The Games Industry Bull Thread

There's a lengthy Did You Know Gaming? piece on famous leaks that's just come out, I watched it in shifts. It's interesting in parts, although not to the tune of two hours of your spare time.

What youse have said was my main thought at the end of it though - leaks are a shower of shite.

They never leak, like, dodgy business practices or anything that would genuinely be of journalistic merit.

Obviously there isn't a single thing about the Insomniac leak that's good. The knowledge that some games may be coming out down the line at best is a disappointing reveal of what should be an exciting thing. At worst... well, you've got the extra pressure on the devs, and/or the disappointment of unmet goals for the punters. And of course there's the personal details aspect of this one. I think I'd think a bit less of anybody who actually supported or helped to spread leak culture without heavy spoilers.

The best thing to come out of this is that maybe some unpleasant publisher type somewhere is throwing a hissy fit, we can but hope. Speaking of which, Kotick's finally fucking off at the end of the year!

Think insomniac themselves pointed out this isn't a leak, as that be something like PlayStation planning to show Wolverine next week, this is a hack and is illegal.

It's the personal details part that's the real problem, a real dick move that in this day and age of weird internet people is especially dangerous to people who's worst crime is trying to entertain people.

You're both correct that this is a hack not a leak, and that for sure the personal details part is the worst bit of it. I stand by what I drunkenly typed about leak culture, but this ain't that.

We instead need to encourage leek culture. Like a nice stodgy pie in the cold of winter.

Instead of microtransactions targeting the whales, let's have vegetables targeting the Wales.

Both leeks and leaks are minging.

You take that back, leeks the vegetable are one of the finest roots.

You can't beat a chicken, leek & ham pie either.

It was bound to happen eventually, but here it is.  UbiSoft made a good game.  Every bugger in certain communities I frequent is talking about it, which makes the bile rise in my throat somewhat.  Following ActiBlizz's amalgamation and that arsewipe Kotick leaving the company, I reckon Ubi are the worst company (as far as we know) remaining in the gaming space.  It'd be nice if I didn't have to see anything about that stupid game, or the company behind it, ever again.  (Please don't talk about the poor struggling workers, they're not the ones that'll get the big bonuses when this sells megabucks.)

That's on top of the transphobe wizard game being the best-selling game in 2023 in the States (I believe). It's not a tremendous time for the industry, even before Squeenix's president shat the bed with his customer top-of-year guff.

If its any consolation, I don't think it'll sell that well despite its apparent quality, it doesn't have the mainstream appeal of say the Tom Clancy stuff. That's the thinest of silver linings though, they still seem go be trundling along with no accountability, it probably helps that they don't have an obvious top arsehole the likes of Kotick.

Loads and loads and loads of slagging off MicroSoft in the games media of late. I know it's naïve to hope that this'll have a damn impact at all on anything, but I swear that this is the most games media as one has gone after a company for as long as I can remember. Including things like Activision and UbiSoft that deserved more going after.

If you're not familiar with the details, here's an appropriately scathing piece I quite liked.

What do they expect? The entire Xbox brand is just an exercise in averting public attention away from the amount of money they make selling systems to militaries that let them bomb brown children off the face of the Earth with flying killer robots.

Xbox or Microsoft Gaming it now seems is just going to go the way of SEGA.

The negative though from that is PlayStation can basically do what they want, and I remember $599 & just get a second job.

Yyyyyyep. The only thing worse than hypercapitalism with competition is hypercapitalism without competition.