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this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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The most depressing thing I’ve seen related to this topic. A small team that worked incredibly hard were lucky enough to achieve the impossible, and now they watch without any control as it is taken from them, for no other reason than greed.
Due to unchecked neoliberal capitalism, big companies like Sony already cover so much of the developed markets, that they have no way to naturally grow more. So they are forced to squeeze more out of what they already have, as stagnation is not accepted in this hellish system.
The line must go up, whatever the cost!
Edit: damn, Sony actually listened
Including lying, controlling narratives, committing outright fraud, controlling the fate of companies through "consultants", changing the definition of Recession, killing of whistleblowers, killing of journalists who help whistleblowers, to name just a very short few.
This system blows, how many millenia does it fucking take to figure that out?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
-Upton Sinclair
I read The Jungle a few months ago and its aged so depressingly well. Nothing has changed, it was obvious what was happening long ago, but we've done nothing but watch it get worse.
"The Jungle" famously spurred large reforms. The FDA exists and has a lot of power because people were disgusted by what they read.
That's why you're reading a hundred-year-old book: it was influential.
But only on one topic. Yes the FDA was created in large part from outrage over food condtions described in the book. But that really is only one chapter of the text, the majority of it deals with the exploration of workers in ALL sorts of industries (not just food), how preadatory home loans lead to finical ruins, how voting systems are rigged and how our policing system only produces more experienced criminals, not reform.
The last 2-3 chapters are explicitly socialist talking points that are still being said, for good reason, today. If the book was as influential as Sinclair wanted it to be, then we would've seen FAR FAR FAR more than the FDA.
I mean, heck, reread the passage I copied in. It's not really about food.
My high school English class (in the Deep South) explicitly left those chapters out of our study of The Jungle lol.
We haven't done nothing. There's Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There's loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don't usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it's far too late to save it.
Do you have any links at hand for all that?
If not, I will try to add find and them to this chain for future reference.
Oh thanks for reminding me!
Anark | Liberation in Action Playlist
It used to be really hard to give a good list of these sorts of movements, but this series by Anark just puts it all in one place.
The first video is him just reading off a list, but this is the list in written form, which I find much easier to parse: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W1wWjWNXhvHjMzzyxT5z5Es_kE6xmTYSadGSJfuVtpE/edit#heading=h.p04t775v871g
The next few videos are deeper dives into some of these, and the series is ongoing, so this playlist link should stay current as he releases more.
The lesson we learn here is that you don't take money from the mob.
Don't go public with youre company.
Don't get involved with the devil.
Said this in another thread :
First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.
Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…
So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.
Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.
I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.
This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.
What does it matter if the game "launches successfully" if it doesn't sustain itself? They knew theyd likely lose their players but they were hoping theyd be special - this game is not successful in the end.
Your entire argument boils down to: they wouldn't have been able to cheat us into thinking this was a good game without sony. If theyre going to take my money and kill the game anyway, it would have been better to not make it at all. That's what thousands of indie devs have to contend with every day.
I think his argument comes down to, don't hate the playa, hate the game. Far better for them to have made the game, as it clearly is a good game. The publisher coming in and shitting all over everything is what makes the situation bad. Hopefully, this can serve as more inspiration for indie devs (who do make most of my fav games) and maybe lead to more studios not accepting Sony as a publisher. I can't fault Arrowhead for wanting to make what they love, but I can hope Sony burns to the ground never to rise again.
You're talking like this was premeditated by the development studio......is that really the case?
I agree with you that they most likely needed the money to do what they wanted to do at that scale.
But I think my point still stands. Because it is a deal with the devil in the most literal sense that is possible. You get to your goal faster, easier or at all but in the end you have to ask yourself if the price you paid for that was worth it when the devil comes collecting. That is the moral of the fictional Storys, isn't it?
But to add to this. I think we, as consumers, aren't completely innocent either. Buying only the best looking, 1000 hours, other buzzword games. This undeniably sends a message to indie devs which can lead to people making self harming decisions.
One could argue that we got groomed to want that. And I do. All those blockbuster-games that were made under gruesome conditions are unsustainable. But we didn't knew that. We thought that they were the new normal.
But now we know better. This is just normal if you walk over corpses to get to your goal. And if we want developers that value our time and mental health, then we should value developers time and mental health in return.
Which means showing them that we will buy games that are not those 10 million dollar productions. And that we will measure the quality of the game compared to the resources that went into that particular game and not compared to a game that had an unholy amount of resources to burn through.
In the end we need to find a way to cut out all the rich people who came into the gaming industry as it broke into mainstream, who are throwing their weight/money around and bully everybody into submission.
And that needs strength of character. It means not buying the new shiny thing that we have seen an add for the hundredth time today, no matter how much we want that. It means not taking that deal which will make that problem go away quicker.
If gaming has taught us anything, it is how to prevail against overwhelming forces. That it takes compassion, companionship, a bit of anger and sacrifices.
If we haven't learned that, why the fuck are we even playing.
So many threads about Hello Games (No Man's Sky) and other Sony backed titles being "victims". They knew what they were doing,
Highly recommend the Internet Historian video about no man's sky.
Also that game is really awesome now
KSP's original team must feel the same way
There are a lot of console exclusives that I like. I think an argument can be made that companies like Sony and Microsoft can add funding and support to make games better, sacrificing profits for console value.
With Xbox failing for another console, putting out half-baked products, and buying IPs instead of creating new ones, I'm worried that Sony will just start maximizing profits.
Sony brought out a console that was almost impossible to buy and has no games. Now they try to inflate their numbers by forcing people to make psn accounts. Fuck them. Not that i ever planned to buy a playstation, but i make sure to stay away from everything sony related
You were right though. And it’s only because we were all so furious about what they were doing and raised such a fuss about it that they decided to renege on that.
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929