The word consumer is so demeaning…

I doubt they were trying to be complimentary.

Wasn’t one of the Witcher 3 expansions already either nominated or even a winner a few years back?

then ship to a nearby country that’s not under tariffs to finish the assembly and ship from there.

The wonders of arbitrage.

How the hell do you accidentally remove fog of war from a strategy game?

That is moronic to a level I didn’t expect from this, I can see why he left the negative review.

Fuck I hope not, Indiana Jones absolutely should not be a shooter.

Kind of a stupid decision to call something pre-currency and pre-codified laws “anarcho communist”.

It’d be like calling something born before animal life “vegan” because it doesn’t eat animals.

Technically correct, maybe, but very much missing the point of the label.

games that I really do care about and want to be able to experience on authentic hardware.

Crack the console then, ps2s have software cracks by now, and sideloading cartridges exist for a fair few portable consoles.

Basically the only one where you can’t really do it is the cartridge era stuff but those can be approximated with a decent emulator, a controller adapter and a CRT screen, if you’re willing to tolerate a bit of latency with output converters.

Games are fundamentally software, the hardware gives the experience but the cartridges/disks, with some exceptional cases aside, are literally just a delivery system and a means to maintain ownership.

It’s nice to have them for that feeling of tangible presence but realistically that’s never going to be more affordable the further we move from when they were made, but that doesn’t mean you can’t at least approximate playing on the hardware or straight up just do it.

they’re just screwing us out of possible remakes

Bro don’t make me like them T~T

Ayyy I know that reference. Good story that one.

People can be correct about something for the wrong reasons.

This guy is a bellend, there’s plenty of reasons to cheer on the demise of Ubisoft without having to be a “DEI is in the room with us” obsessive like Grummz, and ignoring that because it’s easier to call the people who don’t like you chuds shows a similar level of detachment from reality.

Ubisoft’s fuckups are too numerous to list, and the latest one was indeed too fall for a swindler who convinced them to try and sell one of the least marketable ideas in history, but the volume of sales lost is not in the same order of magnitude as the politically obsessed lunatics online on either side of this conversation, blaming them is like blaming sharks for all animal related deaths.

That would be quite smart of them tbh.

Yeah I mean, it’s got upsides and downsides, like everything. Unparalleled access means anyone can make something, which means a lot of things that have niche appeal can find their audience, etc.

It also means a lot of things without any appeal will be out there.

It’s not good or bad in itself but it can be impractical on the consumer side of the equation, and it makes even the remarkable stuff very likely to just disappear in the shuffle.

Sure, but the stock is tanking now, and the regulations are not on the books.

Like, I agree there needs to be an overhaul of a bunch of regulations regarding monopolies and such, but this doesn’t help analysing the current situation where they’re not in place.

That’s just generally all of media right now. We are at perhaps the highest level of accessibility for media creation we’ve ever been, but that means that any schmuck with a pair of thumbs and time to waste can make something.

High accessibility means abysmal signal/noise ratio, turns out.

You realise this isn’t make believe at all, right? Stocks are ownership.

If a stock dips low enough it’s possible to do what microsoft did with Activision Blizzard and buy out another company wholesale, for instance.

Speculation on the stock market isn’t the reason the market exists, it’s a side effect of its pricing mechanisms, the actual point of it is to gather money for companies and gather stake for buyers.

If a major company like Ubisoft keeps tanking, odds are you can look forward to another major buyout and merger which will make the already horribly oligopolistic game industry even smaller, which is not good for anyone involved.

The people who made the casting choice were told by Disney they couldn’t cast either, it was that or get replaced by someone else who would play ball.

It’s ridiculous to expect them to remove themselves from a multimillion dollar project that would get done anyway with or without them.

Eh, they weren’t happy about it but were caught between a rock and a hard place, I can sympathise.

The only one of these that is remotely acceptable, to me, is Tilda Swindon, because they explicitly detached themselves from the character to avoid getting shat on by the CCP for casting a Tibetan and from Americans for casting a Chinese person.

The others are all crap, IMO.

Every time a character is <color>washed we lose the chance to be exposed to global actors that would fit their profile.

Because it’s pressvertising.

Veilguard has had a year (at least) of relentless, shameless astroturfing, ever since BG3 got GOTY, because EA knows it’s not gonna be even close to competing with it and they (rightly) fear Veilguard will get shat on, especially since Bioware is on a 2 games abject failure streak with Andromeda and Anthem both failing horribly and Inquisition having at best a mixed reception with how buggy and repetitive it was at launch.

As a rule of thumb: if an article comes out before a game’s actual release, it’s positive about an aspect the game or franchise is known to be lacking in, and it sounds like John Oliver’s parody of a corporate shill? It’s pressvertising.

It’s access-for-coverage, a trading of favours that stays undisclosed because technically no money changed hands; however, in the past we’ve seen what happens to outlets that don’t kiss the ring and use the access to actually speak negatively of the product, or even neutrally, so we know there is an implicit (and explicit if you know the history of these dealings) pressure to be positive at any cost.

So in short: it’s a bad article pretending to analyse the content they have early access to when really they’re just advertising the game uncritically. It’s literally just source-washed marketing material.

Here’s to a multi-year long process to port the campaigns from BG1 and 2 into 3.