That’s a whole other interesting topic. The barrier to entry for game dev now is also a fair bit lower, for good and ill. And the labor side supply of people that want to do it (at least they think they do) is pretty high. But… other than that the companies are in bed with China… not totally sure this is the thread for that.
People on Reddit are talking about distributing ‘Free Hong Kong’ shirts for everyone to wear to NBA games during the preseason. Thought being they can’t kick everyone out if everyone’s wearing a HK shirt, right?
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I guess it depends on if they already bought the tickets before they get kicked out
The optics of showing an empty stadium are bad.
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Personally I’d like to see the Western AAA industry crash and burn to cinders. Maybe the fee-to-pay model, to borrow Jim Sterling’s turn of phrase, will stop and go back to proper games in the “buy the whole game and play it model” instead of drip fed lootbox live service model. Which I would GLADLY pay $100-120 for. If AAA can’t pivot quickly, there’s plenty of indie content out there until/if the big iron gets its shit back together.
Nah. In practice what will happen is the Western industry will also pivot to mobile. We’re about to enter the gaming analog to the “reality show” era of television.
Minimum investment, minimum quality, maximum profit, and complete disposablity.
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Ugh, like I said if there’s no pivot at least there’s indie content and decades of back catalog. And smaller but high qualityJapanese devs seem to be keeping up with the full game non-live service stuff. Really its already most of what I play anyway, indie and Japanese.
Indies are only going to get smaller in the short-term. There’s no sustainable means to fund them.
See: Apple Arcade.
All business progress is bundling products together, and then unbundling them. And then bundling them again.
It’s funny that most all of the games I’ve been playing and/or interested in, well, for years now, have been coming from Ukraine, Russia, and Europe in general. Very few US made games anymore.
Games really should increase to being around $100 and some of them basically are. If it’s a good game the entertainment value quickly shoots way past almost anything else unless you’re amortizing your PC/console costs very strictly (and even then after 5 years it’s pretty low)
The thing is I’ll gladly drop $100+ on a game if I keep playing it. I’m not very keen to buy a game on Steam for $80 and get 2 hours of enjoyment from it. So we really should have better models for that.
You just gave me a sick feeling in my stomache about my current job. I’ve been… caught off guard with how much we’re trying to take other completely viable working products, plugging into their api, and basically re-implementing their entire system in our own system, and pretending like that’s a business.
Here’s a question I don’t have any idea about. All these “offensive” statements - what portion of Chinese citizens are actually offended by any of this? Care at all? Even heard of it?
It all seems so thin-skinned that I assume the government is doing all the talking, but I don’t even have a guess at how the populace actually feels.
Do we even know?
Would this be happening now if Blizzard hadn’t merged with Activision or if the original Blizzard execs were still there?
Not true. That tweet is some made up nonsense from someone who just messed up their account and over-reacted. It’s super debunked.
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From what I have heard the mainland Chinese citizens are hard against the movement in Hong Kong because of all of the anti mainlander sentiment in the movement that has gotten published. So as long as the NBA stuff is put under that rubric I imagine they are either supportive of the government’s action or indifferent.
Should there be a separate thread for China Censorship?
https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1182816247076966401
TL;DR: They’re going to give him the prize money. They also decreases his ban and the casters ban to 6 months.