TSG_Asmodeus (he, him)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Meanwhile in the east you have companies like FromSoftware and Capcom who are just laughing all the way to the bank, because their competition is all run by idiots.

    The worst part is the CEO’s/whatever of each company know each other, too. You’ll get C-suites come into game companies who not only have never played a game before, but don’t even remotely understand how software development works. I worked for a company where the owner made himself Project Manager and ran that project straight into the ground. Tens of millions on worthless overtime while we sat around waiting for another build that would fail, on a weekend, for months.

    Larian sounds like some sort of a bizarro-world company. They even have awful investors but managed to keep creative/overall control.


  • No worries. I see a lot of posts about what’s happening that are close, but don’t quite understand this is a managerial issue. The devs themselves are (mostly) good people who want to make games. The owners of smaller companies don’t get called out enough though, in my opinion. Every time you see ‘EA just bought and closed another…’ keep in mind the vast majority of the time the company didn’t need to be sold. Some guy who inherited a bunch of money created a company of people who do the actual work, then waited till the worth of the company was high enough for them to sell. It happens constantly and it’s easily the most disheartening part of game development.

    Imagine spending 80 hour weeks and 30-90 days without a single day off, making a breakout game that is beloved… and realising you’re not going to make it to 5 years at a company, because they’re selling it to Activision.

    Then do that every 2 years.



  • This was due to something that happened between (roughly, very roughly) 2005 and 2015. Games went from being made by a bunch of nerds who really wanted to make games, to a more corporate setting, to a marketing setting.

    Fifteen years ago QA would declare Alpha, Beta, etc, in that the build fit the criteria for each state. Then, marketing would set a date, and on that date, Alpha, Beta, etc would be ‘ready.’

    This lead to huge problems. There was a time where Alpha meant Feature Complete, and that there were only a few major crashes. Beta meant you had no, or virtually no, reproable crashes, game ending bugs, etc. (Then later) once marketing took over, it didn’t matter. Instead of Beta being a checklist, it was just ‘March 10th.’

    In addition to this, innovative and cool game design ideas are harder to sell visually than ‘we doubled the poly’s!’ So more and more focus was put on visuals to the point where marketing would assign things to the design team, IE. “It has to have battlefield COD tarkov CSGO TF2 Popular Game-like mechanics, gameplay, etc.”

    So now you get games shipped with incredible graphics and garbage stability. I’ve been on projects where crashes later in the campaign were changed from P1 to P2 because reviewers likely wouldn’t make it to the point where those would come up. (This is called ‘punting’.) In addition, having arbitrary dates decide major milestones means that builds are constantly broken, all through the process of creating them. You know how people get that ‘beta’ build of a game and ask why it’s so crash happy, why it runs like shit, etc? It’s because the game has literally never been stable. It’s been assigned Alpha and Beta based on a calendar, and time is never allowed to delay to fix issues. Add to that that the owners of game companies will give publishers absolutely asinine claims about how long a game will take. Most franchise games, ‘AAA’-wise, are made in 18 months. However, they often also had six months of pre-production before that. Marketing took that out, and focused on a game every 12 months. They used a secondary studio for the ‘B-Team’ and thus every second game in the series was made by said ‘B-Team’. B-Teams were given even less time, and often no pre-production, so the entire game would effectively be made in 12 months.

    Then they lay off 50-70% of the staff, and start all over.

    So if I may end this way, do not go into games. If you like them make them in your free time. You will be treated like an animal and be unemployed about 1/4 of the time if you choose the industry. Of all the people who I worked with in my first company, maybe six are still in games.

    Stay away.






  • And so, what’s the course of action? To give all men some sterilization treatment?

    Who the hell said that?

    The case has put into the spotlight a growing problem with rape in France. The number of sexual assault victims in France increased by 33% in 2021 and nearly doubled from 2017, according to a government report. Women made up 89% of rape victims, while 96% of sexual violence perpetrators were men.

    But out of almost 35,000 rapes recorded that year, just over 10% were prosecuted, and fewer than 5% resulted in a conviction. And the vast majority of rape or attempted rape victims − nine out of ten − never even file a complaint, the report found.

    The plan is to make it so the system actually helps the victims. That’s the idea. These protests bring light to the issue.

    And, I promise you, the real numbers are probably scarily equal, just like with domestic abuse. Because men are definitely taught to never come forward with those.

    Cool guess, stats say you’re wrong.

    But even if the true ratio was 1:50, what’s the solution?

    See above.

    Seriously this is fucking embarrassing, you’re creating constant strawman arguments without any basis of anything reported.


  • Sorry you’re getting this reaction. I am a man who was abused by women and all the support groups lead to me taking to a room full of women about it. Do men come forward less often? Yes. It would have to be like 1 in 100 men coming forward for it to be equal. I’ve had one other male friend who has been assaulted, but over half of the women I’ve been friends with have.

    If it helps anyone with that being anecdotal, you have to look at the statistics of who is doing it: people in power. Just that alone means more men simply have the opportunity. Add to that that men are told sex is power, and that men who have sex often are virile, whereas women who do are slut shamed. It’s getting better, but still far off.

    Anyway I’ll take the downvotes, but every statistic we have shown is that men are the primary antagonist in the vast majority of sexual assault against both men and women.