Devs need to ask themselves “is this cool? Is this fun?” Nothing else matters.
My two cents is that, once corporate America realized how profitable games were they immediately set about flipping studios into high achieving good girls and boys clubs with the “right” people in positions of power. There is so much unnecessary political bullshit at some game companies that dev’s hate but are afraid to speak up about.
It was the HR’ification of game studios overseen by MBA’s that went to school to learn how to do business good based on what good business was 10 to 20 years ago.
The talent is still out there, cool stuff is being made but it’s almost like it has to escape the corporate tractor beam like a fleeing millennium falcon without getting blown to shreds by lawyers and assholes in tie fighters.
That's how I think most everything's gone - the people who actually knew what they were doing were drummed out by corporate stiffs, bean counters, and HR personnel, so the only people left are hylics that care about making money and very little else (and, apparently, they aren't very good at that, either. Looking at you, Ubisoft). I understand why devs are afraid to speak out - I would be too - but they're only biding their time until they inevitably fall on the wrong side of the dividing line. It's a sad state of affairs but I think it was mostly inevitable when video games became the most profitable form of entertainment circa 2007 or so; the parasites were always going to come en masse.
It's weird to me that "make games that are fun to play" is so difficult for western developers. Pleasing the customer is the first job of any business, but these studios and the suits who run them hate their own customers. An upcoming swimsuit pack for Marvel Rivals was just leaked, and I can hear people throwing money at their screens right now. Meanwhile my husband has been watching every streamer with an opinion on the new version of Marathon, and it's a big fat "meh". Even my daughter said, "If I want to play a weird infested cyborg, I'll play Warframe, because at least they're cool to look at."
"It's weird to me that "make games that are fun to play" is so difficult for western developers. Pleasing the customer is the first job of any business"
That assumes you're treating these games as primarily consumer products rather than works of art, though. I get what you're saying, but I also can't help feel this line of thinking can quickly justify all kinds of lowest common denominator slippery slopes.
This has also been a hobby horse of mine for a long time, but I'm not sure I agree a game should always and necessarily be fun to play. You don't tend to see this line of argument in other cultural fields. Ie., would anyone argue movies should always be fun to watch, or that every book should be fun to read? And to tie in with my comment about WoW above, compare how Blizzard keeps streamlining most of the friction and "pushback" from the game world out of it, in the name of convenience and "fun". I think there's something to be said for a certain level of friction to overcome, even in entertainment.
I don't disagree with you point, but I think there's a happy medium between an end product that's equally appealing to consumer and artistically satisfying to creators. I think Star Wars is a good example. If, say, Disney was going to make Star Wars content that appealed to what the consumers wanted, they'd be pumping out nothing but memberberry sludge, and that would objectively not be good. The right course of action would be to provide something new and unexpected that audiences didn't even know they wanted, but instead, they go the exact opposite direction and only produce self-gratifying material that's so over-indulgently for the creators that it comes off as masturbatory (example: look at how pleased and smug the cast and crew of the Acolyte were, and how viscerally angry they were when people didn't like it). And while I'm all for artists making art for themelves, Star Wars isn't just an artistic exercise for the sake of the craft; it is a business and it is there to make money, provide the service of being entertaining, so on and so forth. Like I said, it's really all about moderation, which it seems no major player in the entertainment industry in any form or fashion seems to comprehend.
Part of the reason that MOBAs tend to have healthy esports scenes compared to anything else is because the competitive game is the exact same as the casual game. To use two valve games as examples: in TF2, the usual competitive format of 6v6 with rigid class, map, and item restrictions is wildly different from the 12v12 free for all that most people experience; in DOTA, the game is 5v5 on the same map and the same hero pool no matter if you're playing with low prio shitters or competing for a chunk of that $40 million International prize pool
FYI, the PUMP Act passed in 2022 requires most employers to provide a lactation room, break time, and place to store breast milk. Many companies were doing it even when it wasn’t legally required.
But yeah, I’m one of the players that switched from OW to Marvel Rivals, and it not being balanced competitively makes it much more fun!
I'm learning more about lactation and the regulations around breastfeeding/nursing than I ever anticipated but I'm glad that at least that's one biological blindspot I'm more educated on. Like I said I genuinely had no idea how it worked so whenever I heard about having "designated nursing rooms" at places like airports, it seemed a bit weird but it makes sense now.
That being said, I'm glad I'm not the only one (I knew I wasn't but still). I haven't had the time to play it recently but I'm looking forward to hopping on and seeing the new content soon. It really does remind me of early OW.
Huh. Lately I've been drawn back into WoW stuff and tried out some private servers, after not playing the game since 2009. I've been wondering where all the forced diversity stuff was at Blizzard, since the Warcraft universe didn't seem to be crammed to the gills with it, unlike most other things in the fantasy-RPG-nerd space. Apparently it was in Overwatch instead all along. (That said, I haven't at all kept up with modern Warcraft or Diablo, so if they've put Thrall in a wheelchair and made Jaina P. fashionably non-binary or something I might have missed it)
Anyway, I think the e-sports angle and the casual vs competitives dichotomy you're setting up is what interests me the most here. Personally I'm of two minds about the whole thing. I do see your criticism that it might be too much to claim playing video games is the same as "real" athleticism. On the other hand, there is some serious skill and dedication involved, and would you say chess isn't a "proper" sport even if it's not physically arduous? Same with casuals vs competition: does it have to be zero sum? Or: are you saying balance is necessary a detriment to less intense players enjoying the game?
It does remind me of an article about Pillars of Eternity and Baldur's Gate, where the writer talked about how the focus on balance and streamlining in PoE made for a theoretically "better" game, but also that removing a lot of the wacky and wildly overpowered stuff from BG made it lose some of the fun and charm. Then again, it's obviously different with a single-player game.
I don't know if it's "forced diversity", per say, but Sylvanas did become, like, the de facto hinge upon which three different expansions turned and was inarguably the single most important person in the WoW universe, but I think that was due to the writer's room at Blizzard having a hard-on for her (look up the Nathanos controversy if you want to see what I mean) and not DEI politicking to make her the annointed #GirlBoss God-Queen of Azeroth. Still, I know people who took it that way.
As for e-sports, I won't deny that there's an almost inhuman level of dedication and demonstrable skill that it takes to compete. Personally, would I consider chess a sport? Not in a conventional sense, but since it is technically classified as such, I don't have much ground to stand on. That's not to say that, even if there's no physicality involved in chess, it shouldn't be taken seriously or respected as a game or competition. I'd say the same thing about e-sports, but the dividing line between that and chess or any other "professional" level game-sport like poker or go is that, in those games, they're being played as intended or stripped of what makes them interesting/challenging. No chess player would ever say, "The Queen is OP so it needs to be banned", nor is a poker player going to call for certain hands to be outlawed for one reason or another. On the other hand, e-sports players don't engage with the game as it's meant to be played; many of them effectively rewrite the rules to make it "fair", which, in my humble opinion, is just stupid. For instance, if a character is OP, in e-sports the community will just bitch about it until it's changed to their liking, when in a real, serious competition, good players would just actually play the game as it is and develop new strategies and tactics to get around whatever the issue their having is. Like, if you have to have a certain character banned from the roster because they're OP and you can't beat them, that just means you probably aren't as good as you think you are, and you need a handicap to compete.
Now, this wouldn't be a zero sum situation or even a problem if these changes made to appease e-sports/competitive players didn't effect the rest of the game. A good example is Super Smash Bros, which is one of the most laughable examples of e-sports; when they play competitively, they can turn off certain stages, items, or ban whatever characters in the settings for tournaments, but it doesn't fundamentally alter the game for anyone else. This was not the case for Overwatch, where even casual game modes were altered outright for competitive players. There's nothing inherently wrong with having an e-sports scene, especially for games which cater to them to begin with (most MOBA type games cater to an audience that just kind of expects that high level of play), but with a game that's more open to casuals like Overwatch, it was a huge mistake to cater to one side over the other since casual players far outnumbered those interested in Overwatch as an e-sport. Really, the issue could have been handled by implementing changes to Competitive game modes and leaving the casual game modes untouched, or even just allowing private servers (which they did, albeit too little too late). Also, to touch on the balancing issue, balance was something Overwatch desperately needed for the benefit of both parties, but they could never figure out how to do it in a way that would please anyone. Part of the problem is that even the competitive side of the playerbase was never in uniform agreement about what they wanted, so it resulted in a constant shifting of power between characters that dicked them over as much as it did the casual players. I think 90% of the issue with Overwatch is that the development team is such a mess that they really can't do anything right, and the reason Overwatch League failed while other e-sports leagues flourished was simply because the game's meta was almost always in flux in such a way that made it difficult even for "professional" players to keep track of.
Of course, I am, as I said, extremely biased against e-sports because of how the scene effected people very close to me. I am not exaggerating when I say I've seen it ruin lives. I didn't like just about anyone I met while engaging with it, and everything about the whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. Had I a different experience, I doubt I'd be so overly critical of it as a base concept. I'd like to write an article about it at some point but I think it'd come off as an emotional, unhinged, and way-too-personal screed that ultimately wouldn't be fair to a large portion of the community who really didn't do anything wrong except for take video games a little too seriously, which in and of itself isn't a sin. That kind of virtriolic bile that has nothing more to say than just I HATE THING is not really the type of content I want to write.
To be honest, I've always hated pretty much everything about Sylvanas and the Forsaken in WoW, from day one. I'm vaguely aware that they've centered a lot of modern storylines around her and made her even more of a comically evil jerk (I think?), but I don't really feel any pressing need to look up the details, haha. Like you said, though, it felt more like dumb storytelling and maybe a case of Mary Sue-itis than the dreaded W word as such.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. Personal bias is of course fair, and I'm glad you're above making that kind of "hate content". And of course, I'm not denying that there's probably a lot of unhealthy behaviors in many e-sports scenes. (Then again, that's probably true for conventional sports too.)
"Like, if you have to have a certain character banned from the roster because they're OP and you can't beat them, that just means you probably aren't as good as you think you are, and you need a handicap to compete."
I think this is the real interesting crux point. Ie., how was the game "intended" to be played, and can that vision evolve on the devs' part as time goes on? Also ties in with the good old "do we want randomness in our competition, and if so, how much?" angle. IIRC, most of the elements the hardcores ban in Smash Bros is to reduce randomness in favor of skill, so they can turn what's a glorified party game into a competitive one.
Or to come at it from a slightly different tack: I agree that "play around it" can be a healthier attitude, but sometimes a game element is just plain overpowered too. I guess for me it comes down to whether banning it actually increases the skill ceiling and/or variety of the metagame as a whole, regardless of whether it can technically be played around.
Actually, it was Apendzki, but I guess the four consonants in a row scared the customs agent at Ellis Island so it had to be amended.
Fun fact, though: that is actually what happened to my great-grandfather when he came through, except we don't know what his actual last name was because he would never tell anyone, which effectively stops any familial research into that side of the family. I like to think he was a disaffected noble of the time but in all reality he was probably a penniless shitkicker like most of the immigrants of the time.
I doubt it but I think if one comes, as I suspect it will, then it will be considered one of the first of many dominos. I don't think we'll see a total collapse because of the indie scene and relatively low accessibility of making games that just weren't there in the 80's, and that side will keep on keeping on, but I could see a blow out in the upper-echelons that act as an extinction level event of big publishers and developers.
Oh definitely the crash will be different. That physical distribution is no longer a barrier to entry means something will survive. (Heck you play a lot of card games now free in your browser.)
But AAA gaming… well you put it perfectly, extinction level event. And if that happens, you think Concord can take the crown? A strong fight it should be at least. ;)
Given that cataclysmic failures have become the norm in the Triple A world I have a feeling something soon is going to one-up Concord. It will indeed be difficult, but it'll happen.
Another aspect here is that triple-A games are just so complex, unwieldy and expensive to make these days. And also apparently can't be made without ruining the rank and file devs' lives via crunch. So it looks like the current model isn't sustainable anyway. I wish we could get mid-tier games back.
I tried to like Ryan North's Squirrel Girl comic. Lord I tried.
I remember liking Qwantz. I think North is an incredibly intelligent fellow, even though I am philosophically opposed to him in every way. I think there are types of comics he can do well.
But between the wokeness, the computer science jokes/plot elements, and the insufferable twee flavoring sprinkled over the whole thing (and yeah, Henderson's art was simply not what I was looking for in a superhero comic).... I had to give up.
(While I'm at it, there's nothing inherent in Squirrel Girl's character that necessitates a computer science degree. Clearly North was just shoehorning his own obsession in there. I mean, look, in a world where even Spiderman has the know-how to program a robot, who would actually care about real-life computer science? Not me, for one.)
In fact, I am just now realizing that it left me with a distaste for the character. I see that picture you embedded in your piece, and I get worried that she's about to start talking to me about programming languages.
Computer science? That's just weird. I've never read any of those comics, but if you're going to have a character like that, why would you ever make her anything other than a biologist or ecologist?
I'm just surprised you could stomach the art, more than anything. It's kind of amazing they could mess up a joke character that badly, but the ineptitude of Marvel's writers is truly as fathomless as the void of space. Ryan North was always overrated, in my opinion; I never saw the humor in anything he's worked on, but I think I might have been too young for Qwantz when it was a thing and it just never stuck. To be fair I also only know him from the Adventure Time comics that my friend who was really into AT got me to read and they were just... okay?
Nothing about that combination, North and Adventure Time, sounds like it would be fun for me. The lurking melancholy of AT combined with North's spergy intellectualism? I'll pass.
Also, I tried to read "Machine of Death" years back, when I had the flu, and that was the wrong choice. I got so depressed that I had to put it down, and never went back.
Devs need to ask themselves “is this cool? Is this fun?” Nothing else matters.
My two cents is that, once corporate America realized how profitable games were they immediately set about flipping studios into high achieving good girls and boys clubs with the “right” people in positions of power. There is so much unnecessary political bullshit at some game companies that dev’s hate but are afraid to speak up about.
It was the HR’ification of game studios overseen by MBA’s that went to school to learn how to do business good based on what good business was 10 to 20 years ago.
The talent is still out there, cool stuff is being made but it’s almost like it has to escape the corporate tractor beam like a fleeing millennium falcon without getting blown to shreds by lawyers and assholes in tie fighters.
That's how I think most everything's gone - the people who actually knew what they were doing were drummed out by corporate stiffs, bean counters, and HR personnel, so the only people left are hylics that care about making money and very little else (and, apparently, they aren't very good at that, either. Looking at you, Ubisoft). I understand why devs are afraid to speak out - I would be too - but they're only biding their time until they inevitably fall on the wrong side of the dividing line. It's a sad state of affairs but I think it was mostly inevitable when video games became the most profitable form of entertainment circa 2007 or so; the parasites were always going to come en masse.
It's weird to me that "make games that are fun to play" is so difficult for western developers. Pleasing the customer is the first job of any business, but these studios and the suits who run them hate their own customers. An upcoming swimsuit pack for Marvel Rivals was just leaked, and I can hear people throwing money at their screens right now. Meanwhile my husband has been watching every streamer with an opinion on the new version of Marathon, and it's a big fat "meh". Even my daughter said, "If I want to play a weird infested cyborg, I'll play Warframe, because at least they're cool to look at."
Once they release those swimsuit skins it's going to be all over for Overwatch, I just know it. It'll be a literal goon-pocalypse.
"It's weird to me that "make games that are fun to play" is so difficult for western developers. Pleasing the customer is the first job of any business"
That assumes you're treating these games as primarily consumer products rather than works of art, though. I get what you're saying, but I also can't help feel this line of thinking can quickly justify all kinds of lowest common denominator slippery slopes.
This has also been a hobby horse of mine for a long time, but I'm not sure I agree a game should always and necessarily be fun to play. You don't tend to see this line of argument in other cultural fields. Ie., would anyone argue movies should always be fun to watch, or that every book should be fun to read? And to tie in with my comment about WoW above, compare how Blizzard keeps streamlining most of the friction and "pushback" from the game world out of it, in the name of convenience and "fun". I think there's something to be said for a certain level of friction to overcome, even in entertainment.
I don't disagree with you point, but I think there's a happy medium between an end product that's equally appealing to consumer and artistically satisfying to creators. I think Star Wars is a good example. If, say, Disney was going to make Star Wars content that appealed to what the consumers wanted, they'd be pumping out nothing but memberberry sludge, and that would objectively not be good. The right course of action would be to provide something new and unexpected that audiences didn't even know they wanted, but instead, they go the exact opposite direction and only produce self-gratifying material that's so over-indulgently for the creators that it comes off as masturbatory (example: look at how pleased and smug the cast and crew of the Acolyte were, and how viscerally angry they were when people didn't like it). And while I'm all for artists making art for themelves, Star Wars isn't just an artistic exercise for the sake of the craft; it is a business and it is there to make money, provide the service of being entertaining, so on and so forth. Like I said, it's really all about moderation, which it seems no major player in the entertainment industry in any form or fashion seems to comprehend.
Part of the reason that MOBAs tend to have healthy esports scenes compared to anything else is because the competitive game is the exact same as the casual game. To use two valve games as examples: in TF2, the usual competitive format of 6v6 with rigid class, map, and item restrictions is wildly different from the 12v12 free for all that most people experience; in DOTA, the game is 5v5 on the same map and the same hero pool no matter if you're playing with low prio shitters or competing for a chunk of that $40 million International prize pool
Now we've also offshored our good game design to China.
Smdh we can't do anything in this country ourselves anymore.
FYI, the PUMP Act passed in 2022 requires most employers to provide a lactation room, break time, and place to store breast milk. Many companies were doing it even when it wasn’t legally required.
But yeah, I’m one of the players that switched from OW to Marvel Rivals, and it not being balanced competitively makes it much more fun!
I'm learning more about lactation and the regulations around breastfeeding/nursing than I ever anticipated but I'm glad that at least that's one biological blindspot I'm more educated on. Like I said I genuinely had no idea how it worked so whenever I heard about having "designated nursing rooms" at places like airports, it seemed a bit weird but it makes sense now.
That being said, I'm glad I'm not the only one (I knew I wasn't but still). I haven't had the time to play it recently but I'm looking forward to hopping on and seeing the new content soon. It really does remind me of early OW.
Huh. Lately I've been drawn back into WoW stuff and tried out some private servers, after not playing the game since 2009. I've been wondering where all the forced diversity stuff was at Blizzard, since the Warcraft universe didn't seem to be crammed to the gills with it, unlike most other things in the fantasy-RPG-nerd space. Apparently it was in Overwatch instead all along. (That said, I haven't at all kept up with modern Warcraft or Diablo, so if they've put Thrall in a wheelchair and made Jaina P. fashionably non-binary or something I might have missed it)
Anyway, I think the e-sports angle and the casual vs competitives dichotomy you're setting up is what interests me the most here. Personally I'm of two minds about the whole thing. I do see your criticism that it might be too much to claim playing video games is the same as "real" athleticism. On the other hand, there is some serious skill and dedication involved, and would you say chess isn't a "proper" sport even if it's not physically arduous? Same with casuals vs competition: does it have to be zero sum? Or: are you saying balance is necessary a detriment to less intense players enjoying the game?
It does remind me of an article about Pillars of Eternity and Baldur's Gate, where the writer talked about how the focus on balance and streamlining in PoE made for a theoretically "better" game, but also that removing a lot of the wacky and wildly overpowered stuff from BG made it lose some of the fun and charm. Then again, it's obviously different with a single-player game.
I don't know if it's "forced diversity", per say, but Sylvanas did become, like, the de facto hinge upon which three different expansions turned and was inarguably the single most important person in the WoW universe, but I think that was due to the writer's room at Blizzard having a hard-on for her (look up the Nathanos controversy if you want to see what I mean) and not DEI politicking to make her the annointed #GirlBoss God-Queen of Azeroth. Still, I know people who took it that way.
As for e-sports, I won't deny that there's an almost inhuman level of dedication and demonstrable skill that it takes to compete. Personally, would I consider chess a sport? Not in a conventional sense, but since it is technically classified as such, I don't have much ground to stand on. That's not to say that, even if there's no physicality involved in chess, it shouldn't be taken seriously or respected as a game or competition. I'd say the same thing about e-sports, but the dividing line between that and chess or any other "professional" level game-sport like poker or go is that, in those games, they're being played as intended or stripped of what makes them interesting/challenging. No chess player would ever say, "The Queen is OP so it needs to be banned", nor is a poker player going to call for certain hands to be outlawed for one reason or another. On the other hand, e-sports players don't engage with the game as it's meant to be played; many of them effectively rewrite the rules to make it "fair", which, in my humble opinion, is just stupid. For instance, if a character is OP, in e-sports the community will just bitch about it until it's changed to their liking, when in a real, serious competition, good players would just actually play the game as it is and develop new strategies and tactics to get around whatever the issue their having is. Like, if you have to have a certain character banned from the roster because they're OP and you can't beat them, that just means you probably aren't as good as you think you are, and you need a handicap to compete.
Now, this wouldn't be a zero sum situation or even a problem if these changes made to appease e-sports/competitive players didn't effect the rest of the game. A good example is Super Smash Bros, which is one of the most laughable examples of e-sports; when they play competitively, they can turn off certain stages, items, or ban whatever characters in the settings for tournaments, but it doesn't fundamentally alter the game for anyone else. This was not the case for Overwatch, where even casual game modes were altered outright for competitive players. There's nothing inherently wrong with having an e-sports scene, especially for games which cater to them to begin with (most MOBA type games cater to an audience that just kind of expects that high level of play), but with a game that's more open to casuals like Overwatch, it was a huge mistake to cater to one side over the other since casual players far outnumbered those interested in Overwatch as an e-sport. Really, the issue could have been handled by implementing changes to Competitive game modes and leaving the casual game modes untouched, or even just allowing private servers (which they did, albeit too little too late). Also, to touch on the balancing issue, balance was something Overwatch desperately needed for the benefit of both parties, but they could never figure out how to do it in a way that would please anyone. Part of the problem is that even the competitive side of the playerbase was never in uniform agreement about what they wanted, so it resulted in a constant shifting of power between characters that dicked them over as much as it did the casual players. I think 90% of the issue with Overwatch is that the development team is such a mess that they really can't do anything right, and the reason Overwatch League failed while other e-sports leagues flourished was simply because the game's meta was almost always in flux in such a way that made it difficult even for "professional" players to keep track of.
Of course, I am, as I said, extremely biased against e-sports because of how the scene effected people very close to me. I am not exaggerating when I say I've seen it ruin lives. I didn't like just about anyone I met while engaging with it, and everything about the whole thing just left a bad taste in my mouth. Had I a different experience, I doubt I'd be so overly critical of it as a base concept. I'd like to write an article about it at some point but I think it'd come off as an emotional, unhinged, and way-too-personal screed that ultimately wouldn't be fair to a large portion of the community who really didn't do anything wrong except for take video games a little too seriously, which in and of itself isn't a sin. That kind of virtriolic bile that has nothing more to say than just I HATE THING is not really the type of content I want to write.
To be honest, I've always hated pretty much everything about Sylvanas and the Forsaken in WoW, from day one. I'm vaguely aware that they've centered a lot of modern storylines around her and made her even more of a comically evil jerk (I think?), but I don't really feel any pressing need to look up the details, haha. Like you said, though, it felt more like dumb storytelling and maybe a case of Mary Sue-itis than the dreaded W word as such.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply. Personal bias is of course fair, and I'm glad you're above making that kind of "hate content". And of course, I'm not denying that there's probably a lot of unhealthy behaviors in many e-sports scenes. (Then again, that's probably true for conventional sports too.)
"Like, if you have to have a certain character banned from the roster because they're OP and you can't beat them, that just means you probably aren't as good as you think you are, and you need a handicap to compete."
I think this is the real interesting crux point. Ie., how was the game "intended" to be played, and can that vision evolve on the devs' part as time goes on? Also ties in with the good old "do we want randomness in our competition, and if so, how much?" angle. IIRC, most of the elements the hardcores ban in Smash Bros is to reduce randomness in favor of skill, so they can turn what's a glorified party game into a competitive one.
Or to come at it from a slightly different tack: I agree that "play around it" can be a healthier attitude, but sometimes a game element is just plain overpowered too. I guess for me it comes down to whether banning it actually increases the skill ceiling and/or variety of the metagame as a whole, regardless of whether it can technically be played around.
Offensive and problematic! That's not how you spell "kielbasa"!
I will concede to this sin because I've eaten enough of them throughout my life and patrilinearly Polish that I really should have known that.
Oh of course, I should have guessed that! Your surname is clearly the Americanized form of Apanowicz.
Actually, it was Apendzki, but I guess the four consonants in a row scared the customs agent at Ellis Island so it had to be amended.
Fun fact, though: that is actually what happened to my great-grandfather when he came through, except we don't know what his actual last name was because he would never tell anyone, which effectively stops any familial research into that side of the family. I like to think he was a disaffected noble of the time but in all reality he was probably a penniless shitkicker like most of the immigrants of the time.
Haha! Grandpa, what did they call you back in the old country?
They called me mind your own damn buiznitzky!
I actually wonder if Concord is going to lead to another VG crash. The. It really will contend with E.T.
I doubt it but I think if one comes, as I suspect it will, then it will be considered one of the first of many dominos. I don't think we'll see a total collapse because of the indie scene and relatively low accessibility of making games that just weren't there in the 80's, and that side will keep on keeping on, but I could see a blow out in the upper-echelons that act as an extinction level event of big publishers and developers.
Oh definitely the crash will be different. That physical distribution is no longer a barrier to entry means something will survive. (Heck you play a lot of card games now free in your browser.)
But AAA gaming… well you put it perfectly, extinction level event. And if that happens, you think Concord can take the crown? A strong fight it should be at least. ;)
Given that cataclysmic failures have become the norm in the Triple A world I have a feeling something soon is going to one-up Concord. It will indeed be difficult, but it'll happen.
We'll always have Dustborn and Forspoken. But I don't think their budgets are that high and they didn't get an episode of an Amazon prime series.
Hm. What will be the next train wreck…
Another aspect here is that triple-A games are just so complex, unwieldy and expensive to make these days. And also apparently can't be made without ruining the rank and file devs' lives via crunch. So it looks like the current model isn't sustainable anyway. I wish we could get mid-tier games back.
I tried to like Ryan North's Squirrel Girl comic. Lord I tried.
I remember liking Qwantz. I think North is an incredibly intelligent fellow, even though I am philosophically opposed to him in every way. I think there are types of comics he can do well.
But between the wokeness, the computer science jokes/plot elements, and the insufferable twee flavoring sprinkled over the whole thing (and yeah, Henderson's art was simply not what I was looking for in a superhero comic).... I had to give up.
(While I'm at it, there's nothing inherent in Squirrel Girl's character that necessitates a computer science degree. Clearly North was just shoehorning his own obsession in there. I mean, look, in a world where even Spiderman has the know-how to program a robot, who would actually care about real-life computer science? Not me, for one.)
In fact, I am just now realizing that it left me with a distaste for the character. I see that picture you embedded in your piece, and I get worried that she's about to start talking to me about programming languages.
Computer science? That's just weird. I've never read any of those comics, but if you're going to have a character like that, why would you ever make her anything other than a biologist or ecologist?
Because she's super duper smart and computer science is what super duper smart people do, duh.
That would have made a lot more sense.
I'm just surprised you could stomach the art, more than anything. It's kind of amazing they could mess up a joke character that badly, but the ineptitude of Marvel's writers is truly as fathomless as the void of space. Ryan North was always overrated, in my opinion; I never saw the humor in anything he's worked on, but I think I might have been too young for Qwantz when it was a thing and it just never stuck. To be fair I also only know him from the Adventure Time comics that my friend who was really into AT got me to read and they were just... okay?
Nothing about that combination, North and Adventure Time, sounds like it would be fun for me. The lurking melancholy of AT combined with North's spergy intellectualism? I'll pass.
Also, I tried to read "Machine of Death" years back, when I had the flu, and that was the wrong choice. I got so depressed that I had to put it down, and never went back.