I don’t actually play GTA online, but they are very successful with their online offering, their daily low looks to be >60k concurrent players. I suspect it’d be VERY hard not to continue with the online bit.

Interviewer: why are you a good fit for valve?

Hoopo: we sold ror before we could make a third

interviewer: welcome aboard!

If the internal sponsor of an idea get bored or loses support from colleagues, the project just halts.

Yeah, i kind of agree with everything you’ve said, and history as i remember it kind of backs up what you’ve said about tf2.

But I don’t agree that they don’t care about story and only do it for marketing. I think halflife’s episodes are all about an attempt at continuing that story.

I think that the Cave and Glados bits of portal are a large part of what made those games (of course the gameplay loops are really tight there.

I think the only way to know would to be an insider. I also don’t think it really matters, the games they make are good.

I do think you are right, they start out on gameplay; getting that inner game loop to be fun is primary (I kind of though that’s how most (non narrative) game studios worked though).

they don’t make games to tell stories

This was mostly what i was suggesting was incorrect. I also don’t think it’s a major part of marketing. I’m suggesting they don’t bother putting the work of story into something until that inner game loop is fun.

TF2 was the result of experimentation with team based death match gameplay

Didn’t they already know about team fortress? This seems off based on team fortress having already existed, same with wolfenstine enemy territory.

I’m not sure your theory stands up, they did all those comics around TF2. They hired those old man Murray dudes I thought just to work on narrative. They’ve gotten famous actors to do roles!

I think saying halflife was never about story is just wrong.

If you stripped dialog from portal you’d have a significantly worse game. Did you forget all the glados shit that came out after portal? Humor is a major part of those games which is all about dialog.

I’ve got seinheisser 598 that are quite good, but I understood seinheisser to have been bought and maybe quality went down. I also have byerdynamic 990s that I find uncomfortable for longer periods.

I also have hifiman sundara that are (except for the cable) far and above the best headphones I’ve ever had both in comfort and sound.

There’s a person on the bapcsales Canada reddit called lifelongcaboose who seems to really know their headphones that recommended them

this is normal enshittification, we just move on to the next shit.

No dead cells. risk of rain 2 at 71? nahhh

If your product or treatment of customers is so bad they’d go to the trouble to create multiple accounts to give you bad reviews. Maybe you deserve it.

Maybe just maybe they are saying review bombing but they just mean bad reviews. There is no evidence in that article that stream has detected review bombing meaning single person or bot flooding their page with bad reviews.

Giving someone a bad review is stating ng your opinion, telling others to do the same is more of the same, just like you’ve done here.

The reason for crunch is oversupply of employees who want to work in the industry or product. This doesn’t happen where employees value their time, or there is a undersupply of talent.

Games are not cheap when compared to other entertainment, and they involve the same magnitude of costs, these are businesses and crunch is exploiting talent.

There is a bad actor here, but it’s not the customer.

review bombing them and calling for boycotts because they raised their prices is fucking bullshit.

Just like you’ve stated your opinion here, they also can and should do that.

I wish every gamer had to work through crunch on at least one game

This is silly, developers shouldn’t put up with crunch, but the blame for this doesn’t lie with the customers, but instead with the corporation exploiting them.

You seem to be attacking the customer, and commiserating with the employees, but completely ignoring that somewhere all the value of the enterprise is being extracted. All in favour of status quo, this is terrible for everyone who actually works on the game, or pays for the game.

You aren’t alone. Forspoken was fun but they gated the gameplay behind a tonne of super slow paced unskippable town parts.

Maybe that’s what the like about dark souls series, right in the action rarely out of it.