Games
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
Authorized Regular Threads
Related communities
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
- !gaming@Lemmy.world: Our sister community, focused on PC and console gaming. Meme are allowed.
- !photomode@feddit.uk: For all your screenshots needs, to share your love for games graphics.
- !vgmusic@lemmy.world: A community to share your love for video games music
- !freegames@feddit.uk: A community sharing free games giveaways.
Help and suggestions
By platform
By type
- !AutomationGames@lemmy.zip
- !Incremental_Games@incremental.social
- !LifeSimulation@lemmy.world
- !CityBuilders@sh.itjust.works
- !CozyGames@Lemmy.world
- !CRPG@lemmy.world
- !horror_games@piefed.world
- !OtomeGames@ani.social
- !Shmups@lemmus.org
- !space_games@piefed.world
- !strategy_games@piefed.world
- !turnbasedstrategy@piefed.world
- !tycoon@lemmy.world
- !VisualNovels@ani.social
By games
- !Baldurs_Gate_3@lemmy.world
- !Cities_Skylines@lemmy.world
- !CassetteBeasts@Lemmy.world
- !Fallout@lemmy.world
- !FinalFantasyXIV@lemmy.world
- !Minecraft@Lemmy.world
- !NoMansSky@lemmy.world
- !Palia@Lemmy.world
- !Pokemon@lemm.ee
- !Silksong@indie-ver.se
- !Skyrim@lemmy.world
- !StardewValley@lemm.ee
- !Subnautica2@Lemmy.world
- !WorkersAndResources@lemmy.world
Language specific
- !JeuxVideo@jlai.lu: French
view the rest of the comments
Microsoft shuts down studios like it's no one's business. I don't know of a single big tech company that supports devs.
Game developers are seen as free labour... Then companies wonder why their new consoles/systems flop.
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!....
....DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
..DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
“Game developers are seen as free labour” I emphatically agree.
There used to be a commercial for a school called Westwood College Online University. The gist of it was in the commercial it showed two dudes playing video-games. The infamous “tighten up the graphics on level three” commercial.
The message of this commercial pissed off so many people at the time but I often think people misread its intentions. A lot of folks would say to me “This is a joke, video-games are much harder to make. This school is a joke too.”
The message I got from it was much more sinister. It suggests three things simultaneously:
Video game jobs from that era into the 2000s were looking for eager young people to make games because these adult-children were often suburban, middle class kids with support systems in place. Studios could offer unpaid internships for any opportunity to work at their “dream job”. When in reality, these parents were effectively paying these studios to hire their children. They had hopes that their children could climb a corporate ladder starting at a higher level. Their parents often were boomers with access to that wealth.
TLDR; I 100% agree with you. The video game industry is the way it is because it’s been addicted to free labor for a long time. They have failed to cultivate and retain talent with developers “burning out” after five years on average. They break common sense labor rules and violate workers’ rights unlike any other tech industry. Everyone in that industry just complied for years because they were brain washed to believe they were “so lucky” to have this job.
I’m not surprised this is where it ended up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I usually think of the video game industry as having the bad aspects of both the tech industry and the media industry.
It sure seems that the reason they're shutting down or selling off so many studios is to make Xbox a leaner purchase offering. Because shutting down or otherwise divesting yourself from all of those developers is counter to what a healthy console business ought to do.
Even shedding their studios, Xbox is such a huge brand, who could possibly afford it? The only people I could imagine would have the means and desire to buy Xbox from Microsoft are Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, or the Saudi government. You know, the worst people on the planet.
sigh That's gonna be the end goal, huh? Wouldn't surprise me if it ends up in the hands of Bonesaw or the Ellisons.
Not that I want to float ideas, but Zuck & Bezos have tried to get into the gaming space before.
I will sell every Xbox I have, and figure out a way to sell my 17-18yo gamer profile, 60k+ gamerscore, and 300+digital game library on eBay if one of those assholes buys the brand!
Not only is it a huge brand, it's also a struggling brand. Like as disappointing as Sony has been lately and while I do have some regret that I got a PS5, I have never once wished I had instead gotten an xbox.
First of all, you must be excited to see all the new opportunities that came out of the PS5 jailbreak. Popping in a PS2 disc and playing on a PCSX2 fork made specifically for the PS5, that's some cool shit.
Second, despite the truth in your statement, I don't think the world oligarchs have any qualms about Xbox being a struggling brand. Rather, they see it as an opportunity to further cement their media empires for a century or more. "I already own the news media, social media, and print media, but what if I also owned the medium of games as well?" They don't want a single art form to escape their grasp and coalesce/spread dissent.
Oh I'll have to check that out. I've been letting it update when it wanted and kinda assumed I had missed the window of breakable versions.
But yeah, your second paragraph is also accurate sounding to me. Though I do wonder if they see the video game market similar to the other media markets, considering how no one seems to be able to compete very well with Valve.
Elegantly worded. So many decisions of their incomprehensible decisions suddenly make sense.
I think purchasing them was actually the bigger mistake then selling them. If you're selling hardware at a discount because you plan on making money via the games then you probably want a lot of independent studios paying you to make games on your platform. Maybe offering special incentives for exclusive titles or something, but realistically having some flagship exclusives that may be in house and a healthy 3rd party dev community seems like it makes the most sense. You can sit back and print money once the console is made just by owning the platform. One company cannot realistically oversee the development of enough studios to make that model work. In my opinion, you need a lot of studios to make a lot of games to make your hardware compelling. I'm sure some people use their console as a dedicated COD or 2K or [insert game here] machine, but I no longer buy consoles because there just wasn't enough to play on them to make it worthwhile for me.
Budgets got higher, which made multiplatform releases just about mandatory. Making third party games exclusive isn't working out, in general. I don't know that that's a genie you can put back in the bottle anymore.
the issue was Sony was killing them on exclusives. god of war, spider-man, last of us, horizon, astrobot, Ghost of, etc etc
So the route that David Zaslav took with Warner Bros. to make it easier to sell to Paramount.
I don't think Nintendo operates like that: https://www.cnbc.com/make-it/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-salary-to-prevent-layoffs-why-thats-uncommon.html
That one is always misleading. It's a known Japanese corporate move. As the article says, called "hansei". Culturally regarded as an empty public gesture done exclusively to save the company's public image. It works as a PR move, and it obviously did here, since it happened in 2013 and people still talk about it.
But, it actually does nothing financially, and usually none of the money saved goes anywhere. Nintendo avoided layoffs because they hoard liquidity. Have done so since the 80's. Their revenue could collapse and they could lose money for a decade and still not reach bankruptcy. That is far more unique to tech corporations than halving executive's pay. It is what actually has been protecting Nintendo from their failures. They still exploit and abuse employees just like every other Japanese corporation.
Doesn't make it misleading, it is something that happened. I never read Sony did this before. Which other company did that, other than Nintendo?
Where do you get that?
(Edited a quote and reply away, because I was too dumb to read correctly.)
So because it saves Nintendo from their failures, does mean its misleading to write articles that Nintendo did it?
In what way and where did you got that? Are there reports about Nintendo doing it?
Just use your brain. Nintendo has roughly 8600 employees, 3000 in Japan alone. Salaries are the vast majority of indirect operating costs in any company. If Iwata halving his salary pays to avoid layoffs, then his salary had to be a huge percentage of Nintendo's operating costs and the WiiU failure would've been the least of their problems.
Nintendo regularly reports operating costs in the order of several billions of dollars quarter over quarter, a majority of them would be salaries or manufacturing. Even if Iwata was paid a single billion dollars a year, and halved that, it would barely amount to a rounding error on the accounting. It was just a PR movement, and most Japanese salary men recognize it as such. It is something done for media clout because "we will just pay you with the piggy bank money" doesn't add any drama worth a headline.
And Nintendo working conditions have always been controversial. While they are by far not the worst of Japanese corporate employers. They are not exactly saints either, falling into the same patterns that plague the Japanese office culture. Specially the abuse of employees qualified as independent contractors and unpaid overwork. It triggered a labor complaint in the US in 2022. They have become a bit better very recently, apparently. But it is still one of the oldest and most traditional fucking companies in the planet, they carry some troubling organizational culture sometimes. But this is hard to prove because secrecy and not advocating for oneself is part of said culture.
Iwata is just different. It definitely won't happen today.
When did Nintendo do mass layoffs? Nintendo is just not in a position where they buy lot of companies, then mass layoff (or cut salary in halve) when a game does disappoint. So you are right that it won't happen today, but for different reasons. I'm convinced that they would probably take a hit themselves, instead laying off huge part of their developers. This is one of the few things I actually like about Nintendo; and overall I don't like Nintendo anymore. The mass layoffs issue is a Western world phenomenon mostly (but not exclusively, just a tendency).
Is Nintendo big tech though? They seem kinda too specific to a sub section of an industry unlike the other companies that typically come to mind when big tech is mentioned.
Depends on what Big Tech and how big it is means to you. If we speak about the biggest tech companies ruling the world, then Nintendo isn't it. But Nintendo is in my opinion big and a tech company. I mean even Netflix can count as big tech company, depending on the definition, and they are not as big nor do they something different than video streaming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech
Investors!, Investors!, Investors!, Investors!