MudMan

I was ready to be mad at you for making me google it, but it turned out to be the same iusnaturalist bullcrap that was already centuries out of date when I studied that stuff and had memory holed, so… meh.

Fond memories of my college years, though. Feeling young and smart and so, so intellectually superior by pointing and laughing at those guys because back then we all thought things were mostly going to get better looking forward. Good times.

I mean… yeah, retailer gut checks were a major driver for the industry for ages. The entire myth of the videogame crash in the early eighties, blown out of proportion as it is, comes down to retailers having a bad feeling about gaming after Atari. I’m big on preservation and physical media, but don’t downplay the schadenfreude caused by the absolutely toxic videogame retail industry entirely collapsing after digital distribution became a thing. I’ll buy direct to consumer from boutique retailers all day before I go back to buckets of games stolen from little kids and retailers keeping shelf space hostage based on how some rep’s E3’s afterparties went.

That said, those guys really did flood the market with cookie cutter games in a very short time there for a while. There were a LOT of these.

Weirdly, Neverwinter Nights must have done extremely well for how much credit Bioware gives it for redefining the genre, but at the time I remember being frustrated by it. It looked worse than the 2D stuff, the user generated content stuff was fun to mess with it didn’t create the huge endless content mill you’d expect from something like that today.

I should go look up if there’s any data about how commercially successful it really was somewhere. Any pointers?

People outside the Anglosphere still have a different experience. I mean, the whole “UK refuses to give up, fights for what’s right” bit is… not how that is played out elsewhere.

If you’re from a big chunk of occupied Europe the narrative is more Star Wars-y. The Empire has won, it’s about the plucky resistance. Only a lot more bleak. If you’re from Northern Africa… probably no good guys in this one. If you’re in Spain it’s more of a Game of Thrones. It starts in 1936 and it ends in 1975 after a very long timeskip before which a bunch of resistance fighters wait to take back their country holed up in the mountains and are betrayed by the US and UK because they worry about their ties to the soviets. If you’re from China, the narrative doesn’t have many people from Europe at all, but it sure has a whole lot of Japanese bad guys and an entire holocaust spin-off that somehow you never hear about.

They all get the Hollywood version of it, most people are at least told one alternative take at some point in their lives. I sometimes forget that’s not the case with many things in the Anglosphere.

This.

Valve doesn’t release games, it releases ads for Steam.

Which is fine. It’s great. Makes for great, cheap products and long-term strategies that aren’t trying to shake all the money off of you.

But that’s the end goal, still.

As a friendly reminder, Valve also universalized DRM, invented multiple new types of microtransactions and actually kinda invented NFTs for a little bit.

No, I didn’t. I don’t know who teaches people that commas represent small pauses in speech, but they’re not helping.

That’s what the ellipsis is for. If you want to correctly do fake Shatner you do

“This… means… that, Mr. Spock”.

That’s where the comma should go, by the way. You use it to separate the vocative. I had to use a period in the incorrect sentence above just to avoid the redundancy with the incorrect ones splitting the verb from the subject and the object.