HeyListenWatchOut

  • 1 Post
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•An ad giant wants to control your next TV’s OSEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    Not good enough. Any OTA updates your TV can get over the web will eventually be trying to circumvent your IP blacklists to shove in any ad-riddled garbage they can.

    Literally just blacklist your TV’s MAC address, and use a dedicated set top box of some kind to avoid this shit. My current choice is my NVIDIA Shield Pro 2019, which I installed a 3rd party WOLF launcher (there’s also F-Launcher) and turned off auto-updates so I could avoid NVIDIA and Google doing the same.

    At some point, I will probably need to switch to a NUC or other HTPC with some flavor of Linux on it, as eventually the Shield may succumb to this shit as well.

  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•Perfect Dark Reboot Is Allegedly In Bad ShapeEnglish
    16·
    7 months ago

    “Newer” does not necessarily equal “better.”

    The real problem is how basically game dev is an untenable long-term career from a AAA standpoint… or at least it is outside of Japan.

    Almost every major dev is not being run by anyone with more than 10-ish years of dev experience.

    Why? Because studios shut down and fire everyone, or they get bought… and fire everyone… or the grizzled vets get burnt out, or find out that work-life balance shifts when they get old enough to want to start a family, or discover (like I did) that general software pays better, has less turnover, and doesn’t shut down as often.

    Look at all the major players in the FPS game for example from the past 15 years… The guys who made Perfect Dark, the original GoldenEye, Killer Instinct, Banjo Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day? Mostly not in the industry anymore or struggling while working on small indie projects. Some of the companies still exist, but the guys who’d be in their 60s with 30 years of game dev and design mastery under their belts? Gone.

    Cliff Blezinski isn’t working on games anymore. John Carmack isn’t at id. Half of Bungie’s OG staff has moved on to other stuff or switched to 343 or some other smaller studio.

    I said “outside of Japan” earlier btw because meanwhile Shigeru Miyamoto is still at Nintendo. Dude’s an absolute elder god of game design, and all he’s been doing is working on them for more than 4 decades at this point.

    Kojima’s been making games since the 80s, so has most of the folks at Capcom, and the From Software guys have been doing the same thing for 15+ years at this point.

    And then there’s the rare tiny studio or re-org of a once awesome team like Respawn after all the Activision / Call of Duty stuff or indie effort like the guy behind Stardew Valley… but other than those handful of exceptions, there’s no one but 20-something recent grads that pad out the teams at these giant game companies like Ubisoft, Activision, EA, etc. Even Blizzard is a pale shadow of what it once was. And Valve doesn’t really make games anymore b/c they don’t have to…

    They aren’t making great games - but NOT because they’re “stupid…” they’re making bad games… because they just started… and all the old farts who they should be apprenticing under like you do with ANY other respected artisan type career are gone.

    And every year some $10 million / year bonus paid suit shuts down an Ensemble Studios, or a Telltale Games, or fires half of the team at Square Enix b/c the new Tomb Raider 6-year project didn’t make a bajillion dollars after some exec decided that should be their target since “Clash Royale” only took 1 year to pump out and just basically prints piles of money.

  • HeyListenWatchOut@lemmy.worldtoGames@lemmy.world•How Greed Ruined GamingEnglish
    201·
    7 months ago

    No, the people who deserved it are the ones at the top with garages full of supercars and fleets of private yachts. The Bobby Koticks, the Don Mattricks, etc.

    The ones who I guarantee you are NOT suffering or losing their livelihoods.

    The tens of thousands of devs who got into making video games because of their deep love of them… devs who have worked countless hours and crunched over the holidays while missing out on sleep, family events and more all just because management won’t plan, can’t stop chasing trends and pivoting the project, and because they fired 10% of the team last quarter to boost the share price by $0.02.

    The devs didn’t deserve any of that.

    They don’t deserve to lose their jobs right after some game ships and it turns out no one wants to pay $70 plus micro transactions shoved in their faces every other round between matches.

    AAA gaming is broken and many of my peers from that industry seem to be in a bad spot now at no fault of their own… but their boss’s boss’s bosses who keep steering the ship into rocks are the ones you should be throwing rotten produce at.