Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms]
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day agoThere was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
And that always comes up because it is the truth. It is the same problem as “Well, you worked yourself to death for the past five years but decided you needed to take time off for mental health reasons. Unfortunately, we don’t launch until six months from now so go fuck yourself. Hey, send in Fred on your way out so we can tell him he needs to work 90 hour weeks for the next six months but won’t have been here long enough to get in the credits”.
You know what doesn’t get that? Being told you need to architect your game, from the start, to use listen servers. Or to know that if things even look slightly bad you will have no runway to fix it and will immediately be told to wrap it up and release the “offline mode” in the next month.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
No. But “stop killing games” is an inherently adversarial statement. Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever. Let alone the devs who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into it.
And here we get to the crux of things. And the good news is that we already fucking went through all of this.
“Nobody should have to put up with harassment. But, really, it is your job to deal with that and we have our demands. So give me what I want and this all goes away”. Am I talking about “Stop killing games and give us an offline server for your MMO” or am I talking about “Fire that bitch and stop talking about woke games because I care about ethics in games journalism”?
And we saw the exact same responses from the dev side (and the smarter/older influencers). Either completely ignoring it because they don’t want to get doxxed or “Yeah… there are parts of that I really like. But I don’t know enough to really comment too much. Anyway, back to talking about the new Silent Hill game”.
pugnaciousfarter@literature.cafe 19 hours ago
This is such a shit take that publishers want games running forever. The whole reason they get shut down is because they don’t make a profit and if something that’s not earning them money might as well be something that’s going to take gamers away from their new game. So they’ll of course shut it down. It’s in their incentive.
Your arguments seem very disingenuous.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.