This has been a universal problem with any MMO game that tries to have some kind of a resource grind/time sink. Even if you can manage to stop players from botting it, you can’t stop players from third world countries selling their time to players in first world countries. The game economy quickly becomes a reflection of real world capitalism that most of its players were trying to escape.
It feels like there’s a lot of potential here. One of the most loved colony sims, Dwarf Fortress, thrives on this concept of emergent behavior: yes, the descriptions of the individual characters, their motivations and backstories does have a sort of hollow, procedural generation to them. But the stories they enable, the wacky quirks like an engraver going nuts putting up murals to cheese on everyone’s walls, the fact that when you get an unlikely hero or battle outcome it isn’t the author’s giving them destiny but a true random fluke, the unexpected disaster of opening an unseen water or lava flow or awakening some ancient evil - that can create a wonderful sandbox where players encounter and create their own stories.
There’s a balance in story telling, especially interactive story telling, between romanticism and realism. Between what we want to happen, and what actually happens. And sometimes, oftentimes, it’s the things we didn’t want to happen that make a story more compelling and memorable.
Hit a military target. No one got super outraged when terrorists blew up the Cole. But when they took out 3k civilians on 9-11, or about 1.5k civilians on 10-7, they made a lot of normally anti-war people very angry and willing to look away while their military made horrible mass casualties as a response.
So, the problem is if you kill a few angry people, they all have at least 2 friends/family members, and therefore you create twice as many angry people as you destroy. The only way killing angry people actually reduces the number of angry people is in fact genocide. But if you’re willing to commit genocide, you have to stop and ask yourself if maybe, you’re the angry person.
I had a good laugh when I noticed this tag on steam yesterday.
I think the reality is, “boomer” as a term is here to stay and a moving target: as gen x ages into 40+, they’ll become boomers. One day when gen Z becomes old, they’ll be called boomers. At least here, there’s a fun double meaning to the term. For me, I came into the Doom franchise at Doom 2, at an age where what I played was still very much influenced by my parents and friends’ parents. So yes, Gen X were the primary player base, but it’s not unfair to say the boomers often paid for the game and maybe sat down to a round or two of it. And given that, it might have been one of the last games they were able to sit down and enjoy. I don’t know if anyone else experienced something similar, but my dad in the last 20 years of his life or so really locked in on the 1997 MTG: Shandalar game, and despite several computer upgrades along the way was never interested in any of the newer MTG digital offerings, preferring the cards and UI and experience he was familiar with. And while similar with Doom that game was played by many Gen X and Millenials, I think those demographics mostly continued to follow the franchise through newer releases: but maybe not the boomers.
The test for that should be really, really simple. You fill up a gallon jug with the proposed treated water, hand it to the CEO of the company, and they chug it, in front of the judge/court.
I’m curious where they got 47 million from. The bottom of this document subtracts out to 347 million.
I wholeheartedly support the WGA in their endeavor, both for their own sake and because a rising tide lifts all boats. But I don’t understand their math here.
This last week - factorio, working on city blocks, it’s a little daunting, but hoping the blueprints will serve me in upcoming modded runs that need more scaling.
Vampire survivors, caught a sale, fun as hell if a bit of a patient gamers moment. If you just emerged from under a rock, it’s a minimalistic horde survival roguelite with lots of metaprogression through unlocks, reminds me of an oldie called Crimsonland.
Latest pickup was book of hours: a game made by the guys that did Cultist Simulator, with a similar cards mechanic but a little less stress with everything trying to kill you. Was a little confusing at first but I’m starting to get the hang of it.
Little bit of Orb of Creation: the 0.6 patch is in beta and overhauls the whole game. Combat currently disabled but research, artifacts, and augments in general were made way more interesting. This is an incremental game (big numbers, very casual difficulty, goal tends to be to unlock more stuff and bigger numbers).
And an EA account. And agreement to a 3rd party EULA with EA. For a single player game. That’s some real “we’re gonna sell you microtransactions later” energy out of a 60 dollar release.
There’s anti-union busting laws that are supposed to disallow a company from blatantly targeting unionized employees. But they’re worthless if not used to take the company to court. Starbucks has been up to the same thing: when a store unionizes they mysteriously select it to close.
Ah, seconding ark. I wanted a couple weeks after my friends jumped aboard the hype train, which lasted only a short couple weeks. A few years later and it’s free on EGS, a friend of mine owns a steam copy, and we cannot for our lives manage to connect a private game server between the two platforms. Basically first and one of the very few games I’ve ever refunded on steam, and not even worth playing for free from EGS.
Anti-Idle the Game was an absolute house of a flash game. It may not look like much at first, but it unfolds into the most ambitious incremental game of its era.
Velcro is fine. It shouldn’t just be for kids shoes: shoelaces are like ties: a pointless time waster we should have ditched as soon as we invented velcro.
I mean, factorio came out 3 years ago plus another few in early access, so if that counts, yes.
Yep - we get it. But some of us don’t enjoy the effects that microtransactions have on the game experience, and would prefer not to play those kinds of games. A filter whereby we could just hide those games, and browse ones that we would enjoy, that are more targeted for us, would both save us time and increase the likelihood of us finding a game we want to buy, improving the shopping experience and putting more money into game developers’ and Steam’s pockets. Similar to how the google play store offers a “premium/paid apps” section, because while much of the market prefers free to play and doesn’t mind ads or microtransactions, they know some of us loath it and would rather pay up front for an experience that doesn’t go there, and they make more money when they help shoppers shop.