Lowtax died right on time
RIP Game Informer
never loved it but thought it would always be there
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It’s a rough time for games media I guess. All that seems to be left is a graveyard of podcasts from former outlets.
I don’t really know how to articulate the feeling. There’s a lot of people who want to write about games and apparently an audience but no way of financially supporting anything but the most mainstream news outlets.
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feels like it’s all gone to youtube, and now we’re living inside the vision of reality of a 25-30 year old youtuber. i’ve said it enough times, but youtube: it’s bad, folks! it’d nice to have more things that aren’t just a bunch of fandom fiefdoms.
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We’re all just making content for these rent seeking platforms that sequester money out of the economy.
I know people aren’t keen on aftermath but I found this breakdown from former valve economist to just kinda hit the mark
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I do wonder to what extent people now just stick to their online community of choice for games stuff in lieu of games journalism. Like it’s a big part of why I found SB but I imagine for some people it is a subreddit or game ytuber comments section or the patreon-aligned discord of an ex-games journalism outlet.
Edit: the virtual tracts of land to extract tithes as Varoufakis says
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Yeah I always pipe up in these to say this is me but this is me. Literally I don’t know where a person goes to get “game news.” I have no idea where you guys get it when you post it here. Fewer and fewer places, I guess.
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Actively searching for game news feels like a lifelong contagion I’ve yet to shake but honestly it’s just press releases and direct social media announcements mediated by one of the few ‘official’ news outlets left or shared informally throughout the socialverse. There’s almost no people doing independent investigation outside of the prescribed sacred spaces of press events and trade shows. That is unless you like Schreier or People Make Games or… ? There are some industry-facing outlets as well for devs but they’re not really the same thing and feel very Linkedin adjacent. Keeping up with things is pretty easy and enough people are diseminating the info but it’s a thin spread with little decent discussion. Just enough jam to make the bread taste slightly less like bread.
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yanis is able to speak persuasively but the most important thing to remember about him is that he’s a hypocritical campist whose only accomplishments to date are making the world a worse place, whether through valve or through so completely betraying the left in greece that they are now as weak and irrelevant as the left in america.
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the successful children of radicals are almost always too willing to give themselves a pass in this department (yes I read his memoir and this is the main thing I took from it (vote kamala I guess))
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very much reads like the guy who wrecked the car complaining about how it’s broken now
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my main problem about aftermath is it’s a lot of people who jumped aboard the ecosystem of writing for the big pubs that killed blogs and covering of more niche stuff then saying “we’re going to save journalism, you guys!!” - like they always saw themselves as being victims beset by the horrors of corporate ownership and never people who participated in that decimation of it as a cultural space. this applies to music and other spaces too i suppose, not just games. these pubs sucked a whole bunch of things up into them and now we’re supposed to feel super sad when they fall apart too. everyone conveniently forgets what role they took in the killing of things too.
their articles are mostly fine but the lack of self-awareness of some of that in particular bothers me. which i guess also applies directly to Varoufakis and his direct participation in Steam etc. a lot of people could have told you where this all was likely to go in 2012 and i think now a lot of people are just pretending no one knew better at the time. i guess i’m not fully sold on the “technofeudalism” thing either but what do i know. i just don’t think these tech oligarchs are as actually powerful as a lot of people think they are - if anything i think a lot of professional opinion-havers out there might be overcompensating now for not taking the potential impact of the tech industry on all facets of life seriously enough in the past.
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hell, it was communicated pretty directly in half-life 2’s visual design
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we will make it 2011 again by science or magic
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These findings also fed into another project that Varoufakis is disappointed never saw the light of day.
“I worked on how the Valve ecosystem could be used to create prediction markets,” he said. “Here’s how you could use these 100 million people that interacted there in order to essentially improve upon the predictions of economic forecasters on the American economies, the global economies, interest rates, growth rates, and so on. Because like Reddit, you can crowdsource a lot of information from such a large pool of smart people who are interacting and create games within the video games where you, say, for instance, get these brownie points or credit points if you predict next month’s inflation rate more accurately than the Fed.”
If done correctly, Varoufakis believes Valve could be even more on top of the world than it currently is.
“That was my advice: Since an economy had emerged within the community, you can connect the economy within the community with economies outside the community – and to do it in a gaming way, which creates pleasure and, at the same time, some useful statistics,” Varoufakis said. “I am of the belief that had that happened, then Valve would be able to produce better macroeconomic forecasts for the American economy or the global economy than the [International Monetary Fund] or Goldman Sachs."
This is a pretty amazing idea.
Similarly in STreet Fighter 6 I let the japanese sushi franchise tie-in know my favorite sushi so as to earn a floating 3d model of that sushi that hovers near my custom character.
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SB should host Gameinformer and RH dot net… why not
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Literally about to watch the final episode of Succession, so yeah, let’s do a reverse kill. Sb eats the mainstream rags, becomes imperator of all games news
The Eternal Life of Goldman is the result of years of work by people who love and appreciate the same cartoons, comics and games that you do. We wanted to make an uncompromising 2D game of amazing beauty, so we went back to the genre’s roots and took the most difficult path possible – meticulously drawn, colored and animated by hand using classic frame-by-frame techniques. We didn’t cut any corners, and the results are worth it. In The Eternal Life of Goldman , no two rooms or landscapes are alike. Every place, every object, every character, every visual effect — everything is carefully planned and executed to the finest detail.
Nice.
Far from mindlessly relying on cliché and formula, The Eternal Life of Goldman turns the genre on its head. The game carefully includes everything we all love most about side-scrollers, across the various styles, trends and eras. And it leaves out all the frustrating stuff that doesn’t make sense and wastes time.
It’s a challenging platformer that demands precision, but it never devolves into a grueling exercise where you have to memorize and methodically execute an exact sequence of actions. The key to success is improvisation and ingenuity.
It’s a game that encourages exploration and will give you a sense of discovery—but it won’t have you backtracking in confusion after you gain each new ability or artifact. It’s impossible to spend much time wandering around in The Eternal Life of Goldmanwithout doing anything interesting.
Finally, it’s a game with complex scenes, robust characters and a multi-layered story—but it never gets bogged down in thoughtful poses and feigned pretension. All the elements work to create an adventure that takes your breath away and breaks your heart.
Guess we’ll see about the rest of this. Game looks gorgeous though either way.
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