The Video Game Industry

Yeah, sliding through small crevices seems to be pretty popular these days.

Fallout 3 solved it by breaking the world up into a lot of small pockets with waist high fences consisting of rubble, linked up by chunks of subway tunnels.

Which reminds me that Source engines games DON'T have asynchronous loading and thus can't get around loading screens. Which resulted in Portal 2 (which IIRC is the latest Source engine game) deciding to have actual loading screens rather than the tiny "Loading" in the center of the screen like previous Source games.

That said, asynchronous loading can also fail if implemented wrong (case in point: XCOM2 which displayed an animated scene as it loaded, but before a patch that animation drastically slowed down the loading due to competing over resources)

Portal 2 also cheats at one very notable point (if you pay attention), turning the room black to teleport you to an entirely different map.

Nibellion: yeah, turns out spreading video game news isn't enough to pay the bills and Twitter isn't looking great. Imma retire from video game coverage. Peace, y'all. (*fades out*)

The Game Awards 2022: (*nominates Nibellion for Content Creator of the Year*)

Nibellion (probably): (*fades back in*) Wait, WHAT?!? WHAT?!

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Nov 14th 2022 at 1:18:57 PM

And that means?

The guy who constantly posted gaming news and retired from Twitter and doing that, basically got nominated for an award for his work doing just that.

EDIT: Though I wouldn't call him a Content Creator. More of a reporter.

Edited by ScubaWolf on Nov 14th 2022 at 1:59:39 PM

What they said.

Probably should've jogged everyone's memories about them myself, but thanks for picking up the slack.

It's just so wild because Nibellion retired. How often do retired people get nominated like this?

Must have been one hell of a final year.

Shocked that Ludwig was nominated, but his partner-in-crime Jerma985 still has yet to, considering how innovative the latter is. The absolutely massive Jerma985 Dollhouse event was mostly his idea.

It's kind of hilarious, to be honest. Guy retires because he feels his blog has become about his work rather than about him... then his blog wins a huge award.

Pushing Buttons: If Twitter breaks down, the games industry won’t ever be the same.

That at least could be made up for by platforms like Steam being better at moderating content and making it easier for skilled indie devs to show off their games.

Good luck getting Steam to moderate content again, though I will admit it's not that impossible considering that Steam already banned crypto games. Still, Twitter dying out is going to be one hell of an End of an Age for gaming as a whole.

Truth is, even if they did, a lot of indies were gonna get drowned out inside of Steam regardless.

There's not that much of a social element on Steam, people don't generally go there to talk about games compared to other alternatives like Discord and Twitter.

And frankly, there's so many indie games being released every day, most of them are still gonna get drowned out, no matter how much content moderation is applied.

Edited by OrangeBun on Nov 16th 2022 at 1:59:50 PM

But it would mitigate the damage a little and it would be helpful overall anyway.

NetEase and Blizzard have ended their deal to bring games to China with NetEase loosing out on some of the country's most popular games.

Wait, is that bad?

Because on the one hand, Warcraft and other Blizzard games are crazy popular in China. But on the other hand, China is kinda not popular because of guys like Tencent and Blizzard themselves aren't so great because of the people running it.

So...good thing?

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Nov 17th 2022 at 11:24:41 AM

not a good for players

Eh, anything that reduces China's choking presence on the industry is good.

The way I see it is that the failure of the negotiation will relieve the pressure on ABK to conform to Chinese censorship laws, so they won't have to make games that are tailored to appeal to that specific market to the exclusion of others.

I wanna say the Warcraft franchise in particular has had a pretty long history of having to do that with its depictions of the undead, yeah?

Blizzard themselves aside though, yeah I'd say overall this is good. Makes it sound like the video game industry is gonna follow the film industry's lead on realizing China causes more headache than it's worth as a market, between all the arbitrary censorship laws and the "open mouth, insert foot" PR caused by it forcing you to take pro-CCP stances on things like Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Edited by NesClassic on Nov 17th 2022 at 12:06:30 PM

That's just karma after the bullshit Blizzard pulled with Blitzchung. Goes to show how much throwing away your dignity to suck up to the CCP is worth in the end.

Pretty sure they're actually just looking for a new publishing partner in China. Mike Ybarra has even said here that they're "looking for alternatives to bring our games back to players in the future."

Google payed millions to 26 big app developers to stop them from competing with the Play Store, according to unredacted files from a 2020 Epic Games lawsuit against Google.

Blizzard:

I don’t feel bad for them. They unjustly punished Blitzchung to appease the CCP so I don’t feel bad that they currently can’t release stuff there. It’s a headache to do business there.