Jim Sterling / James "Stephanie" Sterling / James Stanton/Sexton & in memoriam TotalBiscuit (John Bain) - One Gaming Lolcow Thread

[BrunoMattei]

I'm pretty sure I can count the games I've paid full price for in the last decade on both hands. Of those maybe 3 have been AAA. The rest come from Bundles or sales.

The last full price AAA games I purchased were Elden Ring and Doom Eternal. Before that I can't even remember but like you, I mostly buy during sales or bundles.

 

[FraudFrog]

If I didn't know who Jim was and you removed the shark plush I could very easily be convinced that this is an old used up mtf whore. Its a very common thing but you'd think after pretending to be a woman for so long Jim would've picked up the most basic concepts regarding make-up.

Jim makes for an ugly woman. That’s all there is to it. He was a pug ugly man, and he’m looks like a fat ugly woman.

That’s what I don’t get about AGPs, even with effort, they still look ugly, and don’t seem to realize it. Like if he dropped down to 130lbs, maybe he would at least look like a skinny ugly woman, a step up from looking like a fag ugly woman.

 

[Tanner Glass]

Jim makes for an ugly woman. That’s all there is to it. He was a pug ugly man, and he’m looks like a fat ugly woman.

That’s what I don’t get about AGPs, even with effort, they still look ugly, and don’t seem to realize it. Like if he dropped down to 130lbs, maybe he would at least look like a skinny ugly woman, a step up from looking like a fag ugly woman.

You're assuming too much from them.

AGPs think that HRT is literal magic and that it turns them into a sexy woman, regardless of what they were beforehand. If they had that kind of forethought, they wouldn't take untested, experimental drugs and ruin their lives.

 

[Tarka Dhal]

Try getting into RC.

As in RC vehicles? I wasn't under the impression that that was an exceptionally expensive hobby. The cost of entry doesn't seem that high, and it's not like they're consumables either.

Thinking about it, everyone I know that spends heavily on their hobbies does so not because of inherent costs to the hobby (be it building a Warhammer army, upgrading their PC, or dropping a grand on a rifle scope), but because they feel irresistibly compelled to buy whatever's caught their attention. In other words: it's not the hobby that's the problem, it's the consumer mindset.

 

[Mr Processor]

As in RC vehicles? I wasn't under the impression that that was an exceptionally expensive hobby. The cost of entry doesn't seem that high, and it's not like they're consumables either.

Thinking about it, everyone I know that spends heavily on their hobbies does so not because of inherent costs to the hobby (be it building a Warhammer army, upgrading their PC, or dropping a grand on a rifle scope), but because they feel irresistibly compelled to buy whatever's caught their attention. In other words: it's not the hobby that's the problem, it's the consumer mindset.

He's probably talking about the higher end of the RC market for serious hobbyists. Stuff that runs on internal combustion engines rather than batteries. Vehicles that are basically just miniaturized versions of real ones.

 

[FraudFrog]

Thinking about it, everyone I know that spends heavily on their hobbies does so not because of inherent costs to the hobby (be it building a Warhammer army, upgrading their PC, or dropping a grand on a rifle scope), but because they feel irresistibly compelled to buy whatever's caught their attention. In other words: it's not the hobby that's the problem, it's the consumer mindset.

As a former toy collector I can attest to this. At first I was just buying what I liked, but after a while I started buying stuff that was memed or what I thought was gonna accumulate in value. I was right most of the time, but still it was all a waste of money.

I haven’t bought a figure in years, it was a tough detox at first, and I’ll occasionally pass by the transformers at target to see the new stuff that’s come out, but those days are long gone.

Now I just buy a lotta cheap Timex and Casio watches. One addiction for another I guess.

 

[Dollar Store Sentai]

As a former toy collector I can attest to this. At first I was just buying what I liked, but after a while I started buying stuff that was memed or what I thought was gonna accumulate in value. I was right most of the time, but still it was all a waste of money.

I haven’t bought a figure in years, it was a tough detox at first, and I’ll occasionally pass by the transformers at target to see the new stuff that’s come out, but those days are long gone.

Now I just buy a lotta cheap Timex and Casio watches. One addiction for another I guess.

I went the way of 3rd party transformers, better build quality (usually) but a higher price. I traded that addiction in for a 3d printer.

 

[Tarka Dhal]

As a former toy collector I can attest to this. At first I was just buying what I liked, but after a while I started buying stuff that was memed or what I thought was gonna accumulate in value. I was right most of the time, but still it was all a waste of money.

I’ve had a few compulsive buying habits in the past, namely for retro games and Gundam model kits, and while I’ve never invested an outrageous amount into any I know the obsessive fixation that compels you to buy things you don’t need and won’t use. I think that anyone who’s experienced the come down of Steam Sale Mania knows this too.

Patience really is the key; the urges subside eventually and your wallet will be happier for it.

 

[Gloria The Glorious]

Are you tired of Jim Sterling's skits?
Are you sick of being told Capitalism is bad?
Are you outright done with listening to a Brit convince you his tits are true and honest?
Do you think Jim is/was capable of making good points but he's too much of a spiteful, bigoted, terminally-online Twitter weirdo to live up to that capacity?
If you said yes to any of these, then don't worry.

Gloria From Pokemon Sword (and Shield) Presents:
THE JIMLESS JIMQUISITION
with your host: not Jim Sterling
Today's Comeback Topic: Lifeless Services​

Masahiro Sakurai revealed (several times over) that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's DLC had fairly limited budgets and even smaller time frames. This is why most for the "Mr. Sakurai Presents" came across more as typical penguinz0 videos instead of proper Nintendo Directs: they didn't have much money. Enough to rent the space, but most went into the fighter packs. And for the time frames, the most well-known cut was Dragon Quest's Hero, who was meant to have every one of his 8 costumes be a different hero al la Bowser Jr.

If the Paid DLC for the single best selling fighting game ever is going to have these issues, is it any surprise that live services from even greedier companies with far less strong leaders that had far less direction beyond the original release are constantly failing to meet their own promises, let alone player expectations? Frankly, I'm surprised most of them can last a year.

You know the general issues with live services, and so do I. So, as is traditioning for the Jimless Jimquisition, let's skip the recap nonsense and get to the less-obvious problems live-services face.

1. Live Services are a bitch to maintain.

The amount of people who claim it's laziness is... concerning. Not to say there's never a situation, but given that most Live Service games just don't have many devs, and because companies need to continue making games they often have to divide the team up, these multiplayer games take a long time in the best of circumstances to get new stuff made, paid DLC or free updates. Fortnite is only able the achieve this through extreme crunch, and even it had to slow down (remember how long the MHA season lasted?)

Then there's the kind of updates and content. Live services almost always launch with weak content, and actually new stuff takes a long time to make. Hello, Halo Infinite. New characters/weapons/perks need to be fairly extensively balanced since it takes several good updates to maintain your player base (expanding it is a luxury you cannot regularly rely on), but a single really bad update can kill your game even if you make it genuinely amazing afterwards. Hello, Back 4 Blood. Oh, and you need to regularly hold events both to reward your player base via new items only they get because they were playing. But this causes FOMO, which while on paper can raise income by allowing people to pay for those items, can just as easily cause people to decide that if there's a strong chance they'll miss what they want that they'd be better of playing something without that issue. Or they'll at least stick to the FOMO inducing games they already have and not bother with the new one.

And to mix this bit up, how many times are the content just... not good? Think of Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot's DLC. The Gohan DLC was really impressive, but each pack got progressively weaker and weaker, with the Bardock DLC being a 3 hour (at max) adventure with Frieza that barely gives any more characterization than FighterZ did with character match ups, and then another horde mode pretending to be a story arc.

Many companies, even developers, want to take on the challenge of making one and get the rewards of being a lasting one, but as Jesus himself warned: count your costs first.

2. ANY service is a bitch-and-a-half to monetize sustainably.

Twitter and Facebook will happily tell you that getting people to subscribe to a service they don't think they should pay for is a fucking tall order. After all, Twitter's paid value for people is being able to control culture and Facebook has to gather and sell information because you're browser history is worth more than the website that gathered it. This carries to video games. You know about whales. They pay for everyone, and then the game builds the monetization around them, which continues until it drives away the not-rich/less stupid players (often but not exclusively overlapping), and soon the whales without sunk-cost fallacy leave because that player-base allowed them to buy their way into or above a group. And then the game dies, if it ever gets the whales in the first place.

Constant work needs constant income. When making individual products, you can eat into money previous products brought in because you're making something to make more money. That's baby's first economics. But constantly throwing money into something that you've already sold? When it works, small projects can survive off of passionate player bases (Wizard 101 and Runescape come to mind). But when it doesn't worst? Ask Facebook/Meta investors. A live service can quickly seem like throwing good money after bad. Even if the game actually is still doing well, it can only take a downturn or two to kill larger publisher services.

3. Dime-A-Dozen gameplay with Dime-A-Dozen gameplay loops

Most Live Services are just games you can play elsewhere. I won't waste your time with this one, you can think of your own examples.

4. Skill Issues

Fighting games really struggle with this one, but games eventually reach the point where tryhards and goofballs are the only extremes left. Finding a good game with skilled players, but not players abusing every aspect of frame data to tip the odds in their favor only gets harder over time. PVE games can survive, in fact Fallout 4 is held up by it's player base far more than by it's coding and quests. But for PVP games, it's poison. You have an uphill battle against people who are only still playing to keep winning. You might be able to find Discord servers with players to help you learn beyond the ropes, but the casual experience of jumping in and learning by doing has a very limited shelf life. Not something a game that's designed to earn money over time wants.

5. Gimped Customization

To end this off, there's a part that needs to be talked about that often gets lost amidst bigger issues: player customization. here's some tropes I notice from live services that can get really annoying beyond FOMO:

1. Every color is a different outfit, so you have to buy/unlock them separately.
2. The color selection is often very limited, often giving fewer options than your Miis have.
3. When you remove the color variations, you often only actually have about 10 or so costume pieces, something that Soul Calibur would laugh at. Back on the PS2.
4. Limited body types. A downside of the customization needing outfits is that there's a reason to limit body type customization. I can understand limited making characters fat for hitbox concerns, but not being allows to give your men large muscles or women perky breasts is the only thing I can rest assured will be there.
5. There's never a Hawaiian shirt. This is merely an observation.

This Jimless Jimquisition will be finished in it's next update.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

The last full price AAA games I purchased were Elden Ring and Doom Eternal. Before that I can't even remember but like you, I mostly buy during sales or bundles.

I'm the same as you guys. I bought Hogwarts Legacy on release but despite enjoying Insomniac's Spider-Man I doubt I'll get the second game on release. Plus I liked the God of War remake but I still haven't bought Ragnarok.

These days, there's no real benefit to buying games day of unless you want to be part of the multiplayer, and even then there's plenty of old games that still have dedicated communities that you can go for and join cheaply.

 

[Spud gun]

Piracy. The boogeyman of big publishers of treeeple ayyy. Which is in fact a litmus test of game. Since now there's barely any demo versions of games, like in 90s, early 2000s. And if game is good - people will buy it regardless for support and patching

The biggest problem with piracy nowadays is that there is only one person that is autistic enough to crack Denuvo and its a mentally unstable troon apparently.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Piracy. The boogeyman of big publishers of treeeple ayyy. Which is in fact a litmus test of game. Since now there's barely any demo versions of games, like in 90s, early 2000s. And if game is good - people will buy it regardless for support and patching

Don't need to. They're all built on the same shitty, unoptimized engine, but MUH 8k TEKSHURES and MUH MOTION TRACKING and MUH MEGASCANS...

I just want a game that has more than 3h of gameplay for less than $80.

 

[PixarsTedKennedy]

These days, there's no real benefit to buying games day of unless you want to be part of the multiplayer, and even then there's plenty of old games that still have dedicated communities that you can go for and join cheaply.

Or if you want a physical copy. I slacked on getting one for a game for six months and now I they're going for 100+ on ebay.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Or if you want a physical copy. I slacked on getting one for a game for six months and now I they're going for 100+ on ebay.

Why? So you can download version 0.99 and need to download 37GB of content so you can play it?

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

The biggest problem with piracy nowadays is that there is only one person that is autistic enough to crack Denuvo and its a mentally unstable troon apparently.

Name three (3) games with Denuvo that are worth pirating and playing

 

[Nigor]

I can't accept gaming as being "expensive" when both Steam and GoG are having sales, (not even to mention how good emulation has gotten lately). What's expensive is being retarded about purchases, which granted a lot of people are. But people who are retarded about gaming purchases are probably retarded about all their purchases, so that's not gaming's fault.

Really, it's just about patience. Buy the game when it comes out if you have the spare money and you know you are going to love it, or patiently wait until it's $4.79 on a sale a couple of years later. Oh, and if the game is "We're charging real money for each in game bullet," then just skip that one and find something else to play.

This is genuinely true, I've been a consolefag for years and only just got a competent enough computer to download games and steam is cheap as fuck if you put any game you're interested in into your watchlist and wait for it to eventually go on sale. Shit, you can literally buy every single valve game on steam right now for 5 euro. Besides that, I think the only triple a game I've ever bought full price day of was mgsv

 

[PixarsTedKennedy]

Why? So you can download version 0.99 and need to download 37GB of content so you can play it?

I haven't really had to do that too many times. I don't buy a lot of western games and they seem to be the main culprit. I just know that in a couple of years I'm pretty sure we'll all be banned from online gaming for saying nigger on here.

 

[Oliver Onions]

He's lucky that nintendards have attention span of a fruit fly and forgot about him already.

To be fair they're probably busy playing Tears Of The Kingdom and enjoying themselves, a concept completely foreign to miserable fat old Jimbo.

Plus I liked the God of War remake but I still haven't bought Ragnarok.

I'd save your money and replay GoW 2018, Ragnarok is worse in every way.

 

[Cuddlebug]

Jim's complaints about game prices will forever make me lol. I mowed a shitton of lawns to save up to buy Chrono Tigger in 1995, which cost 80$ bloody dollars (approx 150$ today).

That would have gotten me a full AAA game + a season pass with enough left over for additional DLC today. Kinda makes the current Gen look pretty cheap! Methinks Jimmy boy didn't have to actually work for his money back then, so he had no concept of how damn expensive gaming had ALWAYS been.

 

[Moja Zemlja]