MudMan

Neat. I wasn’t able to get into Isolation, it just takes a long time to get going and I don’t click super hard with what you do moment to moment, but it looks super cool and a lot of people really liked it, so I’m glad they’re getting another shot at it. I’d check it out.

It depends on what the money guy is saying and doing. I have no need to rag on people because of their job title if they’re not messing it up. Valve has had economists working on monetization for them, you don’t see audiences publicly stating that they’re sure that guy is an asshole because they work on monetization.

And no, it’s not an unfortunate job title. This may come as a shock to people, but you DO need money to make videogames. And however you’re going to monetize yoru game, you need someone looking at that. You may not like how they’ve monetized AssCreed or Outlaws or The Crew or whatever, but they also have The Division and XDefiant and Rainbow Six Siege and Brawlhalla. I would be shocked if they didn’t have a monetization design department.

Look, Ubisoft is struggling, particularly on the expensive AAA stuff that is their traditional bread and butter. I would say they are very late to the party at breaking free from their framework mindset where games are largely built on a bit of a template. They need a new approach to coming up with game concepts, if only for PR’s sake. But please, please, stop feeding the anti-woke mob’s bad faith nonsense and stop trying to find indivduals to try to pin structural anger about certain corners of game development. We can -should- be better than that as a community.

Also, good for them for reversing course on the The Crew server stuff and for doing PoP The Lost Crown, that game is awesome and underrated. Would love to see them diversify into more mid-size stuff like that, because they nail it suprisingly often when they do.

Right.

Except “the money guy” isn’t the monetization designer, which is what it seems this one guy has been his entire career. “The money guy” has some nondescript title, like “head of sales”, or is just the CFO of the company. Or isn’t even part of the company and just sits in a board with a bunch of other people and periodically shouts at the CEO to make more money.

Bet Chassard was super glad when he got promoted from being a game economy designer in a bunch of mobile games and got a fancy “monetization director” title instead. Irony is a bitch, because you KNOW he wouldn’t be getting half the crap he’s getting if he still had a job with “designer” in the name.

For the record, economy designers, monetization designers and, presumably, monetization directors, whatever the difference may be, have as much of a chance at being nice guys who care about their jobs and are attuned to their audiences as anybody else. I don’t know this guy, and I don’t know if he’s any of those things, but what he wrote doesn’t suggest that he’s not. If people dogpiling think they’re delivering karmic justice or disproving his point, they’re almost certainly doing neither.

I would be a lot more willing to agree with you if “nobody” hadn’t been driving a massive harassment and hate campagin complaining about “DEI”. I mean, it pops up explicitly right in the comments of the piece linked here. “Nobody” has been busy.

I can’t believe we haven’t learned anything since “it’s about ethics in games journalism”. “It’s about monetization in AAA games” now, apparently.

FWIW, I don’t know this guy, but I don’t believe for a second that he would love it if his competitors failed. People have a wild, distorted idea of how AAA game development works and how people making it (leadership included) look at these things. The guy went online to say he’s frustrated at seeing industry insiders siding with an online hatred campaign and people are all dogpiling because hey, his title sounds like the thing I don’t like, so the assholes being assholes online must be justified this time.

Look, much as the heavily online audience likes to pretend otherwise, most people making these games are perfectly nice, care about what they do and even have some degree of attunement to their audiences. Corporate dynamics are more than capable of producing dysfunctional results without an evil mastermind pulling the strings.

Also FWIW, I mostly agree with him. If you’re in the games industry get the hell off of LinkedIn comments at all (as Chassard just learned the hard way), but especially don’t be on LinkedIn cheering for colleagues doing badly. That’s just rude and unprofessional. You are allowed to keep your opinions offline and should exercise that right when it comes to commenting on your colleagues’ livelihoods.

I mean, a bit of context may go a long way here.

How can you wish a company to fail simply because they do not cater to you or that the produce does not please you is beyond me. We are all on the same boat, please please please, stop spreading hate, we should all uplift each other instead of bringing each other down.

I get it, pithy joke, why let it pass, but still.

“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future."

See, this would ring a lot more true if the issue wasn’t being literally litigated right now and going forward. As in, somebody just got sent to jail. Court documents about Trump’s outstanding criminal trial just got released.

Yeah, people want you to litigate stuff that happened four years ago. And then for those responsible, Trump included, to go to jail for… you know, all the crimes. “I want to talk about the future” doesn’t play quite as well when the judge is asking you about those.

Is that good, though? I don’t want realistic and challenging AI opponents, at least not most of the time. It works for a 1v1 fighting game, but you don’t want every enemy in Diablo being a smart, human-like entity capable of min/maxing their build and acting with real self preservation. You want them to act as a pincushion so you can test if your build is doing good damage and to watch them pop like so much bubble wrap.

So yeah, for 1v1 fighting games I want a human, but that’s not an intrinsically better solution than a “dumb” AI. It’s the opposite of that in most games, I’d say.

There are remarkably few MBAs acting as creative directors, but it’s true that the place where the motivations framework thing is most popular is triple A games as a service stuff. Honestly, it’s mostly used as a way for creatives just doing game designery things to explain how the game designery things align with the marketingy things and the businessy things. That’s part of why I don’t love it, it doesn’t really do much, it’s mostly a translation layer.

Yeeeah, the motivations stuff for game design is very popular right now with devs big and small. It kinda rubs me the wrong way, although it’s hard to articulate exactly why.

I think it sits at an intersection of still wanting to look at players as behavioral data, but at the same time being sorta generic and too broad to inform much of anything specific. Still, that’s not to say you can’t do good work using it.

I recommend taking a look at the full original article, the summary linked here may be a bit misleading. https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/most-gamers-prefer-single-player-games

This breakdown chart, in particular is very interesting. https://www.midiaresearch.com/storage/uploads/paragraphs/dbdbaba91de72cd615d8be1a0119cfca

Turns out that yes, slightly more than 50% of the people they surveyed prefer solo, but that’s distorted by older people going HARD towards that option. Every segment below 45 years old skews slightly towards multiplayer, although the split between what type of multiplayer is pretty even.

Gotta say, I HATE that PvP is the preference across all age groups among multiplayer fans. Outside of asynchronous competition, leaderboards and fighting games I profoundly dislike realtime PvP.

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dark

The reason I’m still tempted to go back is my kitchen has three heating elements, not four. I have other tools to complement it, but getting the pressure pot out of there is a signficant gain. Still, lots of money for that, and I’m also short on counter space, so I’m holding off for now.

Yeah, I am using one of those, mostly because I already had it in the place I moved to and I don’t see the need to buy an electric one. It really causes me no anxiety at all to use it in terms of security. It’s safe and reliable.

But also, if you’re not used to them and you don’t know what to buy and how to use them, I see the appeal of a programmable electric thing where you push a button, it stays to a set temp and pressure and it’ll automatically vent and tell you to take things out. I had one of those precisely because it was small and fit my kitchen setup, and I used it constantly with no issues.

“Dedicated” is doing a lot of work there. Regardless, they are both a vessel with a small hole where you’re heating up a gas. The difference is the pressure cooker has a valve that lets the pressure climb higher before it vents while the rice cooker is only up to whatever pressure builds up due to the vent cap foam filter being narrower than the lid. The old “exploding pressure cooker” thing is about that valve getting blocked, broken or clogged and pressure building indefinitely.

Only that shouldn’t happen on modern versions of either because the electric versions of both are using timers and sensors to control the cook. My old-school stovetop cooker still relies on pressure building until the valve hits the pressure I’ve set and vents the steam, but the electric one I was using before didn’t have to vent (at least when used manually, some programs had venting built in), it just went to temp and pressure and stayed there for some time, then released the steam at the end.

But even if my stovetop’s valve failed, there is still a safety valve. And even if that failed again, there is a scored area on the lid that is designed to fail first and vent the pressure (although you wouldn’t want to be in front of it if that happens).

I’d still default to an instant cooker if I was worried about safety. Not only does it not build up pressure indefinitely in the first place, but it also won’t let you open it until it’s vented, so you won’t open it and get a faceful of pressurized steam. Which, honestly, is the real danger with old manual pressure cookers. Everybody freaks out at anecdotal reports of explosions, but from what I can tell “opened too soon or vented incorrectly, got a burn” seems to be the real scenario you should be concerned about.

Ironically, that can still happen with rice cookers. I’ve (lightly) burnt myself by popping the lid open while my rice cooker was still hot before.

I’m curious about how expensive. My last electric pressure cooker was a more expensive model (and I sold it after years in working order), but the stovetop pressure cooker I have at home now was more expensive than the entry-level Instant Pot branded electric cookers.

So are water heaters and we use those pretty confidently.

Pressure cookers get a bad reputation for safety from the times when they were basically a metal box with a tiny hole in it, but modern cookers have a lot of additional redundancies. Particularly modern ones with timers. It’d take a lot of work to get one of those to go catastrophically. It’s more likely to get killed by lighting than by pressure cooker, at least in the US, and as far as I can tell from available stats, and most of the pressure cooker injuries the stats list are from people who got a contact or steam burn, not by explosions.

It’s also interesting that people are often afraid of exploding pressure cookers when they think of them as pressure cookers, but you don’t get as much anxiety from rice cookers (AKA pressure cooker - but small).

The Tyranids work well in strategy games which, of course, Blizzard clocked immediately. For other game types it’s a bit trickier, and it still feels like “playing the bad guys”.

It’s crazy how much less of a factor the core concept of “fantasy races IN SPACE” has become for everything else, though. When Starcraft had the Protoss they stood in for the Eldar, which while still very much dicks and not-the-good-guys are still recognizable as a self-insert faction, but haven’t been the main focus of a videogame adaptation, ever. The Tau then close the loop and slot in for the Protoss a little, but they are less of a PC individual hero thing. Pretty much every other faction they’ve focused on is either a variation on Space Marines or a monster faction for them to fight.

It kinda sucks. I liked 40K when it was all about “the future sucks and is full of dicks and you play them as they endlessly fight each other for no good reason”. I am a lot iffier on “the future sucks and you play the space Christian Nazis who are apparently the least bad option, and if there is another we don’t care about it because branding”.

If the space fascists aren’t the bad guy at least as often as they are the protagonists then you’re not making a “grimdark future”, you’re making games about space fascists.

The thing is, these are just a pressure vessel with a timer and a heating element. They are all good unless they are very poorly made.

That goes many places in an attempt to justify enjoying an authoritarian power fantasy, but ok.

I mean, my very nerdy answer is I don’t want to, I just don’t get a choice. I actively did not play Space Marines when I was playing the board game and they are by far the most boring faction, even if the minis look great. I am endlessly frustrated by their elevation as the default POV characters of the entire setting and miss the good old days when 40K at least pretended to be about PvP competition and had an incentive to keep a facade of supporting multiple sellable, playable factions.

I mean… the normal speed for seeing behind your car is the speed of light, so that may come a bit short of expectations.

In any case, I agree that by itself it’s not a big deal. After the broken windshield wiper, the pieces that fall off and the sticky accelerator one may… you know, infer a pattern. Which, really, is the news here.