NuXCOM_90Percent
@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
- Comment on Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...' 4 hours ago:
Because submarines are even more terrifying and even more effective
- Comment on Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...' 5 hours ago:
That is one of those tell me without telling me deals.
All the “ai will take over a post truth society” bits and the focus on mercenaries was all over sci fi for decades by that point and a lot of the former goes back to a mix of the Frankenstein complex (which is literally creation myths) and the Reagan Nixon debate.
It is why there is so much truth in the torture Nexus memes.
- Comment on Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time: 'What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about...' 10 hours ago:
Honestly? I believe it. It was just a huge hodge podge of conspiracy theories and activist/terrorist groups that folk had vaguely heard about that would never have worked together. And said conspiracy theories tended to have a VERY fragile basis in reality. But also… shit like FEMA being an evil organization that is giving us all a plague has totally been a conspiracy theory for as long as FEMA existed… and just as questionable for why FEMA would be the org doing that.
It is similar to how… based on a lot of the references he has used and his comments in interviews, I 100% believe that Kojima mostly wrote the MGSes apolitically. I firmly believe someone on his team actually cared, but those games are mostly just a bunch of action movie tropes (or outright scenes) combined with a very surface level understanding of nuclear weapons and reading encyclopedia articles to sound smart.
Stuff like this always makes me think we need a “poe’s law but for politics”. And it always reminds me of Austin “Papa Bear” Walker shitposting in the Remap twitch chat during one of the keighleys. Trailer for the Call of Duty where you are fighting for The Gipper (?) and invading Generic Middle Eastern Country and blowing shit up for US interests and Austin just said (paraphrasing) “if I were in charge of marketing it would be this exact same trailer but you would know I was angry about it”.
- Comment on Dave the Diver director addresses controversial “Best Indie Game” nomination from 2023. “There’s nothing indie about us, we didn’t apply for it” 1 day ago:
The issue is generally more funding related.
One “indie game” might have a massive budget and multiple support studios. Another might have gotten fifty bucks for giving an investor a blowie and somehow turned that into a game. Sometimes you manage to get those massive upsets but the reality is that money tends to correlate with quality very strongly.
- Comment on Dave the Diver director addresses controversial “Best Indie Game” nomination from 2023. “There’s nothing indie about us, we didn’t apply for it” 1 day ago:
The keighleys are a shitshow in a lot of ways.
My understanding is that it is a VERY small subset of judges who bucket the games into categories and then that is sent to the wider range of outlets.
According to the keighleys themselves: thegameawards.com/faq
Nominees for most categories of The Game Awards are chosen by an international jury of over 100 global media and influencer outlets, selected for their history of critical video game evaluation.
Specialized juries also convene for other categories including esports, accessibility and best adaptation.
Each voting outlet completes a confidential, unranked ballot based on the collective and diverse opinion of its entire editorial staff, listing out its top five choices in each category.
Ballots are tabulated, and the five games that appear on the most ballots are put forth as nominees. In the event of a tie, six (or more) nominees will be announced in a category.
Game Awards producer Geoff Keighley is not a member of the jury and does not vote on the nominees or winners. Similarly, The Game Awards Advisory Board has no involvement in the awards process and learns of the results at the same time as the general public.
How much you believe that last bit gets messy and is irrelevant to the topic at hand. But more than a few games media folk have openly complained that the pre-sorting into categories is just complete nonsense and all they can really do is pick what they know of once the final ballots go out.
So that is why you have shit like the Simulation (?) category that is a catch all for sports games, flight sims, strategy games, mobile games, rocket league, minecraft, etc. Similarly, you get cases of “… Dave the Diver is not an indie game but I guess it is the best game in the Indie category?”
- Comment on ‘There Isn’t Much Sway Held by Past Success’: Baldur’s Gate 3 actors reveal it hasn’t boosted their careers 1 day ago:
What story do you think her imdb page tells? Because she has consistently done 2-3 roles per year since 2022. And a lot of those are games that have been in dev a long time.
Also… is she major marketing for E33? I don’t watch a lot of commercials these days but mostly if ANY VA is involved it is Cox or Starr. Like, I think Alice Duport-Percier (the singer of Alicia) has gotten more face time across the various youtube ads and what not than anyone else (and rightfully so. That song contributes so much to the Vibes of such a Vibes based game).
But either way: That doesn’t actually change the point. The BG3 VAs pretty much all knocked it out of the park. And that isn’t translating to meaningful increase in roles.
Which has come up a lot over the years. Very few VAs see major success even after bringing EVERYONE to tears with how good of a performance they gave. And the Troy Bakers (and Laura Baileys) of the world are a whole different argument.
- Comment on ‘There Isn’t Much Sway Held by Past Success’: Baldur’s Gate 3 actors reveal it hasn’t boosted their careers 1 day ago:
Did it?
Checking www.imdb.com/name/nm10804818/ and it doesn’t look like she became particularly more popular than she was prior to BG3
Which is kind of the point. YOU recognize her and so do a lot of gamers. But… that doesn’t translate to getting cast by studios.
- Comment on Hesitating getting a Switch 2 (1st game console in 15 years)... 4 days ago:
I would very much not trust a 7 year old with a 450 USD device but you do you.
Honestly? If what you want is something to play “nintendo games” with the family? I would just go buy one of the pi-like devices or even go full sicko with an FPGA and then totally obviously legitimately purchase and rip every single game you want.
But in all seriousness, a small raspberry pi-like device running ES-DE is probably the genuine best choice for someone who wants to play the games of their youth without thinking much. AliExpress is nowhere near as good as it used to be but Retro Game Corps has reviewed a LOT of these kinds of devices over on youtube.
And if you want the portability? You can buy two (there are plenty of gameboy-like devices in that space) and still come in way under the price of a switch 2. Which, again, seven year olds are stupid and destructive.
- Comment on System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster review - a careful makeover that doesn’t wholly stave off the ravages of time 4 days ago:
I would 100% love a Nightdive (or similar) remaster of Deus Ex. But my point is more that it really doesn’t need it, mechanically. If you were to go boot up DX after having played nu-Prey or Shadows of Doubt or whatever, it would be familiar. Some rough edges but no more than going back to DOOM after… DOOM 2016. And SS2 (and Thief) is maybe one notch further than that.
Contrast that with SS1 where it honestly had more in common with what would become the mechwarrior games than DOOM (see also: CyClones).
As for funding: Plenty of indie devs have talked about it. Xalavier Nelson Jr is always a good listen (he did a few episodes of Remap Radio). Late 2010s/early 2020s, getting funding for a video game was, if not easy, very doable. That is more or less what let Nightdive establish themselves as the weirdos who go REALLY REALLY hard on loving remasters of older games.
But between economic uncertainty and the realization that COVID was probably a localized peak for the gaming market, it has gotten a lot harder for basically every studio to get funding. Which is likely why Nightdive seem to be doing every single iD/MS game they can or games that are part of multimedia franchises (e.g. Dark Forces).
So Quake 4 is a no brainer (would love 3 but that is multiplayer first which gets risky). And while Nightdive CLEALRY love System Shock (it is more or less what the company was founded on), getting the funding for a full “game” a la 2023’s SS1 is a much bigger challenge than a ridonkulous source port/patch.
- Comment on System Shock 2: 25th Anniversary Remaster review - a careful makeover that doesn’t wholly stave off the ravages of time 4 days ago:
I mean, that is literally what they did with SS1.
I’m not optimistic though. SS1, even in the EE, was ROUGH. SS2 is not that far off from Deus Ex and immersive sims… really haven’t evolved much past that. That combined with the endless funding faucet shutting off makes me pretty sure they’ll be sticking to more popular franchises and the like (allegedly the next big Nightdive announcement is at Quakecon).
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
What you are describing is less a throuple and more just bog standard Ethical Non-Monogamy with shades of Polygamy. It would be your wife with multiple partners and you making the proverbial (sometimes literal) sandwich.
I emphasize that because there is a lot of media and societal pressure on all sides. ENM has increasingly become divided on gender lines with (cishet) men having been taught by the tates and the manosphere that it is taking THEIR women away from them and ruining THEIR women forever and so far. Whereas women (and the lgbtq community) have almost flocked to it in a similar manner to “free love” back in the day as there is an increasing push to not actually have kids… at which point monogamous sex starts to make a lot less sense.
Whereas throuples are often romanticized. In large part because people watched/read the trainwreck that was Twilight and all came to the realization that “she got two hands…”.
At the end of the day? Every person and every relationship is different and it is really on you, your partner, and your friend to decide what works for you.
For what its worth? Some very good friends of mine are in an ENM relationship and I’ve had a relationship in the past where we also weren’t exclusive sexually. But the ground rule we, and they, use is that they have one emotional partner. Sex is fun and harmless (if you use protection). I broke up with my ex but for completely unrelated reasons and said friends are perfectly happy as far as I can tell. Emotional bonds are where things get REALLY messy. I’ve always avoided it but every couple I’ve known that tried it fell apart within a year or two. Whether that is good or bad really depends on your life experiences and where you draw the line on “save the relationship” and “live your lives”.
So, personally? If you and your partner want to try this I would suggest NOT banging the dude you clearly both already have emotional connections with. But, again, you do you.
- Comment on Signatures skyrocket for Stop Killing Games campaign after big youtubers take up the cause, resulting in 100k signatures in 2 days. (Details on how to help in text body of post) 5 days ago:
Yeah. It has rapidly turned an initiative that was already unnecessarily combative toward devs (fuck the publishers though) and associated it with harassment and review bombing games that are actually Doing It Right just because they worked with the wrong third party studio. Not to mention all the “Well, we don’t agree with everything asmongold says, but let’s call a truce so long as he is gonna let us play our video games”
And… honestly? I have disliked thor since LONG before all y’all realized he isn’t the world’s best WoW player or he has an opinion you don’t like because he was considering things from the perspective of the people who would be doing the work to enact these “simple requirements”.
#But it feels REAL fucking everyday normal to watch people immediately go from “the harassment campaign that led to the death of Mikayla Raines was horrible” to “Let’s fucking ruin Pirate Software’s life and attack him and everything he has ever associated with because we are morally righteous”
- Comment on The 'Stop Killing Games' initiative is close to its final deadline, and after that, its leader is understandably done: 'Either the frog hops out of the pot, or it's dead' 1 week ago:
Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real “okay, let’s go back and reduce our technical debt” for the majority of games.
So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.
But also… how does that change anything? “Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works”?
- Comment on The 'Stop Killing Games' initiative is close to its final deadline, and after that, its leader is understandably done: 'Either the frog hops out of the pot, or it's dead' 1 week ago:
Louis Rossman is, at best, a “free speech absolutionist” libertarian, but he is probably the youtuber with the most experience actually working to get consumer (well, small business) rights legislature passed. And he specifically talked about this www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4zH8bJDI8
In a nutshell: It doesn’t matter if thor is a dipshit (he is and always has been). Attack the arguments, not the person. Because others will have similar complaints and all “He is a fucking prick and he didn’t read the FAQ” does is hurt your argument and make things seem culty.
Because if it really WAS actually addressed (and understand that a response is not necessarily a refutation), point that out. Rather than require people to go dig through a bunch of youtube videos and blog posts.
- Comment on Microsoft Plans Major Job Cuts at Xbox Gaming Division 1 week ago:
It is not something people could really predict.
Games and media sales did indeed go down. But movie theatres (and a lot of live entertainment) never actually went back up. People didn’t “go back to their regular lives”. We got a new normal
Which is why trump et al are working so hard to trigger doom spending and likely another pandemic or three if rfk gets his way.
But the bigger factor is funding. Plenty of indie studios have talked about how hard it is to find funding. Because economic uncertainty means that even a 2-3 year investment is a LOT riskier than it used to be. And that is a death sentence for indie devs but also very alarming for the major publishers who have to answer to investors.
Fuck microsoft and all their bullshit. But this goes way beyond “they bought too many studios and mismanaged them”
- Comment on Restricted data once again leaked on War Thunder forums 1 week ago:
Yeah… that is xenophobic nonsense.
You don’t need a major successful live service game to build a honeypot for military secrets. I remember back in the day the arma fansites and the like would be CONSTANTLY filled with “is it real? if so… somebody getting black van’d” style posts. Same with flight sims. Anywhere you have even pseudo-realistic military hardware/tactics you will have people who insist on stuffing files in their pants and scanning them to prove why the thing they work on is better.
It is always hilarious that warthunder can’t go a month without classified information. But that more just speaks to how insanely popular that game is.
- Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] 1 week ago:
Yet again, your response was “if they didn’t want to get harassed by the people who totally aren’t with us, they shouldn’t have crossed us”
Yet again, we lived through all this shit with gamergate.
- Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] 1 week ago:
There is a reason that there are regularly listicles about “top 1000 horrifically angry comments on github” and the like. And that goes up even more when you are working on a closed source product and have been up and pounding through tickets for 26 hours straight.
Not to mention proprietary or re-used code. Like… I think Call of Duty is STILL technically the quake 3 engine if you go deep enough into the source code? And while Q3a (presumably licensed at some point since it is GPL from a google) is open source, there is going to be a lot of code in there that isn’t. It is very common to use other libraries and suddenly needing to open source your account management system because one of your games is dead in the water is a huge problem. ESPECIALLY if the goal is so that “fans” can… reverse engineer it to build their own servers (and nobody would EVER profit from one of those…).
thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP.
Which can be the difference between “Okay, we’ll give you two months to get this shit popular again” versus “Well, it is going to cost X engineering hours to clean up the source so we are just gonna kill it now and get on that. Oh, and if the source isn’t cleaned up within, let’s say, one month, that is a breach of contract and none of your team gets severance”
- Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] 1 week 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.
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.
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”.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
“Legal” is a very strong word here.
A better statement would be that there hasn’t really been a major court case regarding decompiling source for hobby use and most cases where it is used for profit or piracy are no nos for existing reasons. But for education purposes or to develop and interface, it is a grey area. In large part because said education makes you toxic as hell in industry and said interfaces are usually for things that violate the license agreement and TOS because the software didn’t provide an interface for a reason.
And then you run into cases where the act of bypassing protections to get the binaries in the first place put you in further hot water. Sort of like how the (way over simplified) argument that you are legally allowed to have a backup of your video games but the act of making said backup gets REALLY sketchy in a lot of cases.
I would probably phrase it more as “decompiling source code is not illegal. How you use it might be”
- Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] 1 week 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.
- Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms] 1 week ago:
It was a shitshow start to finish.
First and foremost: it is an inherently adversarial “movement” name which actively shifts the blame toward developers. One of my gaming buddies was a community manager for one of the studios that got gutted over the past year or so (gotta “love” how that doesn’t narrow it down at all) and he definitely had some Thoughts about getting constant social media spam about how they are “killing games” by not releasing offline versions of old games as they were doing layoffs on the regular.
There is a reason the only dev/“dev” who gave any meaningful feedback was thor the shithead. And while it may suck that he didn’t have the same opinion as the people accusing devs of killing the games they spent the better part of a decade on… Yeah, pirate software is a dipshit who was just trying to put himself as a position of authority because his dad worked at Blizzard.
But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective. Well, from the perspective of a developer who expects to get fired any second now because funding will arbitrarily dry up. Yeah, the end result will TOTALLY be that you get an extra six months of salary to make the offline client and not that you’ll be held in breach of contract and lose your severance because you couldn’t pound that out in a week.
But even without starting things off at “its just about ethics in game journalism” levels of discourse: Yes, yes, yes, I know that Ross et al intentionally were vague and shut the fuck up. If you push “We need legislature on X” to a governing body without an actionable plan? Schoolhouse Rock doesn’t start blaring and Aaron Sorkin doesn’t… okay, he still gets a boner but for different reasons. What happens is the lobbyists and Jack Thompsons of the world swoop in and make damned sure that those “details get ironed out” the way they want.
It sucks because treating this as part of a larger effort that included actual Game Preservation efforts and worked with policy groups and developers would actually have been awesome AND gotten widespread support even from the studios themselves. Instead it was a flashy campaign that started off by flipping the bird to people getting fired left and right and reveled in its ignorance of how legislature even works. And then managed to get dragged into a slapfight with some jackass who plays wow and sells mobile games.
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
But from a management perspective
Of course this model fucking benefits the managers. They aren’t tied to those incentives. They get to keep their jobs when some assclown wears a “dark maga” hat to the keighelys and the game craters.
And… fuck the managers. They are already doing great.
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
Like I said, the DLC is still on my todo list but assuming it follows the Bloodborne DLC difficulty (it sure as hell is following the Bloodborne DLC concept and narrative…)? Yeah, I would be amazed.
But I did watch a video of someone dodging to beat the real end boss of the core game which I similarly thought was nigh impossible. And it is incredibly brutal with basically a need for fairly perfect play just to do chip damage. So… sickos gonna sicko.
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
Believe it or not, but you can actually criticize a business practice without solving all the problems in the world.
That said? Less of a focus on widespread acquisitions and immediate profits and more on realizing how many games have long tails and how the profits from a game that company (so not even studio) released five years ago can still fund development. Also, much more transparency in game development and regular credits updates so that people don’t have a giant five year blank spot on their CV that will never get filled in unless they crunch for six months to make sure they were employed a day before release.
And actual salaries and not “incentives”.
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
Perfectly fair.
I think Team Ninja screwed the pooch on other aspects of it (basically every single enemy does nothing but delayed attacks…) but I still think Rise of the Ronin set the bar for what a parry should be in the 2020s: Triggerable from block so you have minimal penalty to mistiming it for all but the perilous attacks. And Clair Obscura is similarly awesome for tightly coupling the parry and dodge timings so you can learn a fight with perfect dodging before switching to perfect parries for maximum punishment.
If whiffing a parry means I lose half my health bar (cough Dark Souls cough) I am never going to use it. If whiffing a parry means I take chip damage or if I can practice my timing with a safe defensive mood? I’ll be grinning like a beast as I clown on the heroes/“heroes” of the Bakumatsu.
But yeah. I REALLY enjoyed Lies of P even if I think the last 3 or so bosses are… kind of genuinely bad (two puzzle bosses in a row is also a real bad feeling). Still need to get around to the DLC but I am INCREDIBLY interested in what the next major game from that studio is. But I wouldn’t encourage anyone who doesn’t vibe with LoP to try again (well… maybe with the new rebalance patch?).
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
Guess what impacts sales figures and even metacritic scores these days?
Assholes like asmongold. Because getting your game review bombed and having all the twitch streamers checking out your game have their unpaid moderators run triple time because they didn’t sticky a clip of them calling the character generator “woke trash”? That severely impacts sales. And Games Media is in a horrible state and the more corporate outlets (but also even a lot of the independent ones) just aren’t going to want that smoke for daring to say a game was fun if it is the latest “culture war” game.
It was bonuses, added PTO, and a Switch. You’re acting like they were facing a pay cut if the DLC didn’t perform well.
There is a reason that it has increasingly become a good practice to refer to “total compensation”. Because, yeah, everyone loves getting told by the CEO that they are essential and saved the company and are awesome and everybody gets a day off … but only if they give the CEO time to peel out in his new ferrari first. But the reality is that that is baked into the expected salary and you are effectively taking a pay cut any year you don’t meet those arbitrary criteria… which are almost always never something YOU have any control over.
And you know who DOESN’T get a pay cut in the years where half your department got fired on a Thursday?
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
They actually did a lot of rebalancing of difficulty and P Organ (hee hee) progression alongside this. Mortismal touched on this in their video.
But Lies of P, at its core, is a game about parrying. You can get a long way with dodging and i-frames (I didn’t do a deep dive on how good of a dodge P has but it is definitely on the lower end of the genre) but basically the last three or four bosses of the core game more or less require parries and guard breaks to have any chance of damaging them.
I loved Lies of P but the difficulty progression is REAL bad. Sekiro actually had similar issues but at least had Genichiro 2 to try and force you to learn (and then Ape to drill that in). Whereas Lies of P lets you play “wrong” for like 16 hours.
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
This isn’t a perfect final solution, but it’s a positive step, so is still say worth celebrating.
It is a “positive step” up from the hellscape that has been used to underpay and screw over devs for decades now.
I get we all want to feel good and not have to give a shit about actual labor issues and compensation of workers. But… this is just the kind of shit that makes it even easier to continue abusing the people who make the games we love and make sure that the golden parachute upper level managers get to have 500 person studios all on the back of having been at a meeting for a successful game.
- Comment on Lies of P: Overture devs actually rewarded for making a solid DLC in rare industry W: Getting a bonus, 2 weeks vacation, and a free Switch 2 1 week ago:
No. This shouldn’t be the norm. How “successful” a game is on metacritic and sales has shockingly little to do with the actual dev team. At best it is marketing and PR. But even that pales in comparison to whether a disgusting hateful bigot says his audience should buy it or threaten to rape the families of every single person who worked on that game and a few others to boot.
It sure beats “Thanks for your hard work. Now that we’ve released, we don’t need you anymore, so good luck on the job hunt.”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma for no apparent reason.
But yeah. That is the bullshit that gets pushed around. Oh, that is just how business works and we are business people and you should understand business. Wait… the CEO doesn’t have significant portions of their salary and existence tied to a metacritic score? Well, that is because the CEO is good at business.