Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: physical discs

Gaming, layoffs, physical discs, and me (part four)

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I’m back to talk once again about Xbox and what the fuck is going on in the industry. Xbox has big main villain vibes, but it’s not just them. It’s not even mainly them. They are just the most obvious symptom of an evergreen disease–corporate greed. That’s the disease. It’s always the disease. It probably always will be. That’s part and parcel of America; it’s built into the fabric of American society. We just take for granted that we are at the whim of our corporate overlords, and there is nothing to be done about it. Oh, and here is the post from yesterday in which I talked about how deluded (and heartless) the C-suite at Microsoft is when talking about Xbox profits.

I read a work blog, and any time the conditions of the American workforce is brought up (especially the fact that our healthcare is tied into our employment), Europeans pour in to tell us how appalling it is and how they can’t believe it. I mean, true, but we don’t need to hear/read it every time. We know it’s gross and terrible, but it’s not as if we can just move countries on a whim. Or overhaul our entire employment system with a snap of the fingers.

Journalism is dying out in general. Gaming journalism, in particular, is on its way out, too. And life as a gaming dev is hard AF. I don’t see how in good conscious I could encourage anyone to go into the gaming industry today*. Then again, it’s not like there are a ton of industries I would encourage anyone to go into, anway. But, especially not anything entertainment and/or journalism related.

Things are dire in this realm. People in the industry are feeling pretty bleak. There are some saying that it’s going to get lower before it goes higher. Others are not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Every day, it’s just bad news after bad news.

Which, come to think of it, is much like the regular news as well. *Sigh*

One thing I will say is that the physical discs issue–by the way. They didn’t even tell their partners that they were doing that until they dropped the news to the public. And, yeah. That did not go over well. Sony really thought they were just going to drop that and let it wash away. (I use Sony and PlayStation pretty interchangeably in this post for complex reasons I don’t want to get into here.)

To be honest, so did I. I mean, what was there to do? PlayStation in the past pretty much just did whatever the fuck they wanted to do with little to no pushback. Given that Xbox has floundered for several years, essentially giving PlayStation free rein. I wrote free reign at first, which works, too (meaning that PlayStation is acting pretty much as a dictator). And, really. They slid it in while the Xbox turmoil was going on, so they probably thought they would be able to go unnoticed.

Well, joke’s on them. There was such an uproar about it; I was quite surprised. It was loud. It was angry. It was sustained. I thought it would wash away in a day or two, but no. People were furious about it, and, weirdly, it’s the one thing that actually bolstered me. The reaction, I mean. I had been so beaten down by the news (gaming and general), I was numb. Everything sucked. Nothing was going to get better. Why bother?


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The state of gaming and me, part two

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So, amid all the wild shenanigans that Xbox and PlayStation have been wading through creating, EA decided that they had been quiet for far too long. EA, once voted the worst company in America for two years running in the tens. Watching PS and Xbox get so much pub f or self-imploding must have really gotten on their nerves. “I got to get me some of that!”–some muckety-muck at EA, probably.

Why do I say that? Because they did something so bonehead and unfathomable (well, it’s fathomable when you remember that companies are souless entities who only care about making a profit and not at all about people or their customers), people are calling for a…boycott of sorts.

In a nutshell, they released their new college football game and took out the “easy mode”. I have included a video down below from SnowBike Mike who works at Kinda Funny Games in which he explains what the issue is. As I understand it, there was a slider that allowed you to adjust to how much experience points you earned in two of the offline modes. Andy Cortez read from an article written by Lewis Parker at Kotaku that outlines the problem. Spoiler–microtransactions. It’s microtransactions. Actual, there’s nothing micro about it. It’s just transactions, really.  There’s more to it, but basically, they’re saying you have to pay actual real life money to get the XP rather than use the slider–which no longer exists (at least the easier side of it).

Now, you gotta pay a hundo to get your coach leveled up properly. Someone calculated that you would have to win something like a hundred championships to do it ‘naturally’.

Well, well, well. Reading through the article, it seems that EA has backed down. I don’t know if it’s enough for the people who want to buy the game/bought the game, but at least understood that what they did was not cool. So very not cool.

Some content creators were really upset, too, because they promoted the game and played a demo of it that did not have microtransactions in it. In other words, EA knew what they were doing was shady, and they deliberately hid it forom the very people they were depending on to promote their game.

Which is astoundingly short-sighted. Content creators can generate so much good will for your game–or, by contrast, call for their followers to ‘play, not pay’–which one content creator did in response to the news of the microtransactions. Also, it wasn’t as if EA could have hidden it for very long–and, indeed, the outcry was swift and vicious. The reviews on Steam are mostly negative (we’ll see how that changes with the new news from EA), and all of them are clear about the fact that it’s because of the greed and not the gameplay. Most people think the actual gameplay is great.


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Indie games, physical discs, and why I should care (as a PC gamer)

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I have spontaneously added a new tag–gaming hell. That’s because gaming is hell right now. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. Some of it is out of the control of anyone in the industry–such as AI driving up the prices of RAM (long story, don’t want to talk about it) so that new consolse/PCs are going to be absolutely ridiculous in prices. I was thinking of buying a new PC a year ago, but I decided to wait it out beacuse graphic cards were already outrageous (because of tariffs), and I was hoping things would calm down.

Oh wait. At the end of the last post, I was talking about a game that came out yesterday that I so wanted to like (after talking about it in a previous post). I don’t know why I’m being so coy about it. It’s Moonlight Peaks (Little Chicken Game Company). I had my eye on it from when I first heard of it–when was that? Was it the Wholesome Games Direct in February? Was there even one in February? Anyway, it was a vampire farming sim. Yeah, you heard that right. OK, it’s not exactly a farming sim, but there is farming in it. And romance. And other life sim stuff.

You will forgive me if I was reminded of another game that was similar to it. One that I played the shit out of, had a chibi-ish style to it, too (well, more cartoony than chibi, but reminiscent of), and was a farming sim. It’s called, Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock), and I enjoyed it so much, I platated it. Here is the post I wrote about it for my game of the year awards last year.

I played it for several dozes hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have written many posts about what I loved and didn’tt like about the game, so I won’t belabor the point. I will say that I really loved the heart of the game, the fact that it incorporated magic into it, and how much diversity was in it.

Quite frankly, I was looking for something to replicate that feeling. I like a good sim, but I’m quite picky about what works and doesn’t work for me. I was really hoping this game would scratch that itch because on paper, it should be right up my alley. You’re a vamp who runs away from home and into a community filled with discord and strife? And you have to find a way to make the warring factions make nice (I’m assuming). There are werewolves, vampires, and other manners of fae (I think), which is great for me. I love that shit.

What I’m trying to say is that there was everything that I liked in this game. A farming/life sim. Magic and fantastical creatures. Not the chibi look, but I can grit my teeth and deal with that. Benig a vamp! I love vampires. I should have been all over that. But I just wasn’t.


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