The Games Industry Bull Thread

Here's a thread about how sometimes players in the game industry are . Microtransactions, harassment, the thing I'm going to talk about with Blizzard... I know we try to be a forum of optimism and light, but there remains a fascination with just how awful parts of the industry are: it's why Jim Sterling's so popular. It also means that if you want to avoid doom and gloom, you can avoid this thread and you're golden.

I'm going to start with a question about what can be done though, however small that might be. Basically Blizzard bent over backwards to appease the Chinese and stick one finger up at the current Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. This article suggests that flooding the company with GDPR requests might hit their (or their legal department's) bottom line or at least productivity, but does anybody have any idea if it will? Or will it just impact some poor grunt who does the IT?

Vote with your wallet would be the number one way to do this. Don't buy Overwatch on Switch. Stopping paying your WOW subscription. Delete your Blizzard account and show you won't stand for that sort of shite.

For what it's worth, there's good people on the ground level at Blizzard as I've read articles about some employees staging protests and walkouts at their HQ, which is great to read.

This is great, though. If this works as intended, it might lead to Overwatch and further Blizzard games being banned in China which would be just desserts, I'd say.

It's a bit of a mess and I've seen some say let's play LoL instead of HoS for instance, but LoL is owned by Tencent.

Everything you buy and use on a daily basis is filthy with Chinese money. Our governments don't give one shit about the human rights violations because China is too influential. Like Jay said, vote with your wallet, but that's really difficult. It's everywhere.

Only Trump cares (Huwai phones coming won't have Google and other American apps due to China).

But yeah Drunka is right and why I mentioned Tencent, something will somewhere somehow will be connected to China or someone else.

Well yeah but you can't compare other world leaders to the Great wisdom and strong moral heart of trump.

At least those who can can move away from Blizzard though. This has to be the most blatant example of kowtowing, even compared to Apple Google and the NBA... although that shows how entrenched the problem is doesn't it.

JayMoyles wrote:

This is great, though. If this works as intended, it might lead to Overwatch and further Blizzard games being banned in China which would be just desserts, I'd say.

I doubt it, but then the Chinese government have been surprisingly thin-skinned before.

In the latest confrontation where you could happily apply the Alien vs. Predator tagline, Epic and Apple/Google are going to war.  Legal war.  Legal war over who gets more money from microtransactions.  Epic have 'struck a blow for the little guy' by removing Apple/Google's 30% service charge and 'only' giving 10% of that back to themselves.  Apple/Google have responded by chucking Fortnite off their stores.  

Might eventually have a pro-customer effect if there's some anti-monopoly controls coming out of it, but I'm hardly going to get excited about it being Epic doing the challenging.

That's a lot of scare quotes considering Epic actually did do a pretty good thing with the 10% cut, and an even better thing making Unreal free until a game breaks a million.

I'm not saying they're "the good guys" or anything, they're stilla for-profit company, but they get a lot of stick and not as much credit as they deserve.

Scare quotes I dunno what to think about Epic in this one. The whole 'Nineteen Eighty-Fornite' campaign feels a bit like getting kids to do their campaigning for them, which is never a good sign, nor's getting rid of a 30% per cent loading and communicating it as a 20% cut [maths may need reviewing]. On the other hand it's a fundamentally good thing they're doing. (Didn't know about Unreal which is a good thing, do think they get some unreasonable flack over the Epic Store, do also recall articles around mistreatment of staff from them which while par for the course makes me less likely to give them a bye.)

What Buska said they do good things Epic for the little guy and even if the Apple cut goes down to 10% but that of course puts more money in epics pocket.

Bloody hell UbiSoft.



They really are rotten to the absolute core aren't they? It's a shame, because Gods and Fenyces: Immortal Monsters Rising or whatever they're calling it these days looks quite nice... but sod it.

Ubisoft had a second Forward event last night and seems more of them are planned. Which actually has given Ubisoft a decent line up that for most people even in the industry like Jim points out won't care
about the behind the scenes becausee they've got this lot coming

29th Oct Watch Dogs Legion
10th Nov Assassin's Creed Valhalla
12th Nov Just Dance 2021
3rd Dec Immortals Fenyx Rising
Holiday 2020 Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game Complete Edition
21st Jan Prince of Persia Sands of Time Remake
18th Feb Far Cry 6
25th Feb Riders Republic

That's a decent line up what will be well received games then a bunch like Siege getting new content etc

Ubi is just the King of cookie cuttter games, they can definitely make some good games but Siege is the only game of theirs that dares to be different.

mas wrote:

That's a decent line up what will be well received games then a bunch like Siege getting new content etc

The biggest news for R6 Siege there was the free upgrade for ps5/new Xbox with the frames getting a massive bump from 60 to 120.

Yeah but do you have a TV or Monitor that can do 120fps? The LG CX is £1400

I'm keen on Immortals that's about it maybe one of Valhalla or Legion for Xmas

Nope, I barely have an HD telly.

masofdas wrote:

Which actually has given Ubisoft a decent line up that for most people even in the industry like Jim points out won't care about the behind the scenes becausee they've got this lot coming

Yes but they should.  And posts like that concentrating on their games rather than their bullshit don't help, frankly.  Sure, I like the look of two of those, and you could say that every big company gets up to some sort of shady stuff; but it's allowing a culture in which sexual harassers are allowed to flourish, rising to top positions in the industry, and having a CEO that is either unaware or indifferent to their plight that pushes me over the line and makes me say, 'I don't want anything to do with this company, up to and including buying their games.'  The BLM as villains stuff is shady as shit as well, and of course they do all the normal TRIPLE AYEEEEE crap; but I will not support a company that pays lip service to cases of sexual assault with no real action in any way.  They need to have an independent investigation at the absolute minimum.

I've been genuinely pissed off ever since last night thinking about this, and their non-apology that they couldn't put in their showcase because TiMe CoNsTrAiNtS, and the fact that people will try to wave it away with 'not wanting politics to interfere with their games' or 'supporting the devs' when really supporting the devs would be refusing to buy games from UbiSoft en masse until UbiSoft are forced to make serious changes to their culture for one that's more - what's the word?  Ah yes - supportive.

'We are working to improve our systems and processes!'  Fuck off.

I never bought anything from Ubisoft anyway, because their games are boring as fuck, but now I will actively go out of my way to avoid them like the plague.

Although I guess the general public are treating Ubisoft the same way they treat a plague; ignore the problems and pretend they don't exist.

The only thing I was interested in was the Scott Pilgrim re-release... But fuck that

Balla is absolutely right here, there should be a proper independent inquiry into this shit. Instead, we're getting ore Ubi stale farts wafted out.

If there was ever a legitimate call for ethics in video game journalism, it's mass investigative coverage of this bollocks!

Not sure if any of you have seen the bullshit 505 games have tried to pull with Control: Ultimate Edition; that it would be impossible to upgrade users from the last gen versions to the next gen because of... blockers!?!?!?

Turns out, the obvious lie turned into a proper gaff  

Yeah, seen that with Control, which lead to 505/Remedy got a bunch of negative feedback when they announced how they were going to do a next gen upgrade.

They then put out a letter basically say can't be done and too much work (now I sort get that as someone has to make the Series/PS5 version use Ray Tracing etc)

Which bam when the Ultimate version arrived people who owned the Deluxe Version got upgraded to that then was reverted back to Deluxe

Think only way 505 is getting out of this is give all Deluxe owners the Ultimate edition and everyone else which the standard version maybe then can buy a deluxe pack add-on like you often see for games with multiple versions

Just watched that. Brilliant. Any further word from Remedy? I'm almost looking forward to their response...

Buskalilly wrote:

I never bought anything from Ubisoft anyway, because their games are boring as fuck, but now I will actively go out of my way to avoid them like the plague.

Muss wrote:

The only thing I was interested in was the Scott Pilgrim re-release... But fuck that

The sad thing is that I've been interested in UbiSoft games before (Rayman Legends), am now, and probably will be again... but, like Muss says, fuck that

Activision there, looking super-innocent and very contrite.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/report-alleges-activision-boss-bobby-kotick-knew-about-misconduct-and-made-death-threat/

Oh, and in case anybody's wondering if that will change anything (I know you probably weren't):

Arseholes wrote:

“The Activision Blizzard Board remains committed to the goal of making Activision Blizzard the most welcoming and inclusive company in the industry. Under Bobby Kotick’s leadership the Company is already implementing industry leading changes including a zero tolerance harassment policy, a dedication to achieving significant increases to the percentages of women and non-binary people in our workforce and significant internal and external investments to accelerate opportunities for diverse talent. The Board remains confident that Bobby Kotick appropriately addressed workplace issues brought to his attention.

“The goals we have set for ourselves are both critical and ambitious,” it added. “The Board remains confident in Bobby Kotick’s leadership, commitment and ability to achieve these goals.”

Bobby Kotick is a billionaire and therefore we all know he's evil. This shouldn't be a surprise. All billionaires deserve the death penalty.

It's not. It's transparently obvious that Guillemot knew what was going on as well. It's just 'nice' to have it in writing.