bad gaming news and being double faced
Look, I like playing videogames and all, but lately this has become a depressing passtime, and I don't mean it from playing videogames, but more so all around it. Constant layoffs that keep on increasing every single year, the constant fuck offs by corporations, and the promises they do that were just blatant lies are amongst some of the bad things happening with this medium, yet every time after some outrageous thing happens, I can't help myself but notice how double faced some people can be about these news.
Okay that may be a bit harsh, but look at the 2 most recent bad news, PlayStation cutting off physical games and the Xbox layoffs;
PlayStation claims that physical games don't sell enough to justify their production anymore, but my guy that's what happens when you keep pushing for a digital only ecosystem, especially when most games releasing on the PS Store lack a physical edition at all, when you keep pushing for digital codes inside physical editions that don't contain a disc at all it's obvious that people will be less inclined for these as time goes on, but it's still very much important to have this as an option, otherwise PlayStation will have a monopoly on its consoles like Apple did on its portable devices, until recently where they're slowly being forced to open up their ecosystem.
Its a shitty move by PlayStation, and people rightfully were very vocal about this... Until they made some old Call of Duty games available there IN DIGITAL for PS4 and PS5 and suddenly a big chunk of that vocal side stopped screaming at PS.
Don't back down!! That's what they want you to do so they can keep doing shit like this!! Just because they gave you something you're fond of doesn't mean they should be excused of bad things like these, it feels like people only scream at these things until they consent them with something smaller than what the big goal is. Don't stop screaming at them until they actually change back these decisions!!
Another recent case is the Xbox layoffs. Let's not lie to ourselves, Xbox was doing pretty bad since more than a decade at this point, and Phil Spencer choose to buy more studios rather than fix that, but still, Xbox keeps on laying off people and this time they did it again, gutting off some historical studios like Id (which they claim they have around the same size as the time of DOOM (2016), but will it really be the same studio it once was with an important part of it gone?), but Obsidian is making a new Fallout so all is forgiven.
We can't keep ignoring the layoffs in this industry, this isn't normal in any other medium, why should it be here? Yeah Obsidian is returning to Fallout again, but an important chunk of Obsidian and Bethesda studios were fired after this, plus some projects by Obsidian were cancelled too, projects that their recent audience was looking towards, like Avowed 2.
You can say what you want about Nintendo in it's Wii U era, but at least Iwata cut off his salary severely rather than firing people in the studio for short term profits, something that Xbox (and Microsoft) can't say for themselves.
Obsidian is back to Fallout, yeah, but don't stop being vocal about these layoffs just because they gave you this side news.
I may seem like a pity mf after complaining about this, but I have my reasons for not backing down the screams, those reasons being Valve.
I used to play Team Fortress 2 a lot back in the late 2010s, hell it became my most played game on Steam and one I hold dearly to my heart, I met a lot of people through it and the community was pretty united back then... Until the bots started appearing.
These weren't the trading bots (that are also common and propagate en masse in TF2), but rather spinning bots joining matches as the only long distance class in the game and instakilling everyone, while spamming racist and xenophobic shit in-game and even kicking real players until they were the only ones connected to the server. It was a mess, it was chaos, the game was unplayable.
Surely Valve will find a way to deal with this, I mean Counter Strike has VACnet and- oh, they muted all Free to Play accounts so they can't voice talk, chat or even send voice commands... Aaand the bots got over this limitation by buying stuff so their account can talk again, WHILE paying Valve for this.
Ok this seems like a bandaid fix, but surely Valve will fix this somehow, right?
1 year passes, TF2 keeps receiving updates that only add community made content while not addressing the elephant in the room that keeps getting bigger and bigger with every passing day. It gets to a point where people make a campaign to get Valve to do something, even getting news reporting on this, and they eventually say something! They post a tweet on their long dead Twitter account saying that they hear us, and they'll fix the game.
Wow, that was unexpected considering Valve never replies to things like these, but surely it will be soon enough that the game will be in a playable state, righ-
2 YEARS, IT TOOK THEM 2 YEARS PLUS ANOTHER CAMPAIGN WITH OVER 300K SIGNATURES FOR THEM TO DO SOMETHING AND TRY TO FIX THIS. I cannot state this enough, but if other videogames companies were found being so late with these fixes they would be crucified by the entire gaming community, but Valve gets a free pass because they made Steam.
This ain't the only case of Valve games being mishandled so badly, there's other cases too, like Left 4 Dead 2 servers being ddosed for an entire year, and the entire launch of Counter Strike 2 being so barebones compared to the original one, Global Offensive.
Look, I'm glad that Steam made playing games on Linux an actual reality, thanks to that I could switch over to it and leave Windows behind, but I cannot blindly trust Valve like most people do because of this, Valve isn't a saint with no fault, they do bad things too, and they should be held accountable for it, yet most people don't seem to care because Steam is the only storefront on PC that doesn't shoot itself on the foot. My fucking god.
Big ranting aside, that's my view on this for me, which I wish wasn't the minority with how much these companies get free of their faults, but what you gonna do?
See ya later, hopefully with a more upbeat topic.
-Anubi "She doesn't like Steam so she hates Gamers" Arts.