11 ms·

I've found that the answer to this is simple, and may be broadly applied to any bad actor in the gaming industry: They make games people want to play. This isn

I've found that the answer to this is simple, and may be broadly applied to any bad actor in the gaming industry: They make games people want to play. This isn't even (remotely) limited to people who don't read the news stories. I have personally spoken with scores of people who will (for example) express displeasure over Ubisoft's culture of sexual abuse, and not blink an eye when it came time to purchase Assassain's Creed: Valhalla. Or of Rockstar's culture of abusive crunch and equally abusive Twitter presence while buying premium versions of TLOU2. So long as they pump out decent-to-good games, no amount of bad press will impact the number of games (and microtransactions) purchased. And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again. Bioware, as an example, is being lauded in the press and by gamers in general again because they announced that they're making another Mass Effect game. There's very little hesitation before gushing about it, even given ME: Andromeda and Anthem. Even the press releases about The Witcher 4 are filled with praise for a company that just released a turd of a game (though you'll still find plenty of people who heap praise upon CP2077 because they have the blessed combination of PC components).

novok 6y ago
People act the same with movies & hollywood. The story of the abusive director with a short fuse is so common it's a TV trope. #metoo first got traction in the movie industry after all.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  In the first class of a film elective I took in college, the professor read a list of movies and their directors we would be watching. When he got to Roman Polanski, he paused and glared around the room, as though daring anybody to voice an objection.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    TBF, if you are studying cinema you kind of have to study Polanski, and many other problematic directors and actors.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      The problem I have is the gushing praise for the director's technical or artistic skill, without any mention of anything else. The movie industry has protected and defended this guy for decades. Film professors who only want to talk about art, not the artists, play a role in perpetuating this ongoing injustice.
      - serf 6y ago
        >Film professors who only want to talk about art, not the artists, play a role in perpetuating this ongoing injustice. I agree that there is an injustice in the willful ignorance one must have to abstract the art from the artist during discussion -- but frankly if we were to focus more heavily on the damaged artist during the discussion of art : A) the topic drifts from aesthetic appreciation to a mix of criminology/sociology/psychology/hearsay/pop-culture trivia information B) it's an on-going philosophical/ontological debate as to whether or not the actions of the artist should be considered within the scope of the discussion of the art. To expound on B : It's fairly well understood that if I showed a painting of nearly any skill level to 3 groups of people, and I differ the backstory between the three of them, I can easily manipulate the surveyed aesthetic appreciation from each of the test groups. If that effect is well demonstrated, and the topic of study and discussion is 'Art', and i'm asked to create an analysis of the aesthetic of a specific piece .. should I consider the artist backstory as a confounding factor with regards to any analysis I might do on the art piece? Some people consider those confounding factors to be within the scope of artistic discussion -- some people don't. Personally I find that only classical depictions of artists get a lot of heat about their personal lives : painters, directors, photographers, writers. Meanwhile certain industrial designers and architects are on record as being wildly racist or misogynist, and no one mentions it or bats an eye... but then again industrial design and architecture are on the fringes of art where many seem not to realize the artistry element exists at all.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    To me this is similar to studying classical music but skipping Wagner because he was literally a Nazi.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      I think you're overlooking an obvious middle ground.
    - linksnapzz 6y ago
      "Literally" doesn't mean what you think it means.
      - prvc 6y ago
        "Literally", in the view of those doing the skipping, not the post author, is my interpretation.
      - KMag 6y ago
        Thanks for this. I thought either my music history was off by a century, or the Nazi party started way earlier than I thought.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
tomc1985 6y ago
> filled with praise for a company that just released a turd of a game Hey now, that's harsh. If you have a decent-spec gaming PC you have the "blessed combination". The console releases were a trainwreck but unless you're calling Skyrim and Fallout 4 turds as well I wouldn't put CP2077 in that category.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Fallout 4 on xbox one actually is a turd, it crashes every hour. It's buggy as hell and will never be patched. Bethesda doesn't care.
- EpicEng 6y ago
  Even if you don't experience performance problems, the game is buggy as all hell, and some of those bugs are game breaking. Besides, the issue at hand here is company reputation. CDPR knowingly released a game to consoles that is damn near unplayable. It was a blatant cash grab at the expense of their customers, and if you honestly believe they didn't know what the state of the game was prior to release then I have a bridge to sell you. Sony actually has pretty strict certification criteria from what Ive read, so the assumption is that CDPR promised a day 1 fix for all of this stuff and they failed. Miserably.
  - Grimm1 6y ago
    I have 72+ hours in the game now, I've experienced one or two tposes and a single crash. I know many people who have had a similar experience to me.
    - EpicEng 6y ago
      Cool for you, I'm glad. We have thousands of streams showing people with high end rigs running into ridiculous bugs, and it's completely irrelevant in regards to the console versions.
      - Grimm1 6y ago
        There has not been thousands of stream that is complete hyperbole at least for PC, but yes granted console has been a complete shitshow and is inexcusable.
walrus01 6y ago
The video game software development industry is fundamentally broken in its corporate culture. I simply do not understand where they're finding people who are willing to work 'crunch' 60 to 75 hour work weeks without overtime to ship a game quicker. There is seemingly a near infinite supply of young, somewhat naive people who can be recruited by video game development studios to do so. I work in a role where there is a real possibility that I might be woken up at 3am by an on-call alert. Or that I might have to work the occasional work week far past 40 hours due to an emergency. But it's in service of a critical infrastructure project (carrier-of-carrier ISP backbone links), not a video game. There is no video game on the planet that is so important people can't work a normal 40 hour work week. If a video game developer can't build, QA and ship a game with a team of people working normal office hours, then in my opinion their priorities are grossly out of whack. I have lost track of the number of instances I have seen of big video game development studios treating their employees in an abusive manner. And yes, I suppose I'm somewhat of a hypocrite here. I bought a used copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for $20 on ebay. I bought a copy of Fallout 4 for $18 on the xbox one game store. Am I contributing to the problem? Very likely.
- verall 6y ago
  The truth is, a lot of industries are abusive like this, unless you make it into a top echelon (size varies by industry). Look at the hours for drawing or animation. Or in the film industry, there are unions, but work conditions are similar in non union productions, and unions are often abusive to younger and newer members.
- tt433 6y ago
  Video games have real magic in them: a powerful motivator to work shitty dead end jobs for too many hours and inadequate pay. Hopefully more aspiring developers will develop independently, I would rather do hardscaping than work in a studio where my labor didn't belong to me.
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    Same with anime. It's known that many (if not most) animators don't even make living wages, but still, people go to work in the industry :/
ballenf 6y ago
> I have personally spoken with scores of people who will (for example) express displeasure over Ubisoft's culture of sexual abuse, and not blink an eye when it came time to purchase Assassain's Creed: Valhalla. Or of Rockstar's culture of abusive crunch and equally abusive Twitter presence while buying premium versions of TLOU2. You say this as if these people are being inconsistent. I'd argue they are not. Any individual sale of a mass market good has as-close-to-zero-as-possible impact on the publisher's bottom line. But it increases the quality of life of the purchaser who is then better equipped to make a difference through advocacy. > And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again. People buy individual games not reputation. Sometimes people buy nostalgia, but often regret it. Giving money to a company based on reputation is a donation. I think it's important to keep in mind that buying and donating are separate things with separate motivations.
- falcolas 6y ago
  > You say this as if these people are being inconsistant. They absolutely are. If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution). The second move is advocacy. Citing mass market purchase numbers when buying from a company someone morally disagrees with is merely a justification to assuage their own guilt at making the purchase. And it’s a pretty a poor one at that. > People buy individual games, not reputation. CDPR’s release of CyberPunk 2077, and the hype leading up to that puts lie to that assertion. It was bought more off the reputation of CDPR based of the Witcher series than any merits it had on its own. This was evident in almost every discussion leading up to it. In fact, aside from marketing, CP2077 had no real reputation of its own when it busted preorder records.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    > If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution). As a general rule, I do find this is often difficult to actually put into practice. However, you are exactly right when it comes to video games. It's a crowded market of entertainment products. You can find an alternative that you will enjoy just as much with less hypocrisy.

novok 6y ago

People act the same with movies & hollywood. The story of the abusive director with a short fuse is so common it's a TV trope. #metoo first got traction in the movie industry after all.

bigbubba 6y ago
In the first class of a film elective I took in college, the professor read a list of movies and their directors we would be watching. When he got to Roman Polanski, he paused and glared around the room, as though daring anybody to voice an objection.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  TBF, if you are studying cinema you kind of have to study Polanski, and many other problematic directors and actors.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    The problem I have is the gushing praise for the director's technical or artistic skill, without any mention of anything else. The movie industry has protected and defended this guy for decades. Film professors who only want to talk about art, not the artists, play a role in perpetuating this ongoing injustice.
    - serf 6y ago
      >Film professors who only want to talk about art, not the artists, play a role in perpetuating this ongoing injustice. I agree that there is an injustice in the willful ignorance one must have to abstract the art from the artist during discussion -- but frankly if we were to focus more heavily on the damaged artist during the discussion of art : A) the topic drifts from aesthetic appreciation to a mix of criminology/sociology/psychology/hearsay/pop-culture trivia information B) it's an on-going philosophical/ontological debate as to whether or not the actions of the artist should be considered within the scope of the discussion of the art. To expound on B : It's fairly well understood that if I showed a painting of nearly any skill level to 3 groups of people, and I differ the backstory between the three of them, I can easily manipulate the surveyed aesthetic appreciation from each of the test groups. If that effect is well demonstrated, and the topic of study and discussion is 'Art', and i'm asked to create an analysis of the aesthetic of a specific piece .. should I consider the artist backstory as a confounding factor with regards to any analysis I might do on the art piece? Some people consider those confounding factors to be within the scope of artistic discussion -- some people don't. Personally I find that only classical depictions of artists get a lot of heat about their personal lives : painters, directors, photographers, writers. Meanwhile certain industrial designers and architects are on record as being wildly racist or misogynist, and no one mentions it or bats an eye... but then again industrial design and architecture are on the fringes of art where many seem not to realize the artistry element exists at all.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  To me this is similar to studying classical music but skipping Wagner because he was literally a Nazi.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    I think you're overlooking an obvious middle ground.
  - linksnapzz 6y ago
    "Literally" doesn't mean what you think it means.
    - prvc 6y ago
      "Literally", in the view of those doing the skipping, not the post author, is my interpretation.
    - KMag 6y ago
      Thanks for this. I thought either my music history was off by a century, or the Nazi party started way earlier than I thought.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

tomc1985 6y ago

> filled with praise for a company that just released a turd of a game Hey now, that's harsh. If you have a decent-spec gaming PC you have the "blessed combination". The console releases were a trainwreck but unless you're calling Skyrim and Fallout 4 turds as well I wouldn't put CP2077 in that category.

walrus01 6y ago
Fallout 4 on xbox one actually is a turd, it crashes every hour. It's buggy as hell and will never be patched. Bethesda doesn't care.
EpicEng 6y ago
Even if you don't experience performance problems, the game is buggy as all hell, and some of those bugs are game breaking. Besides, the issue at hand here is company reputation. CDPR knowingly released a game to consoles that is damn near unplayable. It was a blatant cash grab at the expense of their customers, and if you honestly believe they didn't know what the state of the game was prior to release then I have a bridge to sell you. Sony actually has pretty strict certification criteria from what Ive read, so the assumption is that CDPR promised a day 1 fix for all of this stuff and they failed. Miserably.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  I have 72+ hours in the game now, I've experienced one or two tposes and a single crash. I know many people who have had a similar experience to me.
  - EpicEng 6y ago
    Cool for you, I'm glad. We have thousands of streams showing people with high end rigs running into ridiculous bugs, and it's completely irrelevant in regards to the console versions.
    - Grimm1 6y ago
      There has not been thousands of stream that is complete hyperbole at least for PC, but yes granted console has been a complete shitshow and is inexcusable.

walrus01 6y ago

The video game software development industry is fundamentally broken in its corporate culture. I simply do not understand where they're finding people who are willing to work 'crunch' 60 to 75 hour work weeks without overtime to ship a game quicker. There is seemingly a near infinite supply of young, somewhat naive people who can be recruited by video game development studios to do so. I work in a role where there is a real possibility that I might be woken up at 3am by an on-call alert. Or that I might have to work the occasional work week far past 40 hours due to an emergency. But it's in service of a critical infrastructure project (carrier-of-carrier ISP backbone links), not a video game. There is no video game on the planet that is so important people can't work a normal 40 hour work week. If a video game developer can't build, QA and ship a game with a team of people working normal office hours, then in my opinion their priorities are grossly out of whack. I have lost track of the number of instances I have seen of big video game development studios treating their employees in an abusive manner. And yes, I suppose I'm somewhat of a hypocrite here. I bought a used copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for $20 on ebay. I bought a copy of Fallout 4 for $18 on the xbox one game store. Am I contributing to the problem? Very likely.

verall 6y ago
The truth is, a lot of industries are abusive like this, unless you make it into a top echelon (size varies by industry). Look at the hours for drawing or animation. Or in the film industry, there are unions, but work conditions are similar in non union productions, and unions are often abusive to younger and newer members.
tt433 6y ago
Video games have real magic in them: a powerful motivator to work shitty dead end jobs for too many hours and inadequate pay. Hopefully more aspiring developers will develop independently, I would rather do hardscaping than work in a studio where my labor didn't belong to me.
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  Same with anime. It's known that many (if not most) animators don't even make living wages, but still, people go to work in the industry :/

ballenf 6y ago

> I have personally spoken with scores of people who will (for example) express displeasure over Ubisoft's culture of sexual abuse, and not blink an eye when it came time to purchase Assassain's Creed: Valhalla. Or of Rockstar's culture of abusive crunch and equally abusive Twitter presence while buying premium versions of TLOU2. You say this as if these people are being inconsistent. I'd argue they are not. Any individual sale of a mass market good has as-close-to-zero-as-possible impact on the publisher's bottom line. But it increases the quality of life of the purchaser who is then better equipped to make a difference through advocacy. > And sadly even bad games won't dent their reputation that much, especially if followed up by a good game again. People buy individual games not reputation. Sometimes people buy nostalgia, but often regret it. Giving money to a company based on reputation is a donation. I think it's important to keep in mind that buying and donating are separate things with separate motivations.

falcolas 6y ago
> You say this as if these people are being inconsistant. They absolutely are. If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution). The second move is advocacy. Citing mass market purchase numbers when buying from a company someone morally disagrees with is merely a justification to assuage their own guilt at making the purchase. And it’s a pretty a poor one at that. > People buy individual games, not reputation. CDPR’s release of CyberPunk 2077, and the hype leading up to that puts lie to that assertion. It was bought more off the reputation of CDPR based of the Witcher series than any merits it had on its own. This was evident in almost every discussion leading up to it. In fact, aside from marketing, CP2077 had no real reputation of its own when it busted preorder records.
- Talanes 6y ago
  > If you disapprove of a company’s practices, the first move is to not financially support that company (no matter how small your individual contribution). As a general rule, I do find this is often difficult to actually put into practice. However, you are exactly right when it comes to video games. It's a crowded market of entertainment products. You can find an alternative that you will enjoy just as much with less hypocrisy.