Those are good ideas, thanks. Like I said he’s got lots of good people around him, the university is awesome, they’ve been having workshops for the foreign students to kind of keep everyone up to date and supported. That part is great. But I really don’t like where this is going.
My brother is a post-grad scholarship student at an extremely prestigious and extremely left-leaning university in the US. He is terrified. I am terrified for him. He wants to come home, but doesn’t want to throw away everything he’s worked his whole academic life to achieve. He is in a safe place, surrounded by sensible people, but we all know they will become targets of this fascist regime probably sooner rather than later and I can’t stop picturing how I think that is probably going to go.
Nvidia: It’s the user’s fault! It’s the software! It’s the OEMs! It’s the adapters! It’s the power supplies! It’s the electricity company! It’s the weather! It’s the phase of the moon! Blame everyone but ourselves!
For the more visual learners among us, this video just came out which also discusses fascism and dictatorship in a very accessible and intelligent way.
5 years in the future: “Split Fiction 2’s Josef Fares says he ‘understands why people like to hate EA’ after development nightmare”
It’s not that weird. What they’re aiming to avoid is the situation where a developer does a bait-and-switch replacement of the original, advertised game concept to chase a new demographic with new money. If you have never experienced this, count yourself lucky. A shady developer can advertise/sell a great concept in some niche like a compelling roguelike, survival crafting game or even a cozy and artistic decorating game, and actually create a decent game with lots of potential… at first. And then when it’s collected a bunch of genuine good reviews and they realize either it’s harder than they thought to make, or it’s not making the cash flow they expected and not likely to, literally just replace the whole product, product page, everything with some generic shoot-em-up battle royale asset flip as an “upgrade” and alienate the early buyers to get a whole new audience to throw money at them until they realize the reviews are for what’s essentially a totally different game before it crashes into mostly-negative territory. You might not think something this egregious ever really happens, but it does, especially in the horrible land of Crowdfunding/Early Access.
The first example I can remember that happened to me personally was called “Star Forge” not to be confused with the more recent board game adaption of the same name. The linked post is about the internal development drama behind the scenes, but the bait-and-switch bullshit happened years ago and it went sideways very quickly and was eventually pulled from the store never to be seen again.
Keep in mind that “those games” also have decades of content added through expansions and mods, it’s very difficult to separate the true base games from what they have become today, in fact a lot of them were relatively simplistic and shallow in their very first releases too. Go play the first version of one of the Sims games with no expansions and tell me if you’re having a good experience with deep and interesting mechanics for your Sims, knowing what you know now of what the Sims are capable of.
We are comparing a game in its infancy to an established giant, of course it will pale in comparison… for now, and for quite some time. The question is whether it will catch up, because if it does, it’s going to become something very, very big. Yes that’s a big if, but it’s an if worth waiting for.