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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • Exactly. The problem isn’t diversity. The problem is soulless corporations who put out mediocre games, and then try to shoehorn diversity in a fairly surface level and lazy fashion as a distraction.

    It would have been weird if AC1 didn’t star an individual of MENA descent, because the game was set in the middle east. Origins had minority protagonists for similar reasons Connor being Native American in AC3 added a lot of depth when it came to the concept of freedom and how it relates to the American revolution.

    I feel like I’ve seen the same story a million times. Mediocre IP, lazy forced diversity, culture war commentary, undeserved stellar reviews, underperformance with audiences due to fundamental issues.



  • I feel like a lot of companies that put the most emphasis on making diverse IP make the worst products. I don’t think that the lack of quality is due to diversity. Rather, I think that companies with soulless corporate leadership have a habit of producing mediocre content and attempting to obfuscate said mediocrity by making an otherwise uninspiring game a referendum on the culture war.

    I’m willing to bet that there are developers who can make a game that is more organically diverse and genuinely fun, but that they don’t get an honest shot due to the state of modern gaming.

    Anyway this game is gonna be crap, IGN is gonna give it a 10/10, and Polygon is gonna go on a tirade when it underperforms in the same way every AC game since black flag has underperformed.


  • Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

    Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

    I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.



  • Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

    Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

    Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

    This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.





  • I’m surprised Sundar isn’t on the hot seat at this point.

    People are gonna be like “oh well he presided over X revenue growth and that’s all investors care about”. Investors also care about future returns.

    Under Sundar, Google has more or less completely failed to diversify. They’ve had the advantage on several products, only for them to dick around while their competitors established (or re-established) dominance. The areas where they have market dominance went from “we have the far superior product” to “this Lowkey sucks, but I can’t think of anything better”.

    As far as I’m concerned Sundar is Google’s Sculley. Google will go for a long time under its own momentum, but eventually the wheels will come off.

    Meanwhile Nadella is getting paid a quarter as much.