• Kyden Fumofly@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          18 days ago

          Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked…

          And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities… with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.

          So, basically, they started out where KSP started out… and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state… but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn’t, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!

          Or… maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?

          Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.

          https://techdriveplay.com/2025/01/03/kerbal-space-program-2-a-tale-of-corporate-neglect-and-failure/

          • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            I never understood the fixation on IPs. For a kick ass universe with amazing lore etc, ok sure.

            I mean I love Jeb and the gang as much as the next guy, but they’re not core to my enjoyment of KSP1. The mechanics were.

            • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              18 days ago

              lol, RIP Jebs 1 - 48395.

              But uh yeah, the… the lore is basically:

              We made some cute little dudes and dudettes that are… possibly animated, sapient fungi? Or something?

              Anyway they are sm0l and live in sm0l solar system.

              And they have a space program.

              And most of the characters are just obvious cutesy knock offs of famous humans in spaceflight.

              Woo!

              lol

            • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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              18 days ago

              Name recognition sells stuff. Somebody who loved KSP 1 will probably give KSP 3 a go, at least to a greater probability than an unrelated game in the same genre.

              • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                18 days ago

                Dean Hall and RocketWorkz of uh DayZ fame/infamy… are working on Kitten Space Agency… I dunno, maybe they could pull it off?

                Dean’s track record is really hit and miss imo, but hey, at least they actually give a damn and try, often with pretty bold / niche concepts.

          • cynar@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            It was even worse than that.

            They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      It’s a canon event for any game company that achieves moderate success gets acquired by investors

      Very much not exclusive to the game industry

        • kautau@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Makes sense, wasn’t untrue and I wasn’t criticizing, just wanted to make sure everyone remembers that the problem goes up the chain due to capitalism.

          Various companies/games were mentioned in the comments, but I think a good example is Hello Games. Clearly fumbled their game launch and were over ambitious with No Man’s Sky.

          But it’s gotten an incredible amount of things that were promised, and many things that weren’t, all as free updates. Sure, they’re still making money, that’s the point, but instead of Micro-transactions, overpriced DLC, fucking over the devs, shutting things down, they just keep rolling. I’m sure they’ve gotten offers of acquisition that were probably very lucrative, but they didn’t take them, and have continued their slow roll of making gamers happy.

      • TabbsTheBat@pawb.social
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        19 days ago

        Individual devs seem to generally manage better I think :3. It’s once the companies expand is that stuff starts going awry

        • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Coffee Stain’s another good example on the bigger end.

          It does seem like there’s a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.

        • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
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          17 days ago

          I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don’t agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game’s learning curve less precipitous.

      • pory@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      I think Croteam has been able to have moderate success over the years, but being based in Eastern Europe might make them insulated from issues. Devolver only recently bought them, but they seem to be one of the few good publishers. I at least didn’t see their name on the Video Games Europe member list that’s opposed to SKGs.

    • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
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      18 days ago

      It would make sense for it to be canon in the subnautica universe. I think they were pretty much the epitome of authors with an anvil with the references to economics and governing.

    • Dioxid3@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      It’s Krafton. Just look at what became of PUBG. I mean it’s an OK game and a lot of QoL came to it after all these years, but there hasn’t been any major meta shift in 5 years or so. Only recently they’ve started looking into how broken certain semiauto snipers are.

      Instead you are drowned in lootboxes and emotes

  • mriswith@lemmy.world
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    19 days ago

    The three people were replaced with a guy who used to work at EA. And one of their first announcements was an unprompted “we wont put loot boxes in the game”…

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    18 days ago

    They did all this because they know that the vast majority of the playerbase will never hear about this, and many of those that do will either forget, or simply not care enough to boycott the game. We’re in an age of apathy across the board, with so much bad press that any given scandal just fades into the background noise.

        • Enkrod@feddit.org
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          18 days ago

          Accurate but also not. PewDiePie came out in favour and PirateSoftware lied about it. But I think Thor lying created a huge burst of coverage about how he’s wrong and really created lots of noise about it.

          • AnAverageSnoot@lemmy.ca
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            17 days ago

            Oh I misunderstood the question. I thought they were asking who ironically boosted the petition.

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    18 days ago

    Pop it in your calendars? Maybe I’m using calendars wrong, but mine aren’t filled with things I should avoid doing. But, I’m willing to learn. What date should I put “Don’t Buy Subnautica 2” on?

  • Wolf@lemmy.today
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    18 days ago

    I am also boycotting Microsoft and every product from companies owned by them.

    Sure, that doesn’t leave a lot of games I can buy, but hey, Indie games are often the best games. Also I have a backlog so huge there will probably be peace in the middle east before I’m through with it.

    Besides if there is a game I really want to play, I hear there arrrrr still ways to do so without supporting genocide.

    • kingpoiuy@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Linux gaming is really hot right now. Out of my 575 games on steam I can play 568 of them.

      • Wolf@lemmy.today
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        18 days ago

        Ditched Windows permanently 11 months ago for Pop-OS and couldn’t be happier. I’ve been a big Linux fan for years, but would always dual boot for gaming purposes.

        I’m so glad that isn’t necessary any longer. Almost feels cheating, being Microsoft free with Zero downsides and plenty of benefits.

        You may already know, but a lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ it just means that particular game hasn’t been tested yet and will likely still work just fine*, unless it requires kernel level anti cheat ofc

        Just so happens I’m boycotting that as well. If I wanted you to do shady shit to my OS, I’d have stayed on Windows.

        Edit: *Check the games not listed as playable on protondb and see what that says. Since it’s a ‘crowdsourced’ platform, it’s often more up to date than Valve is.

        • thetrekkersparky@startrek.website
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          18 days ago

          I didn’t realize how truely frustrated I was with windows until I switched a few months ago. I realize now that most of my recent windows troubleshooting was trying to make windows stop doing things I didn’t want it to. Now most of my Linux troubleshooting is just learning how to get Linux to do things I actually want it to do, which is actually quite satisfying.

        • Derpgon@programming.dev
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          18 days ago

          Anything works really. Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch all work - usually just need to install Steam and done, possibly install drivers using your package manager if it doesn’t come pre-installed. Hell, you can even do SteamOS or something like Bazzite or Nobara if i remember correctly.

          • Typhoonigator@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            I installed Mint recently but a lot of my games don’t show as playable. I’m not as tech-savvy as I was 20 years ago, so I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. Any advice?

            • Wolf@lemmy.today
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              18 days ago

              A lot of times when a game isn’t listed as ‘playable’ on Steam, it simply means that particular game hasn’t been tested yet, and will probably still work just fine if you actually try and run it. The only real exceptions to that is games that require ‘kernel level anticheat’.

              Edit: Check those games out on protondb and see what that says. Since it’s a ‘crowdsourced’ platform, it’s often more up to date than Valve is.

                • Wolf@lemmy.today
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                  18 days ago

                  Not a problem at all. If you do end up having difficulties you might try a different distro, I’ve heard a few people complaining about Mint lately. In theory though it should work just fine.

                  In my personal experience every game I’ve tried to play works just as well or better than it does on Windows. Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Prey, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds, No Mans Sky, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Divinity Original Sin 2, Skyrim SE, Fallout 4 & 76 etc. Even older games like Baldur’s Gate and the Original Fallout work great* :)

                  Edit: *The GOG versions, which I use the Heroic Games Launcher to play.

            • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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              18 days ago

              In addition to what Wolf told you, here’s a few little extra tidbits:

              Some games have native Linux versions. If they don’t, you typically play them through Proton, a gaming-ready version of the Wine compatibility layer. Steam directly supports this through compatibility settings (Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility for default settings or Game properties -> Compatibility for per-game settings). Sometimes specific Proton versions will be better for specific games but usually you don’t need to worry about it much.

              Proton is damn good. Expect performance for most games to be within ± 5% of the performance you’d get on Windows. Yes, some games run better on Proton than on native DirectX.

              Valve recently decided to enable Proton by default for games that don’t have a Linux version. You can enable it yourself in the settings if it isn’t enabled yet.

              You can even force games with a native Linux version to use Proton by setting it in the game’s compatibility settings. In that case Steam will download the Windows version.

            • moody@lemmings.world
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              18 days ago

              Steam doesn’t have non-Linux games enabled by default. In the settings, you’ll find a compatibility tab. From there, enable the setting “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”

              That’s what lets it use Proton for everything by default.

          • aeiou_ckr@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            SteamOS isn’t out for download if I remember correctly but you are correct about Bazzite and Novato being similar and great gaming specific distros.

              • Wolf@lemmy.today
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                18 days ago

                Those instructions are about how to reinstall SteamOS on your deck. A little further down the page it talks about how to install on other handheld PC’s like the Legion Go and ROG Ally.

                Currently, expanded support includes devices with AMD hardware and an NVME drive, targeted toward handheld devices. Please note, support for all devices that is not officially ‘Powered by SteamOS’ is not final (currently anything that is not a Steam Deck or Legion Go S)

                While you technically can download it and people have been able to install it on their PC’s, Valve doesn’t recommend doing so.

                They probably will (hopefully) have a version targeted toward PC’s in the future, but it’s not there yet.

                If you want a SteamOS style experience on desktop you would be better off using Bazzite since that is what it’s designed for.

                You are correct that it is possible to do, but it’s not recommended.

        • justlemmyin@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          For gaming, try bazzite, cachyOS, or nobara. Mint is also good, but might not have latest and greatest drivers or kernel etc, even then it is very popular. I switched to mint and then to nobara early last year and love it. I tested a few on VMware in windows before taking the leap. 3 months ago I wiped my windows partition coz I hadn’t used it in yonks. Good luck!

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Almost any is fine, but if you want a distro optimized for gaming, Garuda has been treating me quite well.

          • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            Seconded, with caveats. Garuda is basically a gaming-ready Arch with a few of the rough edges filed off (and a 1337 G4M3R desktop theme preinstalled). I quite like their convenience stuff but in the end it’s still Arch.

            Pros: It’s easy to set up and conveniently comes with everything you need to start gaming. It defaults to the KDE desktop, which will feel fairly familiar to Windows expats. It allows you to do whatever you want to do, in true Linux fashion. Cons: It’s still Arch-based so you will be living at the bleeding edge. A certain amount of occasional instability is to be expected. The default theme might put you off if you’re not into the whole gamer aesthetic but it’s easy to change.

            I also see people recommending Bazzite and similar immutable distros and honestly, I can see the appeal. They’re harder to break and Discover (or whichever Flathub frontend you use) is very welcoming and convenient for managing your installed apps.

            Pros: You’re less involved with the OS’s technical underpinnings than with an Arch-based distro. Immutables are designed to be robust. The Flatpak-centric workflow feels slicker than a traditional package manager. Cons: The design restricts your freedom to a certain degree. Flatpak has a few caveats compared to native software packages.

            In the end I’d say that Garuda is great if you’re interested in learning more about how Linux works and want to be able to tinker with the system. There’s a ton of resources on technical stuff in Arch and all of them apply to Garuda as well. On the other hand, an immutable like Bazzite is great if you’Re not interested in Linux internals and just want something that works and is hard to break.

    • vivalapivo@lemmy.today
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      18 days ago

      I find it really hard to boycott Microsoft today. Yeah, fuck windows, office, Xbox. But there’s GitHub and Azure which you just ignore walking the internet

      • Wolf@lemmy.today
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        18 days ago

        Yeah, GitHub really hurts. Hopefully people will start to use SourceForge and similar alternatives once they realize that Microsoft isn’t just trying to monopolize Operating Systems and Gaming Studios, but the whole damn Internet as well.

        • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.ml
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          18 days ago

          SourceForge sucks ass. I’ll use pen and paper to manage my repos before SourceForge.

          Forgejo is the best git forge hands down. It’s FOSS, snappy & clean web interface, much lighter than Gitlab to self-host, integrates with a bunch of CI platforms, and instance federation is in the works. It’s like GitHub, but better in pretty much every way.

          The most popular instance is Codeberg

          • Wolf@lemmy.today
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            18 days ago

            Cool, I’ll check it out. I’m not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work. It’s nice to know that there is a decent alternative for people who need it.

            • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.ml
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              18 days ago

              Not only is it FOSS, but the experience is legitimately better than GitHub.

              Also has a super fast & good repo migration & sync system. You can still keep the GitHub repo around for the network effect while porting over issues & PRs.

              Forgejo Actions is maybe the only thing worse, but that’s because it isnt one-to-one with the whole GHA ecosystem, even if most GitHub Actions work out the box with no changes.

              I’m not a dev so I mainly use GitHub to download and install other peoples work.

              You’re gonna start seeing more of these pointing to codeberg.org in the near future. I have been seeing a ton of important projects move there or their own Forgejo instance. Once federation hits, I imagine a massive proportion of projects are gonna jump ship.

      • FanBlade@lemmynsfw.com
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        18 days ago

        I mean, you made the claim presumptively, seems reasonable to think it would be on you to provide a source.

      • paultimate14@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025

        The whole key to this is how the bonus is structured, and that is unknown still. They very well may have just been something like “10% of net profit, capped at $250 million”.

        If the whole cost of the game was JUST $250 million, that would put it in the [top-15](The $250 million bonus was due to kick in if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets by the end of 2025) most expensive games we have official numbers for. This doesn’t pass the smell test.

        • Seleni@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Does it make sense to nitpick how much they’re getting though? The fact that they’re being denied any bonus is shady as fuck.

          • paultimate14@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            That’s how bonuses work. If it was guaranteed regardless of how the company perfroms, it wouldn’t be a bonus.

            It is entirely possible that, even if they had released Subnautica 2 in its current state right now, it may not meet sales expectations and no one would get a bonus anyways. They could make a great game and the marketing team drops the ball- no bonus. They could market like crazy but the game sucks- no bonus. Data breaches or corporate embezzlement or world war- there are tons of factors that could prevent them from meeting those goals.

            The amount is also important because it is being used by the position to try to support an argument that Krafton made this move in order to avoid paying the bonus. When in reality the cost of that bonus payment is probably a tiny fraction of what they are losing by delaying the game.

            Personally I hate bonuses, and I have always advocated at my company for more of the payroll to be structured as salary. But other colleagues of mine really like bonuses. They like the increased reward and risk involved. It comes down to risk aversion, so I’m not going to call those people or employers evil or anything just because it’s not my preference.

            I’m also not defending Krafton’s decision to replace the leadership and delay the game. Personally I suspect that they did so in order to add more monetization to the game, but that’s impossible to know until reviews start to get published. I will say that no one should pre-order the game, but I would also say no one should pre-order any game. Why are people pre-ordering games at all?

            And what if Krafton is right? What if the game is actually in a state right now that would disappoint customers? Seems like for the last decade every videogame community has been complaining about games being released as unfinished and buggy meses. No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk for example. Any time Nintendo delays a game, all their fans applaud and share the Miyamoto meme (“a delaged game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”). So I’m really surprised to see that a publisher has come out and admitted that they think the game needs more time to meet customer expectations and instead of applauding them for taking the loss the Internet is instead promoting these weird conspiracy theories that don’t add up to explain how it’s actually bad.

              • paultimate14@lemmy.world
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                18 days ago

                The public does not have enough information to judge the relative probabilities. Krafton has that information and has every incentive to release the game as soon as possible, and they still chose to delay.

      • etchinghillside@reddthat.com
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        18 days ago

        Apologies - that was not a dig at the validity of the information provided.

        That’s a very high number - so I had to either be misunderstanding the number or underestimating the number of employees the bonus was going to.

      • sorter_plainview@lemmy.today
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        18 days ago

        I wonder how much of this is true. Statement from the publisher

        On Thursday, Krafton issued another statement addressed to “our 12 million fellow Subnauts.” The company said 90% of the $250 million payout was allocated to Unknown Worlds’ three senior leaders. Krafton accused the executives of abandoning their responsibilities in order to work on other projects, including a film, leading to delays for the game.

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    16 days ago

    Just gonna copy paste my comment on a related post…

    Similar shit happened when they were PUBG Corporation. Fuck these lying assholes. Player Unknown was a smart, capable dude, and they exiled him to a remote office because he got pissed at the CEO for over-monetizing things in a way that cost them players.

    When they released the battle pass while the game was retail, all of the non-Korean employees nearly revolted. It wasn’t smart, and it was a money grab on the players. When the team lead of market research told the product manager that the feature was a bad idea and would lose them all their Western players, the product manager got him demoted and moved to another team.

    When the numbers didn’t look good, the data analysts were freaking out because they couldn’t deliver bad news up the chain of command, even if it was accurate.

    When they acquired Mad Glory, they promised that the dev team would still be contracted to other game companies to build APIs and tools for them, keeping the game industry tooling ecosystem healthy (think op.gg). When PUBG Corporation acquired them, the company canceled their contract with Bethesda for the API they were in the middle of building and forbade them from working with other companies.

    Fuck Bluehole. Fuck PUBG Corporation. Fuck Krafton. Fuck game studios in Korea. Don’t play Korean games. Kpop and cosmetics and whatever are chill. Don’t play Korean games. Korean game companies are fucking cancer.

    Don’t buy Subnautica 2. The Subnautica franchise died when Krafton became the publisher.

    • vxx@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Kpop is extremely exploitative to the artists, much worse than game development.

      We’re talking physical and sexual abuse levels here.

      Not chill at all.

      • TheBeege@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        You’re absolutely right. I was too focused. I crossed that out in my comment. Thanks

    • wellheh@lemmy.sdf.org
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      18 days ago

      Probably would not add kpop to the list of chill. That industry is rife with abuse like slave contracts.

    • L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works
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      18 days ago

      Friendly reminder that Korea invented and perfected micro-transactions. MapleStory has done more damage to both worldwide gaming and Korean game devs than anything else could ever hope to.

      • Valorie12@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Which is very sad because MapleStory was such a great game, at one time. I still play it (private servers) often, 20 years later. The game had such creative passion in it before Nexon took over and monetized the shit out of it.

      • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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        17 days ago

        Wasn’t it the Chinese that perfected Microtransactions ??

        You know Genshin Impact, Azur Lane, ZZZ, Wuthering waves etc…

    • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      Dude what did Korean devs ever do to you ? You ARE generalizing a bit. What’s next ?

      • TheBeege@lemmy.world
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        16 days ago

        The devs themselves are fine. It’s the leadership that’s cancer. Abusive leadership in Korean companies is actually a pretty well known issue. It’s just more self-destructive in game companies, which I have direct experience with. So they did a lot to me and my friends. And said friends shared their stories of other Korean game companies.

        You’re absolutely right to question, especially with my level of anger, but I’m confident this one is justified.

  • Vintor@retrolemmy.com
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    18 days ago

    More importantly in the short run, remove it from your wishlists so that Krafton can see your choice! At the moment, they are super proud of the game being the most wishlisted on Steam.

  • Swordgeek@lemmy.ca
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    19 days ago

    Oooh, there’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.

    $250M PLUS legal costs PLUS $250M in punitive fees. That should hurt them a bit.

    • MJKee9@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      You can’t typically get punitive damages for contract disputes. Also, there is a very real possibility that the contract hasn’t been breached by the new owners’ actions. It sounds like they used their superior bargaining power to put a lot of questionable yet enforceable provisions in the contract.

      • thann@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        18 days ago

        Ive heard of it once where the defendant litterally wrote a book on how to use overseas buisness to pull off scams like the one he was being accused of

      • Swordgeek@lemmy.ca
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        18 days ago

        Punitive damages can be awarded for bad-faith bargaining, which definitely seems to be the case here.

        It’s a stretch perhaps, but that’s what I think would be reasonable.

        • MJKee9@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          Typically, conduct would have to rise to the level of fraud to justify punitives in a contract based dispute. That’s a very high hurdle in most jurisdictions. Also, at that point the conduct complained of would likely be based in tort, not contract.

          • flandish@lemmy.world
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            18 days ago

            it’s a horror game? prob will pass then. Also lemme borrow your vr for porn though. I’ll give it back.

            • burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de
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              18 days ago

              It’s horror in the sense that Bioshock was horror, but much less so. There are some areas with ‘tension’ that you pretty quickly become accustomed to, just as you would in a game where there is a ‘progression’ of areas where each area you move into is quite difficult at first until you get the resources and build the new items from that area.

                • WraithGear@lemmy.world
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                  18 days ago

                  I highly recommend it on a vr device if possible, but to everyone who has played it knows, it has its moments. But its not as wrote as a run of the mill horror game, i may have given the game a disservice labeling it as such.

                  Outerwilds is also a must play in vr,

    • abigscaryhobo@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      It sucks that this is going around too. Because no matter what the “right” choice is the devs are still gonna have to see what should have just been their fun project get thrown around in gaming politic hell

    • Ashtear@lemmy.zip
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      18 days ago

      Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.

      Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can’t have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!

    • buttnugget@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      I’m sure there’s some truth in there, but it is hard to believe it entirely. This is what you get for unnecessarily selling your company.

    • Wolf@lemmy.today
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      18 days ago

      You Don’t Need a F-ing Publisher*

      *unless you do.

      It would just require smaller teams making lower budget games that are more focused on Art than sales, which I would be really happy about honestly. Too many people are in this industry solely to rake in the big bucks.

        • Wolf@lemmy.today
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          18 days ago

          If you are going to compete with AAA games it’s going to require a big budget, which not all Devs have access to.

          A high quality AA game would probably do great, but would be unlikely to outsell a AAA with hundreds of millions of dollars for budget.

          Obsidian made a fantastic game with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire but it was considered a ‘failure’ sales wise (at least at launch), despite being well received.

          Obsidian sold to Micro$oft despite making very high quality games and their crowdfunding campaigns consistently earning more money than they were asking for. The stated reason was they found it hard to keep their employees paid consistently and they didn’t want to lay people off. Also that they thought they could do just as good as other big players in the industry if they had access to larger budgets.

          I think it was a bad move. They managed to survive the massive round of 9,000 jobs cuts to Microsoft’s gaming division (this time), but you just know that Microsoft would cut them in a heartbeat if they thought it would save them a dime in the future. That being said I think it’s understandable to want to see your employees paid, and it’s just a sad fact that AAA games require huge budgets nowadays, so I can kind of understand why they sold, even if I don’t agree with it.

          • Muad'dib@sopuli.xyz
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            18 days ago

            I’m still waiting for Obsidian to finish writing the second half of Tyranny and I won’t be buying another of their games until they do.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          18 days ago

          Source?

          Pretty much every popular indie game has a publisher. Publishers are great because they provide relatively low cost marketing, the trick is to be careful when signing a contract that you don’t sign away too much while still getting value from them.

    • Vermingot@jlai.lu
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      18 days ago

      It’s not so black and white, Clair Obscur : Expédition 33 has that level of quality and polish because the team behind it was able to find a publisher to finance it. Everything has nuance, we got shafted on subnautica 2 but we had other great games, some self published, some not

  • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    You should get a publisher if:

    You want to make one game then get fired

    You want your work to be bastardized by the publisher in the future

    You want countless hours of overtime/crunch and no compensation

    You want to be another disposable cog in the machine

    If that doesn’t sound like something you want, self-publish.

  • Lovable Sidekick@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    I will support this by continuing to be apathetic toward (and in fact ignorant of) the game known as Subnautica 2.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        18 days ago

        First one was a cool premise but really annoying in some ways. The game sort of assumes you get certain fragments of blue prints by certain points but doesn’t actually make them easy to find nor really give you any hints to find them.

        For people who’ve played it was for the sea moth and and later the moon well.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            18 days ago

            It was weirdly a little light on crafting in some ways. But extremely heavy in others. I tried playing it like Minecraft and stockpiling stuff but that’s not really the way. I found it slightly more enjoyable to gather things only when I needed them.

            Also the game has no map and I’m REALLY bad with directions. Like REALLY bad.

          • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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            18 days ago

            Yep, it loops between exploration and basebuilding / crafting.

            The exploration part is what usually gets people hooked because the alien underwater setting is amazing. The other stuff is more to give you a reason to stick around for longer, and pace your exploration since need to unlock things at certain points.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              18 days ago

              Then maybe I’ll try it sometime. I don’t like base building (feels like crafting), but exploration can be fun. But it’s pretty far down my list.

              • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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                17 days ago

                Very, very light spoilers:

                This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.

                A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.

                Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          17 days ago

          Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.

          Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.

          The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.

            • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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              16 days ago

              Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.

              You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.

              Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.

              Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.

              All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.

              It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.

              I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.

              • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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                16 days ago

                I don’t need hints because I’m not playing the game and I’m not planning on continuing. I’d gotten further than you think. But for context I’d already begun to explore the deeper areas when I ran into this conundrum. I built a stupidly long oxygen tube to get down there. I think the game expects you to have the sea moth first. That was one of the first moments I thought something was wrong. Then I think once I got it I couldn’t take it down there without an upgrade because I also didn’t have the moon pool unlocked. You’re talking about life pods, I never had a problem finding life pods. Those were easy and fun. It was going deeper without the sea moth and upgrades that was troublesome.

                • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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                  16 days ago

                  Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.

        • kaidezee@lemmy.ml
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          18 days ago

          That’s the point of the game - it doesn’t tell you where to go and what to do because you’re meant to explore the environment yourself. And the debris you scan, the screenshots you take, and the thrills that you get - are the real reward here, and not some goal that game artificially imposes on you. So I think you were just playing it wrong.

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            18 days ago

            So I think you were just playing it wrong.

            Look, I genuinely get your point, and I was tracking with you until you said this. Fuck off. Fuck for with this stupid bullshit. I was not playing wrong. I was playing it the same way everyone else does. I was exploring. I was collecting. I was finding new things. It was getting very clear that the distances the game expected me to travel were meant to be done much faster than what I was capable of. I was getting multiple upgrades for things that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have the thing that lets me install them. It’s been ages since I’ve played and I’m not psychic so I’ll never know what the actual devs’ intent was, but something was off. I’d definitely missed something. What’s more annoying is that I was finding multiple blueprints I already had or something? I don’t remember the context. Like you needed 3 fragments or something. And I’d find more like “ah surely this is the third for the thing I need” only to get the 5th of something I already had. It was give years ago when I played, at least, so I’m probably explaining wrong.

            But don’t fucking say I was playing wrong. That’s such a condescending, brain dead thing to say to someone who is critiquing a game.

            “Hey, based on what’s going on and getting tons of upgrades and not unlocking the thing to install the upgrades, I think I’ve missed something and I have no idea where to find it. It would be nice if there was a way to unlock this without scouring every inch of the ocean I’ve been through multiple times and without looking it up online.” No, you’re just playing wrong! It’s a game about exploration and discovery!

            🙄

            • voodooattack@lemmy.world
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              17 days ago

              You’re not alone. As much as I love that game, the absolute lack of direction is one of my biggest gripes with it, right along with the atrocious inventory system.

              You’d think someone who manages to build a fricking atomic submarine and a mech suit would be able to pinpoint relevant tech on the go somehow but no. Also you get a scanning room that can pinpoint little pebbles a kilometre away but is it helpful? Nope. Just another half-baked gameplay element that was never developed beyond the initial concept.

              So yeah, your concerns are absolutely valid. Anyone who played this game would agree. But maybe that’s why I personally love the game. Clunky and beautiful, frustrating but once you find that thing you’ve been looking for, a bit rewarding too.

              • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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                17 days ago

                Yeah, I think people look at that criticism and think I mean I want super explicit bright glowing objects with a Skyrim style HUD that points me directly to where I need to go to get blue prints. Nah. Some ideas:

                1. Some way to tell if there aren’t any more in an area so you don’t waste time looking when there isn’t anything.
                2. Some sort of device that tells you how close some are, but not where they are. Like the classic “beep … beep … beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEPBPBPBBPBP” thing that gets more frequent as you approach. But make the max range relatively small.
                3. I think they were called life pods? Like the other crashed emergency escape pods. For things you’re expected to get like the sea bike (I don’t remember the name), sea moth, and moon well maybe always put some blue print fragments on life pods you find later. This way you can’t miss them (unless you’re really really not paying attention). You can still make it so you get them earlier on, but this way in case you missed some somehow you can always “catch up” to where the devs expect you to be. Like if they expect you to get them ~10% in, then make it so the life pods you find ~25% in give you what you are missing for the sea moth.
                4. A bit of a map system. This one is controversial, so I’m putting it last. A huge appeal of the game is not having a map. But even just a blank screen showing you all your way points, but not showing you where you are or what biomes are around would be useful. Then do something like show where blueprints are in an area. Maybe something like once you get two of three it shows you the general area where the remaining ones are, but doesn’t put a marker on the HUD.

                Because with games like this where progression isn’t gated behind actually having some of these items, you can get in weird states where you get further in and didn’t get them. But maybe >95% of players did. The other <5% just missed something somehow. And then there’s no real clue on where to.go to back track to get it. And you can get in these annoying situations where it seems like you should have it but you aren’t sure, and you don’t want spoilers so you don’t look it up. Then when you look it up maybe you see a spoiler and it turns out you shouldn’t have it yet, that’s common. Other times you missed something super obvious in some very random area you only needed to go to once and never checked again because it seemed empty.

                But it’s just so infuriating when people say things like “you’re not playing right” like, I’m getting frustrated because I’m playing right! If I wasn’t checking everywhere I could miss things. So I have to check everywhere to make sure I don’t. But then you can still miss things because there’s no real way to guarantee if you actually checked everything.

                • voodooattack@lemmy.world
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                  17 days ago

                  Tbh I’m against the full on map idea since it would ruin and demystify/trivialise the aspect of exploration, but maybe they could have made it so that the scanner room HUD chip UI was actually useful and displayed any kind of distance indicator. Often times I’d be scanning for limestone chunks for example. Now my HUD is full of circles that all have the exact same radius and no indication of distance, just a vague direction, and it’s so frustrating to work with that.

                  They could have added some sort of compass as well. They chose not to.

                  I wish they implemented something like No Man’s Sky’s non-intrusive HUD, which conveys both heading and distance at the same time in a super nice way.