.
I’m enjoying the first right now, but I wouldn’t say no to an update to the later games when I get around to them. However, they’re completely fine to play right now, so I’m not sure they need to be remade.
I disagree about Ys 1, it’s my favorite game in the series, and I’m worried a remake would destroy what I love so much about it. For example:
bump combat - really encourages you to be intentional about combat encounters, which keeps the pace of the game fast
level cap - focus switched from getting stronger to getting better; I wish more games did that
no handholding for where to go next in the first half; that’s completely fitting for the premise (you wash up with amnesia)
That said, I do wish they’d redo the first and last bosses because they’re way too hard, and the last is hard in an unfun way (I think it took like 2 hours, maybe more, repeating the same steps over and over until I executed perfectly). I also wouldn’t say no to a graphical update, especially if they add cool intro cutscenes to the bosses like the other games do.
I didn’t like Ys 2 nearly as much though because the magic cheapened the bump combat. I also didn’t like the leveling system because there seemed to be no cap (I didn’t hit it; apparently it’s 55?), which kind of encouraged grinding if a boss was challenging instead of getting better. I found the first incredibly well balanced, but I did have to grind in the second because battles were taking way too long with how much damage I was putting out (I was like 2 levels under the “expected” level much of the time).
Probably not, but it’ll at least give the quiet majority options to deal with issues. I still see complaints from people about communities they wish didn’t appear on their feed, yet they refuse to block them themselves.
I haven’t looked through the notes, but it would be cool if instance admins can get a notification or something for frequently blocked instances so they can go ahead and do an instance-wide block earlier.
What are some of your favorite content creators that highlight small indie games? Can be big or small, I’m just looking to find some lesser known games for a change....
Written reviews are the best, thanks! Looks like I’m going down a rabbit hole, I think I’ve seen one of the games listed from the last year of reviews, and that’s only because I followed a rabbit hole mentioned by a YouTuber that led to me stumbling on it.
I’ve played or own about half of these, and those I’ve played have been great. To me that means this person is a good curator. Here are a few I’ve especially enjoyed:
Black Mesa - never played HL before it, and I found it fantastic; in fact, HL2 felt like a downgrade to me in gameplay, that’s how good BM was
Baba is You - I’m a software engineer, and this totally nerd sniped me
Manifold Garden - not too difficult, but tons of fun and a very unique puzzling experience
Yooka Laylee and the Impossible Lair - only mentioning because I adored the original; this is fun too, but the OG is fantastic; not sure if this should qualify since it was made by former AAA devs
Slay the Spire - fantastic game, though I found Inscryption to be even better for me since it offers more than just a card battler (StS is rogue like, Inscryption is more complicated)
The Forgotten City - haven’t played it yet, but it looks like a ton of fun
I didn’t like a few of them (e.g. Jet Lancer), but that’s mostly because I don’t like the genres they’re in, not because they’re bad games.
They probably have a crappy DRM solution and don’t want to keep maintaining it. They should just remove the DRM entirely in a patch, remove the early access label, and drastically drop the price instead of delisting.
I agree with you, and I think the jury reached the wrong conclusion, at least from my understanding of the lawsuit.
But that’s irrelevant, I’m merely making the point that a smaller competitor can and should get away with a lot more crap because they don’t have a commanding share of the market. Epic paying for exclusivity is desperation, Steam doing it is monopolistic, because one has a dominant position while the other doesn’t.
I agree, but again, that’s irrelevant. We’re talking about whether they should be allowed to do stuff like pay for exclusives, restrict payment options, etc. Market leaders are held to a much different standard vs underdog competitors.
I have never and probably will never buy anything from EGS because Steam is just a better experience.
It’s truly disgusting when companies do layoffs near Christmas. They should do it a month or two after instead.
It also seems strange to me how many layoffs there are. Surely they expected the huge increase in demand during COVID to return to typical levels now that people are going back to the office. The industry is still incredibly profitable, surely having more staff around to make more games is still a profitable strategy…
McDonald’s is incredibly consistent in how they prepare food location to location. It turns out I just don’t like their food and much prefer the fancier place down the street.
I don’t. YouTubers just cover stuff people are interested in, they rarely create that interest.
It turns out people like whatever it is COD offers, so YouTubers make videos either about the good or bad things in the latest COD, and they attract the audiences that are looking for it. And that is where “The Algorithm” comes into play, if more people want to know what’s bad about a popular game, those videos will get more popular and thus recommended more often.
The people to blame aren’t the YouTubers, but the people who watch those videos.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at. What you’re essentially saying is that the problem with capitalism is that popular stuff stays popular. That has nothing to do with capitalism and would exist in any economic system. Think back to your school days, there’s no capitalism system saying “X is cool,” that was just the majority opinion at the time (e.g. for something like local slang, not something advertising-driven).
What you seem to be really complaining about is a lack of exposure for smaller studios. That’s a hard problem to solve because when a studio gets popular because of a good game, it quickly becomes a larger studio, and thus “part of the problem.” Franchises have an incentive to change very little so they can maintain their customers. If your favorite restaurant drastically changed its menu every year, you’d probably stop going. The same is true for game studios, if the studio changes a lot from what sold well, there’s no longer an expectation that it’ll continue to sell well.
Finding good indie games is hard because there’s so much inconsistency in the marketolace. Big studios offer consistency, and they’re rewarded for it, yet they’re not that interesting because they have an incentive to avoid risks. Indie studios live and die by the risks they take, which is what makes them interesting.
I guess I don’t go to fast food often enough to notice. I don’t eat out very often (like once/month?), and when I do, it’s at a better chain (e.g. Five Guys) or a non-chain restaurant (I prefer the local places).
the popularity isn’t the issue it’s the fact that the bad game is still popular even though it’s bad
It’s popular because people like the series. Even a bad COD game is still a COD game, and the main criticism I see is that it feels like an expansion, but it was also allegedly planned to be an expansion until execs decided to release it as a standalone due to delays in another COD game.
It’s not a broken game, it’s just bland. People generally play COD for MP, not for the story, which is probably why it’s still selling well. Capitalism may have encouraged the studio to cut corners, but individual choice is why it’s popular.
People buy games because of the franchise, not the company. People buy COD because they liked other COD games in the past, not because they liked other Activision games. Each franchise appeals to a different demographic, so they’re not going to be trying to get COD players to play Spyro or Tony Hawk, they’re going to try to get COD players to play the latest COD game, and maybe try to attract Battlefield players as well.
And that’s why indie games struggle so much, by the time they’ve established a franchise, they’re a large studio. Most indie devs don’t do franchises, and very few get well known at a studio (e.g. Supergiant is an exception here). Usually a successful indie studio will have one or two hits and a bunch of less popular games.
So what you’re complaining about is inertia of a franchise, not capitalism, because that would exist even in a socialist, georgist, or mercantilist economic system (or whatever system you prefer). When the original team behind something disappears, the franchise tends to suffer, and I think that’s precisely what COD has become (it’s now your garden variety fast food of video games, like Assassin’s Creed, FIFA, and Pokemon).
LODs should be something you build in from the start. Start with some low poly models for early prototyping, and then the art team sends updated models as they get completed. All of that would be done well before pre-release testing and tuning happens.
Yeah, if I can get 40FPS minimum (ideally 60+) on a larger city at full speed with my hardware (CPU: 5600X, GPU: 6650XT, 1440p), I’ll probably buy it.
But there are plenty of other great games that work way better, so I’m in no rush. If I have to wait for a DLC release or two, that’s fine, I just want a stable experience.
I disagree, I’m pretty sure the same-y dungeons and lack of interesting space traversal (but requirement to engage in it) was a design choice, not an engine limitation. I’m happy to cut them slack on a lot of things, but not game design.
They fail to deliver on PC every time, and there’s no way I’m buying a console just to play it. I’ll probably even wait for a PC sale since I’ll already have to wait for 2+ years for the PC launch because Rockstar wants to double dip.
And that’s why I never buy on release. Studios have consistently rewarded waiting for months to a year since you’ll pay a lower price for a better product.
The only reasons I’d buy at launch are:
I’m a game reviewer and somehow didn’t get a free copy
I’m a streamer, so that’s the cost of doing business
it’s an MP game and I can’t convince my friends to play something else
I play almost exclusively SP games, I don’t stream, and I am not a reviewer, so it’s in my interest to wait several months for patches and sale prices.
Yup, it is an anomaly in that it feels like the quality I used to expect 20 years ago when devs couldn’t just patch flaws after launch and had to actually QA their games before going gold. They rely so much on after launch patches that games often aren’t finished until a year after release.
I bailed after Skyrim. I loved the immersiveness and scale of their previous games, but Skyrim didn’t have that. It was a relatively small world, the storyline was barely even there, and the side content was a lot more limited vs other games. It looked great and had your typical gameplay improvements, but it was just a massive downgrade in terms of overall experience.
I wanted Morrowind in space, and I got stripped-down Skyrim in space, which was already a stripped down experience. Either make a great dup (like Oblivion) or make something completely new and interesting. They went with mediocre dup in a different setting.
And those examples are not hard to come up with either. For example:
any Nintendo game
games with a passionate designer - "Nier: Automata* and Death Stranding come to mind
refined, broad market appeal sequels to popular niche games - as Elden Ring is to Dark Souls
Starfield was a mediocre rehash of their Elder Scrolls formula, but without the interesting variation that Elder Scrolls games have. And performance sucks, so you’re paying a penalty for an average gameplay experience.
BG3 was a complete, enjoyable experience all the way through at launch. There were a lot of patches, but those weren’t as necessary as other games, like Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout: New Vegas. For example, character customization is nice to have, but lots of games don’t bother.
Starfield on the other hand, was relatively bug free at launch, but it didn’t have a good gameplay loop. Outposts were repetitive, gunplay and weapon variety wasn’t particularly interesting, and cities weren’t very plentiful or interesting (Morrowind was way better in all three, and the game is ~20 years old).
Yeah, BG3 wasn’t as solid as launches before OTA updates were a thing, just it felt a lot more like that era than most of the AAA game launches in recent memory.
I don’t use it because there’s no official Linux client, and they don’t have Linux versions of games even when they exist on other platforms. Linux is what I use, so I’d have to go out of my way to use their platform.
Why bother? Steam gives me a fantastic user experience, almost all the games EGS has (and probably more), actively invests in my platform of choice, makes innovative hardware products like the Steam Deck (which I love), and prices are very similar.
EGS gives me… some free games and holds exclusives hostage? That’s not enough to win me over. Give me a good user experience, not bribes.
If games didn’t run on Linux, I wouldn’t play games. I did that for years before Steam on Linux was a thing (well, aside from occasional Linux-native games like Minecraft and Factorio, or a game I bothered to get running on WINE). I only booted into Windows when my friends pushed on me hard enough to play something with them.
My computer is for software development first (mostly hobbies) and playing games second. You seem to have different priorities, and that’s totally cool too.
I absolutely agree. I’m a parent and I’ll never install a content filter. Ever.
I prefer to operate on trust. My kids tell me what they want to look at, I agree to it, then I unlock the computer to they can access it. If they access anything else, they lose that privilege until I’m confident they’ve learned their lesson and we try again. Rinse and repeat.
Trust is earned, and I hope by the time they’re old enough to be interested in boobs, they’ll value that trust. That worked reasonably well for me.
With a content filter, you’re immediately telling the child you don’t trust them, so they’re going to circumvent it, or just use their friend’s computer. I’d much rather they look at porn on my computer than their friend’s, because I can find out about it if it’s on my computer, whereas I can’t if it’s at a friend’s house. And if they’re interested in porn, that probably means they’re interested in sex, which means we need to discuss it to build that trust before they go out and have unprotected sex. If they’re watching overly violent stuff or whatever, they’re probably talking about that kind of thing with friends and I may need to be careful about who I let them spend time with (or notify the other kids’ parents). And so on.
Content filters hide the problem, I’d much rather confront it head on.
Sean Murray is risking another No Man's Sky launch disaster, but he knows exactly what he's doing and it's kinda genius marketing (www.pcgamer.com)
The curious case of Epic Games: how the developer beat Google but not Apple (www.theguardian.com)
Intel may have finally caught up to AMD in iGPU performance — Meteor Lake's Arc iGPU edges out AMD Phoenix's RDNA 3 iGPU in gaming and synthetic benchmarks (www.tomshardware.com)
Sea Of Stars Developers To Release Patch That Removes The Completionist (noisypixel.net)
[Karl Jobst] The Completionist's Response Is The Worst Thing Ever (www.youtube.com)
Nihon Falcom wants to "eventually" re-release Trails in the Sky for modern platforms (www.rpgsite.net)
Lemmy v0.19.0 Release - Instance blocking, Scaled sort, and Federation Queue (join-lemmy.org)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/9347983...
Content creators who highlight small indie games?
What are some of your favorite content creators that highlight small indie games? Can be big or small, I’m just looking to find some lesser known games for a change....
Godus and Godus Wars to be withdrawn from Steam Store (steamcommunity.com)
Epic CEO Tim Sweeney: the post-trial interview (www.theverge.com)
Another drop of the axe by Embracer Group, this time landing on Danish 3D Realms. A lot of people, including core devs, will be looking for work asap. (twitter.com)
Worst-Reviewed Call Of Duty Ever Has Already Outsold Zelda: TotK (kotaku.com)
Cities: Skylines 2 Patch Available Now, Adds Character LODs to Improve Performance and More (techraptor.net)
Starfield design director calls out unfair game criticism: 'Don't fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is' (www.pcgamer.com)
Alan Wake 2's Seemingly Dire Sales Don't Paint the Full Picture (www.ign.com)
Twitch will now allow "Artistic Nudity" following the viral topless meta (www.dexerto.com)
Twitch Updated their Sexual Content Policy:...
‘Hogwarts Legacy’ Is Beating ‘Modern Warfare 3’ As The Best-Selling Game Of 2023 (web.archive.org)
Link's Awakening DX HD Trailer (unofficial open source remake) (www.youtube.com)