Right - you can’t sell something to a million people and still own it completely.

Mario game forcibly moved to cutting-edge software standards in open defiance of copyright law

Lemmy: “Oh, neat.”

using AI

Lemmy: “That’s theft!”

The proliferation of handles has made doors minor obstacles for medium and large breeds.

And is probably why that panicky retriever we dog-sat broke a toiler paper hook.

The Xbox people have a better grasp of things. Consoles have little reason to exist… and the writing was on the wall when the PS3 stumbled out the gate. Really, in the PS2 era, all those Renderware / id Tech 3 / Unreal 1 games running the same on every platform was a big hint that there was no longer a benefit to having different platforms. Now there’s just various badges over x86 PCs and smartphones - and the smartphones are starting to run Steam games.

None of which is to say that Microsoft has conducted their grand scheme to computer-ify the console market with any degree of finesse, consistency, or follow-through. They’re still idiots for setting successful studios on fire, and for refusing to shit or get off the pot vis-a-vis whether there’s gonna be an Xbox The Next One.

Yeah, either they pivoted immediately to find alternative funding, or that’s deeply telling of why they report on these problems specifically.

… some of which are physical versions of a code in a box. Or worse, a physical login for video streaming.

Well, half your digital library. We stopped paying another company so your money doesn’t count anymore.

We’re keeping it though.

Ohhh, you mean Ancestors, not Clair Obscur. Okay, that’s significantly less what-the-fuck stupid.

Nevertheless Ancestors obviously employed real artists doing real art since it came out before these tools existed. So it’s complete nonsense to scoff that 1666 must be made by, like, WallStreetBets redditors.

And meanwhile Clair Obscur still used these tools, and its Metacritic scores are “universal acclaim,” and my god would it be nice if words meant anything here.

> record-breaking award-winning artsy-as-fuck game about art’s art direction was garbage

I no longer respect your opinion. Good day.

And if they do have artists, this is fine - yeah? Like Clair Obscur? Or are you just saying words recreationally?

In any case it seems fucking insane to suggest the studio that made Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey in 2019 may not contain any true Scotsman, sorry, I mean real artists.

Clair Obscur used these tools, for similar purposes.

Do you think that game was cobbled together by random idiots?

‘The artists who worked on this game chose to use these tools.’

‘Why don’t you care about artists doing work?’

Incorrect.

I’m tired of having to activate detective mode on a video game every time a trailer or piece of art is released.

You could just… not. You choose the one-drop rule against the fancy denoiser.

None of the art in this game was imposed on them by aliens. A team of artists said ‘we need an evocative painting for like five seconds and we’ll fix it up later.’ This is the very earliest look at the project. It’s not placeholders making it into a finished game; it’s exactly where you’d expect to see placeholders. And placeholders of the sort where stick figures won’t do. It has to look polished at a glance, and then nobody should miss it when it’s not in the next version. For this particular game they surely considered grabbing a Dutch master’s lesser work off Wikipedia.

They do this ‘we’re sowwy’ song-and-dance because the alternatives are even less serious. You want the whole industry to reject these tools? Ain’t happening. Too useful. But they’re not gonna flop their dick on the table say ‘deal with it’ because the performative backlash would just get louder. Weak excuses are gentle appeasement about something everyone’s going to keep doing, because it works.

A studio comprised of A Guy could now crank out voice acting for an entire RPG, and unique portraits for every NPC, and animated FMV cutscenes, using little more than patience and taste. Quality’s worse than hiring a thousand people for seven years. Quelle surprise. But somewhere in-between, you can spend merely five million dollars, and get a game done in a year, that feels like it took ten. If you still gag when a character’s buttons are in the wrong place, at some point that’s a you problem. The buttons are not really the point of the work.