Stallman was right, episode five billion.

It’s not “free.” It’s “have you considered creating a Skinner box that somehow gouges people for more money than any game should cost?”

Not including Abigail Thorn.

Hell yes, Coincident! Congratufuckinglations!

For anyone new to classic Doom runs: you can’t save. There are no i-frames. If two rockets arrive at your location, you just die. This map also has multiple platforming segments where falling off means death… in a game where you cannot jump. This map is not Kaizo Mario kinds of cruel, because Kaizo maps have a gimmick you’re supposed to perform. Some of the fights are pure “ha ha good luck.” There’s recently-unearthed footage of the designer personally beating like a fifth of the map, and even he’s just winging it.

For shorter introductions to ass-reamingly difficult maps, consider Zero Master’s speedruns of Sunder. E.g. Hollow Icon.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money. Least of all how you look.

Only legislation will stop this. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

Ban the entire business model.

Doom.

It’s April. Have you looked outside lately? Reality’s pretty fucking green.

Oblivion is aggressively verdant. The fuck happened?

Brown RPG was the one before that!

Massively single-player. I like it.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

Ban the entire business model.

Entertainment is a tool for emotional manipulation - usually toward enjoyment. Fiction seeks suspension of disbelief and attachment to completely artificial interests and goals. Charging actual currency for anything under that fiction is an abuse. It’s exploiting your brain’s fuzzy separation of wants. However much you desire a goal in soccer, it’s just a ball going through some posts. It has no economic utility. There is no exchange rate between score and hamburgers.

Maximizing that mistake is the entire driving force of this industry-swallowing abuse. It’s half of all revenue. Boycotts don’t work. It’s in $70, flagship-franchise, single-player games. It costs nothing to add, even in games you already bought. Only legislation will fix this.

Now the usual excuses.

‘Just don’t pay them.’ The entire game is expertly crafted to make you crave whatever they’re charging for. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that’s what makes them games. Gently convincing you over time is the developer’s job.

‘You want it for free!’ You want it ‘for free.’ I want people to buy games. Like how it worked for forty years straight.

‘But servers need money.’ This shit’s in World Of Warcraft - a subscription MMO. You think Blizzard is hurting?

‘But arcades–’ were renting someone else’s machine. Your own phone doesn’t get to charge you a quarter per minute.

‘But cosmetics–’ are still an engineered desire which can be denied until you pay more money.

‘But budgets–’ follow revenue, always always always. It has never been easier to make a game. Companies choose to spend millions because they expect to make billions.

‘Well it’s better value.’ This bullshit makes them more money… and they get the money from you… so this “free” bullshit costs you more money. You get it? In no reality should it be possible to pay the price of a whole-ass game for one imaginary hat.

This machine deserved so much better. It was supposed to be a lightweight headset, until Japanese liability laws became absolute, and it turned out misaligned images could make children crosseyed. Hence the battery-powered desk unit containing a piddly mobile CPU and a solid steel rail.

G-Zero alone would have been sick.

By design. That’s… that’s literally what these games are for. You’re supposed to be addicted and frustrated until you fork over real money.

All the mechanisms that games use to make your brain do the happy juice are kept behind the part where you pay real money over and over.

Should be simple to do better than the sound designers over at Riot

Your explicit argument is that “better” isn’t the standard, when it comes to cranking out textures or whatever. But suddenly when it’s your thing - there’s no possible way that passable results could work. Disruptive change won’t affect your profession, because good-enough audio never happens in video games, a medium obsessed with escalating… audio quality? No, right, graphics. The thing you figure AI will be awesome for, when someone needs two hundred variations, to-day. And when that demand becomes reasonable there’s no fucking way the studio will demand two thousand.

I mean, you clearly know more than me

‘You’re being a hypocrite, judged on your own statements, in this thread alone.’

‘YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME AT EVERYTHING?!?!?!’

Jesus.

I consider myself pretty positive about the potential for generative AI, especially in game development, and it’s still embarrassing watching you aggressively fail to handle polite criticism. You lurched in with ‘I bet people will downvote my lukewarm take!’ and then got big mad when that happened. Like it was a surprise.

This latest comment is an open wound of grievances which I, personally, didn’t say a god damned word about. You’re just showing your whole ass over… cut content? For some reason? Who asked. And you’re trying to turn measured pushback regarding your sweeping claims into some chest-beating dominance-game, where one of us has to go away humiliated and quintessentially stupid forever, instead of just saying - oh, guess that was a slight overreach, whoopsie daisy.

My condolences to anyone who works under you. However good you are at your job, the way you handle disagreement is demonstrably miserable. Please get better at it.

Damning comments from 2023.

I do not need lossless copies of an image someone didn’t even draw.

Wanking is about the emotional connection to a JPG, said someone I deeply pity.

Everyone’s convinced their thing is special, but everyone else’s is a done deal.

Meanwhile the only task where current AI seems truly competitive is porn.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t theft.

Ahhh, fuck. I didn’t know that’s where they found Doug Bowser.