Yeah, might be.

Dailymotion should be a non-issue to get into though. It’s got free user access, it’s the 9th biggest content site by active users worldwide and I don’t think they have selective creator recruiting practices.

There are a few platforms. Nebula, Floatplane, Peertube. I think Patreon allows you to host videos directly on their platform too.

But none of these platforms offer free access plus a built-in ad function.

“work” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here when talking about a Fairphone. Worst phone I ever owned with quite some margin.

Generic degoogling/google alternatives video from Pewdiepie, but he won’t get rid of Youtube.

“Privacy”

Never had Eternity lag before. Impressive.

That’s a game I’d love to play, but right now I still have a semblance of a life left and I’m not sure I want to risk that.

The huge majority of indie games never make any money at all. This link is a little older, but it claims that 50% of indie games on steam never make more than $4000, only 25% ever make more than $26 000 and only 14% cross the $100k mark.

Considering the cost of developers, that’s about 1-2 man years for the $100k mark, and then there’s only a 14% chance of even recouping that.

Passion projects work out because the people making them don’t value their time as work time, don’t make a salary from it, and even then in the huge majority of cases, it doesn’t work out financially.

Imagine having 10k employees and not setting aside an indie dev team or two for passion projects.

This statement holds true for pretty much every other corporation. Imagine owning a huge farm and not setting aside a few farm hands to grow old artisan vegetables. Imagine owning a supermarket chain and not setting aside a few shops for exotic sweets from Central Africa. Imagine owning a fast food chain and not setting aside a few restaurants for artisan burger variations.

Yes, every corporation could afford to do stuff like that, but they aren’t there to advance humanity by investing in arts and crafts, but for making every last drop of money they can. And yes, there’s much to criticise about this goal, but making little indie passion projects doesn’t work well with corporations.

So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games.

That only happened in the 2010s. That’s when the Ubisoft formula really took off. Assassin’s Creed 1 was only released in 2007, Far Cry 2 in 2008 (FC1 was a quite different game). GTA also only started to get imitated in the 2010s.

Open World in that sense (non-scripted encounters that can be approached from many different angles, with a “living” world) only became a thing in the late 2000s, precisely because of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2.

I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.

While I do get your point about hand-crafted deterministic enemy placement, it’s just two different kinds of approaches that work for different players.

When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct? While some players love or even need punishing difficulty levels, others play for other reasons. (Maybe check out the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It’s a bit outdated, but it shows some of these different reasons quite well.) If you want to just kick back and relax after a hard day of work, punishing difficulty might not be the right thing. Some players want to have to learn (or even memorize) levels/bosses/encounters and repeat them repeatedly until they know exactly which button to press when, and that’s fine. For others that’s just tedious busywork, everyone’s different. I quite enjoyed Far Cry 2 and its random encounters and having to adapt to different scenarios all the time.

I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.

Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.

To get back to the original point:

20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.

That was in the 2010s, not in the 2000s. In the 90s, game development was pretty much completely low-budget, with games rarely having more than 5 programmers on staff, and maybe 5-10 content creators. In the 2000s games started getting bigger, but the studios were still led by game developers, not by finance dudes. Budgets were still not nearly where they are today. Assassins Creed 1, for example, had a budget of $20mio. Compare that to e.g. the $175mio that AC Valhalla cost to make. And AC1 was comparatively expensive back then.

It was only in the 2010s when finance really got into gaming, budgets ballooned and risks were lowered to nothing.

I think your perception might be 10 years off.

Assassins Creed 1 came out in 2007, less than 20 years ago. It was mindbogglingly fresh and innovative back then. An open world where you can’t just run anywhere you want, but also climb anywhere? And your character dynamically climbed up walls, finding places to hold onto everywhere? That was amazing back then. It was the first game that even attempted anything like that, and it was really, really good. AC only became lame when they started doing the same over and over again with little change.

Similar story with Far Cry. FC1 came out in 2004, only FC2 was also released in that decade (2008). Both FC1 and FC2 were doing something new, fresh and genre-defining. Looking back from now, yes, these games look like everything else that followed it, but because these games defined it.

But in this decade we saw a lot of other genre-defining games, like Warcraft 3 (2002/2003), WoW (2004), KOTOR (2003), Bioshock (2007), Crysis (2007), Fable (2004), Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), Portal (2007) and also a lot of AAA flops that happened due to too much experimentation and shooting for the stars, like Spore (2008).

And most of the games I listed above don’t have a piss filter.

Less so though.

Yes, being “safe” means you won’t make the next Minecraft, where a hobby budget turns into the best selling game of all time. But it also means that the people who buy every instalment of Fifa or Assassin’s Creed will also buy it.

These popular franchises almost always turn a calculable profit as long as they don’t experiment and do something new that bombs.

As sad as it is, it actually does work out.

That’s why we gamers shouldn’t trust on AAA titles bringing something great to the market. If you want to play a game like you watch linear TV (plonk down on the couch/in front of the PC and to whatever to relax and waste time), then AAA is great. If you want to play something new, something exciting, something that you haven’t played before, then go with lower-budget titles.

AAA is the McDonalds of games. You don’t go to McDonalds for the freaky hand-crafted vegan fusion kitchen bacon burger with crazy Korean curry mayo and caramelized lettuce.

20 years ago AAA games could still experiment, but that was because back then AAA games had about the same budget as big indie games now.

You just can’t gamble if you have 10k employees and hundreds of millions riding on it.

Happened even with Boeing. I think it should be illegal for anyone with an MBA to be CEO or CTO of any company. They can be CFO if they want to, but not any role with actual decision power over products.

To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here

This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.

And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.

This is spot on.

In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).

A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.

Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.

Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.

But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.

Talking about it, which arch flavour is “btw”? /s

GNOME is horrible. Looks pretty, but it’s opinionated approach means that nothing works as expected and you have to relearn how to use a stupid window manager.

I prefer Ook! Ook! over Ooga.

Are you using Arch btw?

• People who don’t play games because they are too grown-up to have fun aren’t grown-up but sad.
• Catch-up mechanics even the playing field, so that people of different skill levels can have fun together.