Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

…

If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

I disagree.

Amazon still owns and operates New World.

All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

The servers will be shut down in a few days.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

Yeah it hit that point a few days ago.

If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.

I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.

If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?

At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.

I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.

This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.

As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/08/23/concord-dev-writes-off-critics-why-would-i-care-about-a-bunch-of-talentless-freaks-hating-on-it/

The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.

The estimates I’ve seen from people going off of PS achievements for the game put total PS sales at about 15,000 compared to about 10,000 on Steam.

So that would equate to roughly an all time PSN concurrent player count high of 1,000.

The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.

47 playable days.

All time steam peak player count: 38,104.

Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.

…

Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.

15 playable days.

All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.

Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.

…

Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.

It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?

Realistically, its a corporate buzzword that is supposed to mean that the game delivers an exceptionally high quality experience, graphically, narratively, gameplay wise…

…but what it seems to actually mean is that the budget and manhour count and development calendar time ballooned to far greater than the original plan/estimates due to incompetent management.

At this point, I propose that ‘AAAA’ applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.

With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.

Basically… it doesn’t have to be from a grandiose marketing campaign attached to a AAA game, its more about being stuck in development hell and continuously funded to the point of destroying other parts of the business making it, like a financial cancer.

Hope you were wearing a proper mask while making these, otherwise…

paper shuffling noises

… Mmmhm, yep, your blood might just turn into gasoline.

The absolute worst, in my experience, is people who believe they are ‘empaths’, people who are hugely into superstitious nonsense like astrology or literal witchcraft, people who think they can ‘manifest’ things.

Those kinds of people have whole worldviews built around themselves being special, enlightened basically having superpowers.

They have no problem telling you how you feel or what you are thinking or why you did something, but if you even attempt to correct them, god forbid tell them they’re literally delusional, they’ll freak out and have a huge breakdown and cause as much drama as possible with everyone they know.

I have had waaaay too many of those kinds of people in my life.

I agree with you that most normal people would be embarrassed to learn they misread someone, but I seem to just have very bad luck of being surrounded by people who are just incapable of basic human decency.

As long as you’ve seen Lethal Weapon 4 rofl

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sH0Qda32IKM&pp=ygUkbGV0aGFsIHdlYXBvbiB3aHkgY2FudCB3ZSBiZSBmcmllbmRz

Doing better than I’ve been in a while.

After my doctors determined I was Autistic two years ago, my family decided I was actually schizophrenic and needed to be sent to a mental asylum in the middle of no where.

When I did not go along with this, they deactivated my phone plan, thus locking me out of my email, bank accounts, everything I had set up with 2FA.

Things went downhill from there, my car got stolen, I got robbed, lost my wallet and my bank cards and ids… ended up homeless for about a year, getting the shit kicked out of me by fentanyl addicts.

But uh hey, managed to get some of my id/cards back, and lucked out and found a motel that lets me stay month to month.

I’ve been doing my own physical therapy for half a year now and can finally walk without a bunch of braces, though only for short durations.

I had a bunch of broken bones and torn muscles and tendons… Slowly getting back to normal.

Good thing I managed to qualify for SSDI, otherwise I’d be dead!

Well, on the one hand, I do believe that dogs and cats have emotions similar, though likely not as complex as humans, and that if you know a cat or dog well enough, you stand a good chance at understanding some of its fairly basic emotional states.

Dogs and cats are both usually quite capable of sensing emotional states in humans, though each one will react a bit differently, so in that regard, they are sort of humanlike.

But… you wouldn’t be able to understand a cat or dog’s very specific opinions about a topic it could not possibly grasp.

Sure, you can probably tell if it likes or does not like a person or kind of food… but its not going to be capable of having complex opinions about fashion or politics or finances or something.

When people seriously act like their pet is telling them things that are far too complex, this person is either delusional or basically manipulating/guilt-tripping you by presuming to speak for an animal, and then they’ll say ‘Don’t blame me, pet just doesn’t agree!’

This is basically the behavior of an immature child or a manipulative sociopath.

Also, on its face, I don’t see anything wrong with talking to a pet as a form of trying to work through your own feelings…

… As long as you realize that that is what you are doing. That its not much different than talking to yourself in a mirror or a doll or something, in that regard. In another regard, the pet just views this as you spending quality time with it, and it probably enjoys that.

Sometimes it helps to just sit down and talk through your own feelings, and having a loving animal certainly can help you feel more calm and loved.

But again, if someone gets to the point that they actually think they are having a complex conversation with an animal and it is communicating complex opinions back to them… we’re back at either delusional or this all being a kind of sociopathic manipulation technique.

EDIT:

Its wild to me that Autists are often described by their tendency to attribute human like emotional capacities to things that do not have them… but its usually never pointed out that we know they don’t actually have them.

If I had to guess, I’d say we do it as a kind of coping mechanism of projecting our own experience of being emotional entities treated as unemotional objects… onto things that actually are unemotional objects.

If you can’t even pretend to have emotions for an object playfully, you’re likely not going to be able to treat an autistic person with empathy.

Kind of a coping mechanism and a bullshit detector at the same time.

Hah, maybe we can be friends lol!

How’s your day going? =)

Autistic person here:

I often ask people how they are feeling. Even though 90% of the time I can correctly tell by changes in a person’s behavior, language, facial expressions, intonation, etc, I am aware that I can’t literally read minds and the most obvious solution to this is just ask.

The 90% correct guessing figure comes from asking people and validating or invalidating my guess.

However, in at least my personal experience, neurotypicals almost never read my emotions correctly, will tell me how I am feeling, and essentially never ask. If they do ask, they will often get frustrated by how complex my emotions are, to the point that they vastly oversimplify to the point of caricature.

Then they go on to do or say things based on how they think I feel or felt and functionally spread lies about me constantly, which I am constantly bewildered by.

I would say that I am far more empathetic than most neurotypicals I meet or know, far more likely to spend my time and energy being emotionally available for them than they do for me, far less likely to assume my initial impression is correct, far more likely to truly engage.

As to the increased suicidality of Autistic people yeah that tracks with my lived experience.

Not in that I’ve personally considered suicide, but I am in constant tension of wanting to communicate with people vs essentially always being misinterpreted.

So I’ve just grown to be more and more content with mostly being alone.

Basically everyone I ever once thought I loved or trusted has been so utterly incapable of giving me 10% of the emotional support or availability that I feel I give them that I’ve learned that most people will exploit me and then scream at or assault me or have some kind of total emotional breakdown which they then blame me for whenever I am able to tell them how I feel.

Its beyond exhausting.

As an example that happens frequently to me: I also have a form of neuropathy, which often causes me to be in extreme amounts of pain for no obviously visible reason. I will tell people, I am not angry with you, I am in extreme pain, I have neuropathy, and they will just say no you aren’t, no you don’t you’re just angry for (insert projection of their own insecurity here).

Expanding on this concept: Do any of these programs aimed at architects have a capability of easily exporting to blender, such that they could be imported into Unity or UE?

Apparently the longest ever recorded glide is 45 seconds.

Fish don’t have lungs, so the analogy is kind of busted, but some humans can hold their breath for 30 seconds, some 2 minutes, some 5 minutes, but overall it doesn’t take long for brain damage/death to occur.

I’d guesstimate that a flying fish would be probably irrevivably dead after 3 to 5 minutes out of water.

I tried to look up more specifics on flying fish respiratory systems vs other fish back when I posted this, to see if they have measurably better ability to remain alive out of water for longer than other fish, but I couldn’t find much.