Sweet Baby Inc. and the Steam Curator Group Conspiracy - The company that is responsible for the diarrheic video game writing.

The SBI detected discord server is probably up there with some of the worst servers I've lurked in. The announcements are constantly spammed with ads for Kabrutus and his various ventures, every chat has a 1 to 5 minute slow mode, (that I believe can be bypassed by boosting but I've not bothered asking) the mods are groomer trooners and political discussion has been replaced with a couple anime and artist chats in a sneed jerk reaction to appear less toxic after an angry discord email. While this is expected it's always interesting observing the foul turd that is the obligatory discord server every mainstream e-celeb owns but never openly acknowledges.
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marvlouslie said:
Going back to the good devs thing, if every single one of them grew a pair of balls and stood up to these fucking weirdos and legitimately left, that would accelerate the AAA crash even further. Leave. Take your talents elsewhere. AA and Indies who aren't affected by this bullshit. Show some fucking backbone. That's what's missing in the modern gaming space. No one has any balls anymore.
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They don't have the balls. One of the hallmarks of AAA development is for every one single visionary there gets to be 50 to 200 "workers" who just do a drone like job day in and day out and represent 95% of game developers. Even if they all just up and quit - they would just be backfilled with another 50 to 200 aspiring game dev workers to happily do the same drone work. It's one of the most sought after jobs by people who don't really know any better.

The AAA crash really cannot be stopped just because the "take my ball and go home" devs already took their balls and formed their own smaller studios and have been doing so for a decade. It's a huge brain drain that large studios don't have a good answer for - and Sweet Baby Inc is demonstrating that it is not a position that can be consulted through. There's a gaping hole for vision that's not getting filled ever. The only studios still chasing it have some staff up top entrenched in studios (aka your Randy Pitchfords, Todd Howards, Naoki Yoshidas, Miyazaki, Kojima, etc) but none of those guys are getting any younger.

It's extremely telling that the most popular games of 2023 were
- From a smaller studio (Lethal Company, Pizza Tower, Dave the Diver, Baldur's Gate 3, Harry Potter, Lies of P, HiFi Rush) complete with Baldur's Gate 3 winning most GOTY awards.
- Not from 2023 (Fortnite, CoD : last year, CoD : Warzone, Fifa : last year, etc).

I've never seen anyone organically talk about Spiderman 2 being good or worth playing despite the piles of cash put into advertising it. Suicide Squad was panned pretty badly from the trailer forward to it's terrible launch. Redfall was supposed to be a system seller and was a complete disaster (shades of Anthem) - there's not really a "first party AAA" game that people gave a shit about outside of Tears of the Kingdom and it shows.
 
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Tanner Glass said:
They don't have the balls. One of the hallmarks of AAA development is for every one single visionary there gets to be 50 to 200 "workers" who just do a drone like job day in and day out and represent 95% of game developers. Even if they all just up and quit - they would just be backfilled with another 50 to 200 aspiring game dev workers to happily do the same drone work. It's one of the most sought after jobs by people who don't really know any better.

The AAA crash really cannot be stopped just because the "take my ball and go home" devs already took their balls and formed their own smaller studios and have been doing so for a decade. It's a huge brain drain that large studios don't have a good answer for - and Sweet Baby Inc is demonstrating that it is not a position that can be consulted through. There's a gaping hole for vision that's not getting filled ever. The only studios still chasing it have some staff up top entrenched in studios (aka your Randy Pitchfords, Todd Howards, Naoki Yoshidas, Miyazaki, Kojima, etc) but none of those guys are getting any younger.

It's extremely telling that the most popular games of 2023 were
- From a smaller studio (Lethal Company, Pizza Tower, Dave the Diver, Baldur's Gate 3, Harry Potter, Lies of P, HiFi Rush) complete with Baldur's Gate 3 winning most GOTY awards.
- Not from 2023 (Fortnite, CoD : last year, CoD : Warzone, Fifa : last year, etc).
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This bears repeating: There is no such thing as a good AAA studio. Any good ones left wouldn't call themselves that or be lumped in with them.
AAA needs to die, every single studio. No survivors, the only way for the effects to be felt is for the suits to be fired and people who are responsible for ruining games to be out and starving about. Then we have the journos, who serve no purpose other than as attack dogs or cheerleaders of the AAA. Thankfully, AI will have their "jobs" pretty soon, we already see Kotaku coping and seething they actually have to play video games to compete.

If the crash happens, don't expect it to happen overnight. The big players need to start bleeding money, and bleeding badly. The mere existence of SBI and similar groups shows that there isn't as much money as you may think: They wouldn't need the support if they made good money themselves. The economy is collapsing, powers that be need these funds elsewhere if they keep producing nothing but stinkers, they may be considered a lost cause and left to dry before long.
Don't forget, games are also getting more and more expensive to make, and longer too. Every failed AAA title hurts someone, so I very well wish them many more happy disasters. I get the entertainment for free, they get to ruin their reputation and go out of business. Win-Win if you ask me.
 
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Baraka Obama said:
Steam DRM can be removed at any time and even if you want to talk about console storefronts where redownloading becomes impossible at some point it's not like the stuff on your console stops working.
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The best thing for game preservation has been rom and abandonware sites. I realized that these were essential due to the fact that a lot of old disk based consoles are eventually going to break and good luck getting replacement parts. I realized that when the disk drive on my beloved Dreamcast breaks due to normal wear and tear on the mechanical drive, I won't be able to find a replacement part or a new Dreamcast to replace it. Same with my GameCube, etc. Now some people actually go through the trouble to replace the drive in their Dreamcast with an SD card reader. However, I think that's going through a lot of effort when Rasberry Pi 5s are available and work out of the box.

I'm always a little shocked how much the success of the Rasberry Pi seems to depend on piracy. Not that I have any problem with piracy, I'm just amazed how something as important as the single board computer scene seems to depend on it for its massive financial success. (Yes, people would still be buying Rasberry Pis and the like without piracy, but it would be more small and niche. You certainly wouldn't have all the third parties selling nostalgic game cases for them.) Truthfully, though, I like it. If some enterprising corporation had decided to come out with a gamestore for Pis, I think that would actually be worse than the way the scene is now.
 
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P. Barnes’ THOT 2.0 said:
Hold on-what antifa video?
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In some random Antifa protest video maybe a few years ago in some random city like Portland, a Black cop was just being silent and keeping a watch over the protest, and a clad in black Antifa guy (I think he was White), just shouted "nigger" right in front of the cop's face. No bad tactics, just bad targets.
 
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Terror Sandwich said:
I don't want a shit like that to see the light of day. I'd prefer if it was cancelled after having wasted millions on development and over half a decade of dev time.
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Fable 4 actually sounds like it might be pretty fun - playing as an obese black woman and rolling around like Homer in The Simpsons Game.
 
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Quijibo69 said:
I hoping more like GTA 6 will do this! It will be another Saints Row reboot on an epic scale. I hope it delivers!
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I’d blotted GTA VI from my memory. I’m betting Rockstar are panicking and doing some rewrites.

This might be a retarded hot take but you can see the rot starting in GTA V. It was really safe edgy for the time.

Can’t wait for a stronk Latinx womxn to lecture me on privilege.
 
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SomeSpook said:
I dunno, knowing Rockstar players, they’ll just consoom product regardless.
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They'll buy it in the millions, for sure, just like they did with RDR2. The normiefags will talk about it non-stop, just like they did RDR2...for a week and then never again.
An anticipated follow up a massively popular franchise that is bigger, has better graphics and is meant to be better in everyway, has killed a lot of games. RDR2 and Cyberpunk are recent examples.
 
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30+GameOvers said:
The Crew has a really novel idea(Travel across the entirety of USA mainland in one big open world) and was an actually decent game. Other than maybe it's sequels, which are also online only, I haven't heard of a racing game that had this scale. Problem is that it never should have been multiplayer only, in fact code exists in game to make it play offline(if I recall correctly)
Maybe do your research on what you're talking about, I would love to play this game right now and I hope the project to rebuild it offline will succeed one day. Just imagine the possibilities if this goes open source and you can create your own content.
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The Crew is basically Great Value Forza Horizon. A lot of people have picked up on that.
 
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