Extra Credits - leftie gaming channel that had two of its members accused of "misconduct" in only 2 months

I used to watch them, wanting to learn about game design. But it was really their "Hard-Boiled" video that made me realize how biased and dog water their content is. The entire video they shit on Max Payne 3 for being dark and gritty and say that games that have a dark and gritty tone are "immature" and then I think they go on about how real "mature games for mature people" are Nintendo and Valve games. But I think their take on Max Payne 3 was really bad.

 
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Holy crap I remember this channel, it's sad the path they took. In a better timeline, they would have been against ESG, social engineering, and other propaganda tactics that they called out in the video criticizing Sesame Credit ( Social Credit score system for china that gained interest in 2015):

Name of video: Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification - Extra Credits
URL of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
wiki on current standing of seseme credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhima_Credit

You would think they would have a different take on social issues based on this video alone, but its like they all took the current year pills and their takes got dumber as a result. It was Dec 16, 2015 when they put out this video and comparing this to what they have been putting out the past few years, its like night and day.
 
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Robotic Kiwi said:
Holy crap I remember this channel, it's sad the path they took. In a better timeline, they would have been against ESG, social engineering, and other propaganda tactics that they called out in the video criticizing Sesame Credit ( Social Credit score system for china that gained interest in 2015):
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Name of video: Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification - Extra Credits
URL of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
wiki on current standing of seseme credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhima_Credit

You would think they would have a different take on social issues based on this video alone, but its like they all took the current year pills and their takes got dumber as a result. It was Dec 16, 2015 when they put out this video and comparing this to what they have been putting out the past few years, its like night and day.
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The Trump derangement syndrome did a number on these people.
 
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Gravityqueen4life said:
The Trump derangement syndrome did a number on these people.
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People like to quip that the death of Harambe "splintered the timeline" but the election of Trump is what I think truly caused the massive brain drain from 2016 onwards. You can even find a few cows with threads on the site that may have been kind of normal pre-2016, but went absolutely batshit insane when he was elected. Trump Derangement Syndrome may not be an actual medical condition but it feels so tangible.
 
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Compared to all the other YouTube channels run by poorly educated people that don't read, there was always something about Extra Credits that made me especially hate them. I guess it's because the guy that narrates the videos has the worst voice imaginable.
 
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The Noise said:
People like to quip that the death of Harambe "splintered the timeline" but the election of Trump is what I think truly caused the massive brain drain from 2016 onwards. You can even find a few cows with threads on the site that may have been kind of normal pre-2016, but went absolutely batshit insane when he was elected. Trump Derangement Syndrome may not be an actual medical condition but it feels so tangible.
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Democrats are sore losers and traitors to humanity with all the race baiting and dysgenic policies they've been pushing globally.
 
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Oliver Onions said:
Old video games were very expensive to manufacture because every part was bespoke. You needed to get cartridge casings designed, moulds made, then have them produced and shipped. Same with the boards inside the cartridge, which often had additional costs like batteries for save functionality. You had to get cartridge labels designed, printed and shipped to production, same with instruction booklets, some of which used to be borderline works of art and contain entire novellas inside; all of which cost extra money. Then you need to get cases made, even the cheap cardboard Nintendo used was a bespoke item that had to be designed, printed, cut and assembled; it would have been even more costly for the jewel cases used by Sony and Sega. Old games also sold in far smaller quantities because the market was relatively tiny, meaning you produced smaller batches, raising the per unit cost.
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Most game engines weren't off the shelf products either; you wanted a game to do something, you told the egg-heads to make it from scratch. A game wasn't just decide what engines to patch together to get the actions and behaviors you need; it was building shit from scratch, because data retention wasn't exactly a thing back then either. That's why people crying for remakes of old games don't understand they can't just pull their gold master copy out of storage or download it from the database servers; that shit doesn't exist, and if it does, it's probably in someone's desk or closet at home and they forgot it's even there. As much as I'd kill for a proper Xenogears with a full Disc 2, whatever was written down to be implemented no longer exists; and they'd have to rebuild everything from scratch. The same thing with what was once called The Suikoden Bible; the OG creator apparently wrote a tome of everything in the Suikoden world; the nations, the runes, the wars, characters, everything, he wrote some sort of massive fucking epic that was used as design documents for the games... then one day, he left Konami, and no one knows where it went. We'll never get another Suikoden, the OG creator left and no one knows where his notebook went.
 
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Kheapathic said:
That's why people crying for remakes of old games don't understand they can't just pull their gold master copy out of storage or download it from the database servers; that shit doesn't exist
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I first became aware of this with Silent Hill 2 when the infamous HD collections came out. Konami had thrown the masters away and so, when they had to re-record all of James' dialogue with Troy Baker, they couldn't change anything because the subtitles were baked into the cutscenes in the only version they had to work with.

Actually maybe I'm getting that wrong: I think they did change the dialogue and then it didn't match the subtitles any more because they were baked in and couldn't be changed. Either way it was a total shambles.
Kheapathic said:
We'll never get another Suikoden, the OG creator left and no one knows where his notebook went.
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Didn't the Suikoden creator also recently pass away? Or am I thinking of a different famour JRPG guy. I remember a story about someone crowdfunding a spiritual successor to an old franchise but dying before it was released.
 
Robotic Kiwi said:
Holy crap I remember this channel, it's sad the path they took. In a better timeline, they would have been against ESG, social engineering, and other propaganda tactics that they called out in the video criticizing Sesame Credit ( Social Credit score system for china that gained interest in 2015):
View attachment 5994051
Name of video: Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification - Extra Credits
URL of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
wiki on current standing of seseme credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhima_Credit

You would think they would have a different take on social issues based on this video alone, but its like they all took the current year pills and their takes got dumber as a result. It was Dec 16, 2015 when they put out this video and comparing this to what they have been putting out the past few years, its like night and day.
Click to expand...

What happened to the original voice guy anyway
every time they get into controversy it's never the original guy anymore

I think James still writes for them and he got "cancelled" but he wasn't the original voice
 
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Nick Gars said:
Quoting mostly to echo this sentiment. I'm fairly fresh to PC gaming in the sense I never owned a computer that wasn't bottom tier and 5 years out of date before the one I have now, but even with this massive beast of hardware, it's not the ULTRA HIGH REZ GRAPHICS AAA SLOPFEST games I find myself playing.

Why? Because $60 is too fucking steep for 99% of them, and pirating to try them out before I buy often times proves this fact. For every genuinely good $60 AAA game (let's say Elden Ring, for example), there 100 that are pure trash that aren't even worth the asking price at 90% off (Suicide Squad, Fallout 76, pretty much every Assassins Creed, Madden, and the list goes on). Yet funnily enough, all those games I find on Steam on sale from nobodies end up getting most of my play time (having a blast with Tiny Rouge, it only cost me like $5, and I've already put in well over 5 hours).

There's a ton of really good games out there on the indie side (there's a lot of trash too, don't get me wrong) largely because they're focused on making a good game, unlike the AAA corpo's who just want to financially fist fuck you at every given opportunity. Give that $5 on sale game you never heard of a chance, more often than not, it's a better investment than what you're getting for 12x the price with AAA garbage.
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At least personally, the issue with game prices is that 99% aren't made for me. So why the fuck would I pay a premium on them? If a game is actually designed for my tastes I'd pay even extra than the worth for its length since good developers should be encouraged. But most of the games today are made for as wide target audience as possible, so let those people spend their money.
 
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Payne in the Max said:
I used to watch them, wanting to learn about game design. But it was really their "Hard-Boiled" video that made me realize how biased and dog water their content is. The entire video they shit on Max Payne 3 for being dark and gritty and say that games that have a dark and gritty tone are "immature" and then I think they go on about how real "mature games for mature people" are Nintendo and Valve games. But I think their take on Max Payne 3 was really bad.

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I mean. Considering their most well known video is one of the most disliked videos on Youtube featuring them calling everyone they disagreed with on the internet a nazi I'm honestly only surprised there's a channel left to shit on tbh. My only shock here was that they somehow made enough of a return to relevancy we're talking about them again. I can only hope this doesn't become a kotaku situation where pre gamer gate under the plan of total biscuit everyone stfu about kotaku and let their organization go bankrupt to the point their parent company no longer existed to gamer gaters ruining it all by acknowledging their existence when they were dead. Allowing the shitty pheonix that is kotaku to rise from gawker's ashes and give them enough force a urinalist of theirs who barely works for them is able to start lolsuit after lolsuit against people like smashjt.

Like in 2011 John Bain said stfu about them, never give them attention as they lie on purpose for clicks, ignore the trolls and they will go away. And from then til 2015 we listened and the company was literally bankrupt. And in 2016 after just 1 little year of people forgetting how trolls operate, their a force to be reckoned with them poisoning even more respected sites like ign and GameSpot.
 
I decided to make a table showing the price of a game, the price of bread, and the median household income over time. Price of bread is taken January of the respective year. Game % / Bread % is how many loaves of bread you could buy instead of a video game. Higher means games are more expensive relative to the price of bread. Naturally the marginal utility of buying bread drops off pretty sharply if you're just buying it to eat, but it's just meant to offer a point of comparison.
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You can draw whatever conclusions you want from this. If you have better video game price data I will happily exchange the data I'm using.
 
MAPK phosphatase said:
I decided to make a table showing the price of a game, the price of bread, and the median household income over time. Price of bread is taken January of the respective year. Game % / Bread % is how many loaves of bread you could buy instead of a video game. Higher means games are more expensive relative to the price of bread. Naturally the marginal utility of buying bread drops off pretty sharply if you're just buying it to eat, but it's just meant to offer a point of comparison.
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You can draw whatever conclusions you want from this. If you have better video game price data I will happily exchange the data I'm using.
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You can look up old 90s toys r us ads and see that console game MSRPs ranged anywhere from 50-55-60-65 and even 70(and I'm not referring to stuff bundled with peripherals like mario paint). There was quite a bit of variation, and of course things also dropped from those MSRPs a bit sooner as a normal price than being a sale price. SNES cartridge prices were usually $5-10 higher than Genesis games. Although the overlap of producing games for 8 bit systems for a number of years also meant that you'd get games hitting the market priced at 20-30 as well. That said, I couldn't tell you what the median was for the early 90s but games definitely weren't all $50. This was also long before stupid collectors editions hitting over $100, bundles of bullshit like skins and "early access" driving up the launch prices too. If you factor in season pass/battle pass/bundles of currency/etc. the real target for spend on a game seems to be 100-110 or so.

With that all said, pricing on video games for a large span of time never needed to increase because getting past consoles and switching to discs meant more profit per unit. And of course digital sales you avoid manufacturing and shipping entirely with hosting costs being a fraction of that leading to again more profit, and of course there's also economy of scale where selling a much larger quantity of now cheaper to sell games is the expectation(with mtx on top of that).

As an example of what I mean, here's a tweet with the video game portion of the 1992 toys r us holiday catalog.
PGA tour golf $60
TMNT turtles in time $65
Link to the past $50
Street Fighter 2 $70

Even Nintendo was still trying to sell 8 bit games for $50 a pop at the time. You could make an argument that PGA tour golf doesn't mean shit. But Mega Man 4, Street Fighter 2, TMNT 4, those were the equivalent of AAA games at the time.
That's a 1993 TRU catalog, same thing with SNES games priced 50-70 and the Genesis games priced 55-65. The 8 bit console cartridges were finally down to $30 that year.

Here's a page with some 1995 TRU spring catalog snippets. Fucking $73 after a coupon for WWF RAW

If you're looking for more data, another good source for the late 80s and early 90s would probably be the Sears Wishbook(aka, catalogs for kids to bother the shit out of their parents) for more insight.
 
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It makes no sense to try and relate the price of video games (what even is an "average" video game?) to anything
It's very simple supply and demand, minus distortions caused by currency debasement
 
p1138 said:
PGA tour golf $60
TMNT turtles in time $65
Link to the past $50
Street Fighter 2 $70
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I encountered that spread in my research, though your sources are better than mine. I chose $50 as a median, though looking at your sources I probably should have bumped that up. Regardless, the net effect is a gradual decrease in game price as a percentage of median income and relative to a staple commodity. From the interviews and articles I've read, they don't raise prices to $120 for all video games because they can't, because it's difficult to get non-whales to spend more than $70 as a one time purchase of a video game.
 
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MAPK phosphatase said:
I encountered that spread in my research, though you're sources are better than mine. I chose $50 as a median, though looking at your sources I probably should have bumped that up. Regardless, the net effect is a gradual decrease in game price as a percentage of median income and relative to a staple commodity. From the interviews and articles I've read, they don't raise prices to $120 for all video games because they can't, because it's difficult to get non-whales to spend more than $70 as a one time purchase of a video game.
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Right, and I doubt that changing the median from 50-55 or even 60 would actually affect your chart by all that much in the grand scheme of things. I also agree about the non whales not being willing to spend $120, because they don't want to spend more than $70 now on a single purchase for the most part, but the general expectation seems to be a $70 sale plus a couple of battle passes and some other mtx, to hit the same price of the $110-120 editions that just include a lot of that BS from the start.

XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG said:
It makes no sense to try and relate the price of video games (what even is an "average" video game?) to anything
It's very simple supply and demand, minus distortions caused by currency debasement
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On the whole, sure. But it's interesting to note a fairly stagnant set of pricing for basically 30 years, and seeing where the industry still manages to turn that into increased profits over time when they aren't producing total shit(like ubislop). And then seeing what those corporate expectations are for sales to individuals and seeing that it actually does come closer to the increase in cost of a loaf of bread over time with the increase in income. Obviously, don't buy video games if you're struggling to put food on the table.
 
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