Hulu was really good a decade ago. Then they put ads in and created a higher tier. Nobody was surprised when it happened again some years later.
In Ukraine starlink was being hailed as a hero before Elon decided to turn off Internet access in areas he deemed Ukraine to be “too aggressive”.
Goodwill doesn’t deserve it’s reputation. It uses minimum wage exemptions for disabled people to pay it’s staff below minimum wage.
Edit to add - Destiny 2 was the other one I was thinking of and couldn’t quite place. Great PvE shooter with great story, and they killed it to force people to buy DLC.
D2’s problem is different. To succeed critically they needed to produce The Taken King or The Witch Queen every content cycle, but there’s no way to do that except release only once a year — but they wanted to release every 3 months, so they made shitty DLCs that everyone mildly disliked and hyped them up so people actively disliked them on release.
Then the shitty mini DLCs began cannibalizing the dev, time and monetary budget from the main DLCs and it fell into a downward spiral.
Yeah that wasn’t great but I think it was the part where they literally deleted a bunch of the story so you either bought the DLC or wandered the maps aimlessly killing stuff that really broke any good will left.
Or worse… you bought the DLC and had no idea what was going on because you’re a newer player and they deleted the story that this DLC is a follow up.too…
It’s amazing how people still get things wrong ages after it’s been corrected by the author and spread misinformation and the hate involved with it.
Elon didn’t turn starlink off. It was always off. It was never ON to be turned OFF.
Further, allowing ukraine to use starlink as a weapon in an offensive attack was against the terms of service and would put spacex in a very difficult position with regulations. That’s why the DoD took it over, and it’s okay now.
If it was always off then why did they lose Internet? And why was Ukraine’s counter offensive bad but Russia’s offensive okay?
They lost internet because they went out of range of where it was on. They assumed it was on everywhere.
They strapped them onto boats where the internet was on, and drove them to where the internet was off. Then they begged SpaceX to turn them on, and they refused.
Not turning it on to allow the attack was in line with the terms of service and weapons export rules. SpaceX doesn’t want their consuner service to be considered a weapon.
Russia was getting satellites from 3rd parties and using them in ukraine because they work in ukraine.
Edit: and just to clarify, now that the DoD is managing this for ukraine through a contract with SpaceX, the DoD is allowing its use as a weapon AFAIK.
A. That’s not how satellites work
B. The US considers Crimea to be Ukrainian territory.
C. These uplinks were already purchased by the DoD, who was very vocal about Elon fucking with the signal.
I know it sucks that your idol turned out to be the vain villain instead of Tony Stark but we were all here. We all remember.
Lol, service absolutely can be turned on and off based on regions. SpaceX doesn’t turn it on in a region until the local government had an agreement with them. Just because the US gov sees Crimea as Ukraine does not mean SpaceX is obliged to turn it on there.
And no, there was no DoD contract in place at the time. SpaceX was providing services for free out of their own goodwill.
The DoD had a formal contact in place in June 2023, the incident falsely commented on by OP was in 2022.
Edit below
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War
You can go read it all in the wiki yourself but the relevant part
In June 2023, the Department of Defense officialized a contract with Shotwell’s SpaceX to buy Starlink satellite services for Ukraine.[10] The deal includes the Pentagon buying 400-500 Starlink terminals for Ukraine, giving the Pentagon control of where Starlink works inside the country without fear of interruption.[79] The terms of services of the final contract were undisclosed for security issues.[10] Following the contract, The Pentagon stated Starlink was a “vital layer in Ukraine’s overall communications network” amidst “a range of global partners to ensure Ukraine has the capabilities they need.”[10]
Edit: oh, you’re OP. LOL
I’m not going to read the wiki on an active war with a cult of personality involved. It’s not going to be unbiased.
News reports from the period make the situation very clear. As well as whistle blowers straight up telling us Elon personally shut down their Internet.
Get fucked.
Okay dude, continue to have your raging hard on for hating Elon
I’ll wait for a verified source that shows spacex had a formal contract to supply starlink services to Ukraine with the DoD prior to this. I imagine I’ll die before you can do that since you can’t.
Edit: specifically before the event in question.
It’s a cultural issue.
People at Larian had one objective the entire time - making a genuinely good D&D based game. If the money comes, that’s incredible. And it did come.
People at blizzard make games with the goal of making money. The era of making something fun has been long over in this studio
It seems that publicly traded game companies simply can’t help themselves from becoming this (e.g. Activision/Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA).
It’s very sad, but at least there are still a few private AAA companies and indies who seem to make fun games for the sake of fun games.
Once you go public, you’ve practically forced yourself into aiming for infinite growth. “Just enough” revenue is not in the vocabulary of these people
Not even just game companies. Publicly traded companies are a curse on humanity.
That’s what happens when MBAs start making too many product decisions at a tech company, and game companies are no exception.
It’s an ownership issue.
Larian is privately owned by Swen Vincke. They can concentrate on making good games because they don’t answer to anyone but Swen.
Blizzard is publicly owned. It has to answer to greedy and short-sighted shareholders.
Death to ActivisionBlizzard. Company of shitty games and sexual harassment.
Even if Blizzard games haven’t had a high note since 2016, I would like to remind everyone that the company still had absurd amounts of goodwill and customer loyalty for a large and corporate studio at the time, with fans owning and actively collecting literal decades of merchendise.
Things only really truly collapsed for Blizzard and saw their goodwill vanish when they openly supported and endorsed the chinese oppression of Hong Kong.
Specifically, the winner of a Hearthstone tournament was interviewed after his win and gave the pro-Hong Kong slogan “free Hong Kong, the revolution of our times”, which there was absolutely no rule or stipulation against. China demanded that the company not endorse that (because authoritarianism), but Blizzard ACTIVELY WENT THE EXTRA MILE to strip the player of his prize money and ban him from all future events alongside other punishments, specifically in the name of appeasing the chinese government.
It wouldn’t be fair to expect a game company to singlehandedly stand up to an authoritarian regime that loves to make people disappear. But it is absolutely fair to recognize that Blizzard’s actions very clearly demonstrated that they weren’t just doing this because they were threatened into it- they were more than happy to actively endorse the chinese government’s oppression of Hong Kong. And THAT is what we should always remember about Blizzard’s morals and principles, or lack thereof.
That’s the event that gave me the push I needed to request deletion of my account with them. I won’t give them another dollar for as long as I live.
Same, was just starting wow classic with my partner as she’d never played wow before, that made us both cancel immediately and never give them another cent.
There are a couple of VERY GOOD classic pservers out there which are not only better maintained than the Blizz servers, these have also much less bots and way healthier populations and economies.
Do you have any resources to share so that I could join one?
I can absolutely recommend Turtle WoW. It is such a good classic+ experience: imagine if there never were any of the wow addons but instead the base game got expanded in a meaningful and in terms of Warcraft 3 lore-friendly way. There are new and very well-done zones which were empty before. There are new items and professions without nullifying the existing ones, there are two new races and new race/class combos (to keep close to WC3 lore), there are new dungeons and raids, tons of new quests and a lot of quality of life improvements. You have many options to play how you want: restrict yourself on how much exp you get and play slow & steady, opt in for a built-in hardcore mode, activate warmode to be flagged for pvp or a combination of those. Also, pretty much all classes got rebalanced (some more than others, though) to make more builds viable without altering the game to much (more balance updates are in the roadmap). The dev team is very active and dedicated.
Crossing fingers that we get the answer. I would love a well-recommended classic server.
Look one comment above.
I’d forgotten all about that.
All the sex pests felt like a “good” reason to quit WoW but I’d say my real reason was it had become a piece of shit that didn’t value my time, and I’d honestly been looking for a reason to quit for a long time.
Reminder that that event happened IN TAIWAN.
That’s exactly where they lost me forever. Truly a despicable bunch of assholes.
Concorde would have loved to get 115,000 reviews…
That game flopped so hard.
The beta was boring and it was free
Ever since they banned that StarCraft II pro for protesting china in Hong Kong, I’ve uninstalled battle.net and didn’t look back.
I rather buy a game from EA.
Sometimes Blizzard says things but it just sounds like Winnie the Pooh’s jizz gurgling out their mouth.
what
Let me introduce you to Wizards of the Coast
IMO the issue isn’t WotC, it’s Hasbro. WotC is their golden goose and they’re squeezing it for everything. I haven’t checked their recent earnings calls but I wouldn’t be surprised if WotC is still their only subsidiary where the revenue isn’t declining.
It was easy to predict a downward slide as soon as they merged with Activision.
Rather than merged I think they were simply bought by Activision. An Acquisition is when one business entity becomes a child to another, a merger is when the two become one different entity.
“Mergers” end up being acquisitions in the majority of cases. One company culture will prevail, one companies middle management will take over the administrative sides and depending on the structure also the technical side.
I miss the Warcraft II and StarCraft days. You could tell they were serious by their cutscenes, but also knew they were having fun, and wanted the player to as well, by the gameplay and Easter eggs. “Line must go up” took over, now it’s all cash grabs. I will not buy a game from them at full price again.
Their cutscenes still go hard honestly
Its probably not that hard to make an inspirational 5 minute animation though, is it.
I mean they likely have some great talent doing it, but its not the product, its not what we are paying for.
At least they started putting more cut scenes in game rather than the single intro video to hype you on the game.
Blizzard is dead. At the time they were Activision. Now they are Microsoft. The blizzard that existed to make StarCraft, warcraft and diablo only exists in name.
Blizzard died quite a while ago. Even if the same dudes are still making decisions at the head of the studio after the Activision buyout, clearly they have dementia or some other cognitive defects.
I think the execs were always somewhat shit, even when they were making good games. It’s just their creative team miraculously managed to make good games despite the shitty execs.
Yeah, they used to have a Caste System in Blizzard HQ where badge color decided your importance. And get this, their tech guys, security guys, and hardware guys (not firmware) were all the lower caste lmao.
Firing Nethaera was a bullet in their brain.
Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Ugh, the thought of some generic investment company swooping in and running Valve hurts my heart.
Whether or not we believe it will be true, Gabe has said that he will release code that will allow you to play every game you’ve bought on steam without steam service if ever things headed in that direction.
Why should they enshitify a service that is printing money with minimal effort? Right guys 🥲.
because they don’t understand why it’s printing money
Not only do they not understand, they actively don’t care: they have a product-agnostic business process that can convert any type of stable business into a pile of extracted equity and spare parts. They are literally bleeding their own society to death
At least actual vampires would probably have the good sense not to destroy the breeding stock that keeps them alive.
Because it could be printing even MOAR money. Line must go up at all cost.
Supposedly the answer is inflation. The same profit next year is worth less, so it needs to go up to be the same.
Of course thats not where most companies stop, is it.
The thing that pisses me off if that my comp only goes up by 3% but that is failure to a corp.
Thats interesting, I hadn’t connected those before. I think it would be hard to argue in favor of separate expectations for inflation of wages and the companies profits.
Like I understand having a stellar year, but the goal is still set the same, and its fine to return tk that baseline next year. Or maybe even doing well one year means we can lower the goal next year, or bank the difference for bad weather years.
Would be interesting if companies had an interest in the long term like that.
I’m seriously concerned about this, yet I keep using steam because of the convenience.
Steam is privately held, so there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful. The recent rapid enshittification of what feels like every company is mostly due to US laws that require publicly traded companies to squeeze every last dollar out or face severe penalties. Privately held companies are not subject to those laws, and so they can stay actually decent and care about their customers without threat of legal repercussions. An example is Lego Group - there’s some valid criticism, but legos have stayed a top quality product for nearing a hundred years - and show no signs of suddenly degrading in quality. So, I wouldn’t worry unduly about this until Valve announces an IPO. Then you should start worrying.
Just to be clear, there’s no actual law requiring that. It’s just an excuse they use to be greedy.
If you breach fiduciary duty the best thing you can hope for is to be fired. Executives have been criminally charged for it as well though. And while it has to be an intentional act of malfeasance, that gets pretty blurry when the shareholders hire thousand dollar an hour lawyers to come after you.
So while yes, the root cause is greed, the system itself is setup to feed that.
it’s a very closely held private company, gaben absolutely has someone to take his place with ideals similar to his.
You hope. It wouldn’t be the first time.
example? /genq
Oh geez there’s so many people tend to write articles about the general phenomenon rather than specific examples.
One of the biggest recent examples though has got to be Boeing. While they’re a publicly traded company, they resisted the call of greed above all until they merged with McDonnell Douglas and the MD executives won the battle for control of the merged company. Things went on a decades long slide after that which resulted in hundreds of deaths and a chain of high profile mechanical failures we’re still not sure is over.
For privately held corporations it’s all about that new leadership. In fact around 70 percent of family run ones fail in the second generation. But any generation can run the business into the ground or change it up. Bancroft and Barings are great examples of that. Barings was 232 years old when it went bankrupt under mismanagement.
Luckily BG3 is on GOG. I don’t think I’ve bought a new game on steam for years, granted I don’t play a lot of games nowadays.
I bought BG3 on GOG simply because it was on GOG, otherwise I would have waited a few years. I want to support AAA games being release on GOG at release because it doesn’t happen much. GOG isn’t gonna take over Steam, because largely the industry isn’t going to support DRM free AAA games.
If you think that’s bad, wait 'till you hear about the working conditions.
In their defense their just keeping up with the standard in other publicity owned companies. Don’t wanna rock the boat you know.
(This is a joke, please join a union in your field. Union strong motherfuckers!)
CDPR? admittedly they’re really good at gaining it back again, kinda homer simpsons vibes where they repeatedly fuck up but then make an honest attempt to make things right only to repeat the cycle all over again.
CDPR is still on my “probably pass” list after cyber punk. I read the launch news, stayed faraway. I picked it up this year, after all the patches and work and… yeah it’s still fundamentally broken.
Not in terms of balance or bugs, but it didn’t have the magic. To start, I really don’t like fantasy games. They’re just not my thing. Witcher 3 had bad combat mechanics, could be terribly grindy and YET is one of my top five games. The story telling, from the plot itself the tiny immersive details in the world, hooked you. They nailed the big things, but it was the little things like sometimes you’d free someone, and realize they murdered a bunch of dudes who were minding their own business, and none of this was mentioned in or affected any other plot line, it was just a random detail in the universe.
Cyberpunk has a semblance of the big stuff, but exactly none of the soul. I cared about some of the main characters (emphasis on “some”) but exactly none about the world. It never felt like more than a backdrop.
A loss and misstep is ok, particularly given a growing studio, the problem with CDPR is they think they fixed cyberpunk. With that mentality I’m giving their next game a huge berth.
And if you liked cyberpunk, enjoy. There are parts to be enjoyed. There are some neat plot threads, some nifty side quests, if you enjoy it don’t let people ruin it for you.
They lied about Cyberpunk. They knew it was bad on release and maliciously made decisions so that people would still buy it. That’s not some minor thing, that’s a crime. “We leave greed to others”, yeah, right. And this problem was never addressed by CDPR, like it’s a normal thing to do, they think it’s okay.
“We could address the frat boy culture at our company and give reparations to the women who had their boob juice stolen… But will you settle for us changing McCree’s name to.something the fanbase still won’t acknowledge three years later?”
