Naia
@Naia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on New York sues Valve for enabling "illegal gambling" with loot boxes 1 week ago:
The point is that this is not the first time that Valve has been singled out for things widely done across the industry and they’ve also been falsely accused of doing things that the rest of the industry is doing.
If they wanted to go after Valve specifically for gambling they should not have linked it to kids. It’s invoking “think of the children” BS while diluting what they claim is the core argument.
Gambling is also harmful for adults. They are M rated games. If a child is playing the game that is a parental issue, not a state issue. It’s not illegal for kids to play M rated games, nor do I really think it should be as that is something parents should decide. The issue is that a lot, if not most, parents have no idea what their kids are doing online.
The argument that “mostly kids play these games” is unsubstantiated at best. Might have been true in the 90s and early 2000s, but there are people in their 50’s that have played games for the majority of their lives.
Also, PC gaming tends to skew older. They might have more of an argument if they were talking about Call of Duty on a console, but an M rated game is still not targeted to that age group.
Again, if they want to go after Vavle for gambling, then do that. But they are jumping around with what exactly the accusation is which makes it seem like they are grasping at straws at best or trying to hide the real reason at worst.
That we have all the age verification crap happening at the same time is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Like, How about going after anyone implicated from the files?
- Comment on New York sues Valve for enabling "illegal gambling" with loot boxes 1 week ago:
None of this is exclusive to Valve. Yeah, people can technically buy hardware and sell it, but they can also gift games or whatever and people were already using third party websites to sell their items for cash.
And MMOs with random drops have historically always had an RMT market that is against the TOS where people sell in game currency or items for real currency.
I’m not saying that valve should be let off the hook when it comes to loot boxes, but this lawsuit kind of stinks because it is all over the place and again, valve isn’t the worst example of what they describe.
The fact that it’s framed as “protecting children” and claims that valve is intentionally targeting children despite the games in question being rated M and old enough that I seriously doubt there are that many minors playing is putting a ton of red flags up for me. They also add the 90s era “violent video game” rhetoric that was always nonsense.
The conspiracy part of me thinks this is going to eventually lead to more age verification BS and they are targeting valve because it is the only company that is complying in a way that still protects user privacy.
- Comment on New York sues Valve for enabling "illegal gambling" with loot boxes 1 week ago:
Which actually makes in simple to me. They are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks while also muddying the water as if they are trying to hide something.
They are throwing very convoluted logic around for this, and I immediately distrust anyone in government who makes wild leaps to “protecting kids”.
First off, I don’t like loot boxes. Specifically paid loot boxes, because if you don’t signify that something like this could effect any game with random drops.
Second, all the games in question are rated M. They are very much not targeted at kids. Obviously kids still play them, but that is on the parents.
That they also added “violent video games” nonsense that could have come out of the 90s is absurd. Is it about gambling or violent media? If it’s about violent media, why not go after any of the other shooters that are likely going to have way more kids on them. Counterstrike is old enough that I would be surprised if it isn’t a majority of millennials and gen X. At the very least I seriously doubt there are a ton of minors playing.
If it is actually about gambling targeted at kids, The Pokemon trading card game is probably the best example of “gambling aimed at kids”. Sure, digital loot boxes can be more insidious, but that isn’t how they’ve framed this and if you’ve seen how TCG players buy packs it’s very much looks like gambling.
The framing of this is very suspicious because it doesn’t make sense to go after valve exclusively for any of the things they are claiming. And the 3x fine is ridiculous. I’m all for fines actually being based on profits, but you can’t tell me they would do the same for any other company.
And part of me feels this is a strong-arm tactic because valve is not publicly traded which lets them be very pro user/consumer and is the one company that is complying with age verification in a way that still protects user privacy.
- Comment on New York sues Valve for enabling "illegal gambling" with loot boxes 1 week ago:
Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is,
Which is no different that trading card games and also not valve’s fault.
I have no love for loot boxes, at least when real money is used to get them, but from what I’ve seen across the board Valve is far from the worst with them. Valve also doesn’t allow you to sell the skins you get for real money, only steam credit. That is still real-world value, but they are also not the only company that does that.
Outside of real-world money for loot boxes, most of the issues with the skin market are not anything Valve did. It was third party sites popping up that allowed people to sell their skins for cash.
Valve have even made changes to their side that crashed the market and caused a ton of “value” to disappear.
The fact is that this lawsuit is pretty obviously not actually about gambling. If it was there are far worse companies they could go after.
And I do want something to be done about them across the board, but this is not going to do that.
- Comment on New York sues Valve for enabling "illegal gambling" with loot boxes 1 week ago:
Look, I don’t have any love for loot boxes in general, at least when it’s real money. But there are far more egregious examples that would work just as well if not better for going after the practice of loot boxes than what steam does.
There’s a reason they are singling out steam, and they signal why in the statement, saying this “teaches kids to gamble and makes them violent”, repeating 90s BS about “violent video games”, when the games in question are rated M, meaning if a child is playing it then that is 100% on the parents… and still not illegal anyway.
They are most likely singling out valve because they refuse to play ball with the privacy violating age checks. Valve did the bare minimum they had to: basically clearing anyone with a credit card registered as being over 18.
Valve is also not a publicly traded company and is very customer focused, even with the loot box thing.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 2 months ago:
For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I’m less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even thinking having an artist make the “core” texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn’t a problem for me.
Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.
- Comment on Cope 4 months ago:
As a lesbian I can say with certainty that men without beards don’t look like women.
- Comment on For those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big? 4 months ago:
How have I not heard of this one?
I did hear about Light No Fire from the No Man Sky devs. Looks impressive from what I’ve seen so far on it with it’s supposedly literal Earth sized world.
- Comment on For those of you who enjoy open-world games, how big of a world is too big? 4 months ago:
Depends on a lot of factors like what the actual game is.
A sandbox game, bigger is better. Like Minecraft. If the goal is exploration and resource gathering you can plop me into an infinitely generated map and I will be happy.
Outside of that, narrative games can be too big if there’s nothing to do in between points of interests. I don’t mean like side-quests, but more like random encounters or crafting/gathering stuff. There has to be something there I can either get distracted with or to “on the way” to the next location.
I think a lot of games want their cake and eat it too. It’s not an open world game, but Final Fantasy XIV promoted the Heavensward expansion with the zones being like 5 times bigger than the base game…
…but there were only 6 of them and between already being able to teleport to each zone there wasn’t any difficulty navigating the zones and they added flying which made them seem smaller than the base zones.
1.0 XIV had impressively sized zones that were unfortunately very copy pasted and between the rushed release and the engine limitations enemies were very spread out.
Again, depends on the game.
- Comment on I am in the US and its gotten very political but as pretty much a peon do I just tune the stuff out thinking its fear mongering? Or should I closely pay attention to it? 1 year ago:
I’ve literally seeing the rights of myself and other get taken away in the last week. I’m moving cross country to get out of the state I’m currently in because it does not recognize who I am.
They want to open up people like me to descrimination and hate crimes. I’m wondering what will happen with my job if this stuff keeps happening.
There are real world consequences to politics and people sticking their heads in the sand is the reason literal fascism is on the rise.
If you are privileged enough to feel you don’t have to worry about politics that generally means you aren’t the current target.
- Comment on It's a good group! 1 year ago:
I don’t know much about it either, but in general conservatives and the right at large have no media literacy. Everything is shallow and face value to them. They see pro military crushing stuff deemed “lesser” and they basically get off on it.
It’s the same reason for right wing star trek fans. They see space military and ignore all the themes and other things like the fact there is no capitalism. It’s always pushed left ideas, yet only now it’s “gone woke” because it’s pushing modern left ideas, not stiff they’ve learned to ignore.
Just look at any media made by conservatives for conservatives. It’s terrible and the kind of wish fulfillment youd expect from a child telling a story.
- Comment on Video game publishers are starting to use "anti-DEI" as a marketing meme 1 year ago:
Like I feel they should want right wing nuts to be mad about the game. They won’t stop talking about media that are mad about and so many conservatives will still buy the thing even just to destroy it and virtue signal to the other idiots.
The left? Some may still buy it, but most don’t talk about it at all. The idea of “go woke go broke” has always been a message of intent, not reality, at least in the modern era.
Nothing makes me want to try a game or watch a show more than legitimate, non surface level representation that incels whine about.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year ago:
I guarantee he is projecting how little he works on others. Every accusation these people make is a confession.
And yes, even the “why do you have to make it your entire personality?” is projection. As much of a cult as maggots are, I think the only real difference is trump is too stupid to use the usual double speak politicians were using before and the base that always was out for blood ate it up. He also gave them phrases and symbols to plaster over all their stuff.
Yet they will claim someone having a single pride sticker on their car or flag outside their house is “shoving it in their face” while they drive down the road with a 2 or more flags I their car, along with countless number stickers, and a house covered in at least a half dozen flags and signs.
And no, I’m not exaggerating. I see these trucks (always a shitty truck) and houses regularly where I currently live, and I’m fleeing in a month as I’m queer and one of their targets.