Yeah, I was suggesting that even the “salaried” “volunteers” might still not technically be employees/paid workers - and since, as you say, having unpaid/improperly compensated content contributors could cause the company some legal issues, they might have problems with a great deal of the game. The transfer of…

“That’s not a volunteer.”

If it’s structured like the other expeditions, it’s time limited so at some point it resets. You join, it runs for a length of time and then ends - if you haven’t completed the goals you wanted, you join again in the next cycle. (And it sounds like the benefits don’t apply to the whole game, but this one specific mode…

“the change in ownership was written into the blockchain and to undo it would be to rollback the entire blockchain for everyone”

Lawyers weighing in on this seem to be uniformly saying, “If the NFT was stolen, the legal ownership hasn’t changed.” It’ll be interesting to see if they actually take any legal action, because it’ll likely end up with a situation where the entry in the blockchain about ownership means nothing (and not just in this…

You misunderstand - I’m not saying that a 1/3 billion budget defines AAA, I’m saying that AAA budgets of that size exist, and increasingly AAA game budgets are moving in that direction, getting even bigger than they were (which already were straining the ability of publishers to release them). The existence of even one…

What you’re claiming - or at least implying - is there’s no difference between GTA V and Hellblade. Which is obviously not true. It’s true “AAA” is poorly defined and includes games of radically different budgets these days (but largely because the upper end has increased so much). What doesn’t mean anything is the…

while consolidation is inevitable result of capitalism

“we’re only selling because, um, inflation or something.”

“It is a societal behavior issue, not a weapon issue.”

A lot of mass shootings barely even make local news. They’re too common to cover unless there’s something special about them.

“Don’t know about 140"

Yeah, in movies, the post-9/11 glut of zombie movies (kicked off by the Dawn of the Dead remake) made zombies a lot less interesting and over-exposed, and it was always pretty rare to have interesting zombies in games. Zombies were mostly the uncontroversial (not-)human opponent that didn’t require good AI or a lot of…

They’ve been making zombie games since the ‘80s, but I’d argue it really got started in a recognizable form with Doom and Alone in the Dark in the ‘90s setting the form for zombie FPSes and survival horror. Those were followed by numerous zombie shooters which are largely forgotten now, although it gave us a number of …

Yep, exactly. All the bullshit about how they “want to create entertainment that takes a stand for the inalienable rights of each man” - that’s not at all what they’re trying to do. What they’re trying to do is dehumanize their political opponents and revel in their deaths. I mean, they’re still terrible at that, but…

Yep - games, e.g. military shooters, are political as hell (and basically quite conservative). They don’t recognize their own politics as being politics and similarly think their own race/gender/religion/sexual orientation are the “defaults” (i.e. also not race/gender/religion/sexual orientation) and the inclusion…

it wouldn’t be part of the accounting for each studio

It amounts to the same thing - they’re leaving the vagaries of the AAA market, unwilling (and likely unable) to afford regularly spending AAA budget/marketing sums with marginal returns. These days you need to spread that kind of massive risk out across a lot of games. So yeah, they’re keeping their high-selling…

I imagine most developers/publishers don’t allow item trading because they think they can earn much more money by selling items directly to users

skins as an example of “digital ownership” was invalid because most games do not allow you to resell skins