Second Wind is the journalist team formerly from The Escapist with a few additions. They cut themselves loose from their contracts to make gaming news and analysis videos independently. This video looks at the outrage cycle that’s evolved around video game releases since the 2010’s
Following gaming news has become increasingly exhausting in the last decade. GamerGate has never truly ended, its shadow’s been pervasive of the entire discourse on videogames for years. Every AAA game is an excuse to rant about the (perceived) political agenda of its writers or the art team or whatever.
I disagree with the final take of the video, though. While moderation and companies taking a stance is certainly necessary, the main problem is that the social media algorithm feeds on this kind of discourse and amplifies it because it increases engagement. There can never be enough moderation to silence these trolls because you cannot moderate all platforms and all places, and the trolls outnumber the developers (and with AI on the rise, the numbers are even more stacked in favour of online trolls).
There will be no solution to this problem for as long as social media is run the way it is at the moment.
zecg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Devs are also contending with the issue because they pivot from any originality to make safe games in a popular genre du jour and then cynically overmonetize it. Chuds are a loud minority, but other gamers also haven’t bought Marathon, it’s not just online negativity that’s the problem because it never impacted sales. It’s just that games are well enshittified and have become a bad value proposition and also everyone has libraries full of better games from times they were a better value proposition and also indie publishers have sprung that are doing a great job and prioritizing fun / quality.
Shit, I like gaming, especially since Linux became the default platform, but with a library of 1.5k+ titles in my family group, I’d have to be stupid to buy fucking GTAVI day one from the CEO that hates both games and me personally.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You could also not buy GTA6 and not be outraged about it.
zecg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Absolutely what I’m doing