i don’t think my brain is going to recover from that fact by the end of the day
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do you have a link to that article? i missed that one. not the other stuff though… unfortunately.
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It looks like she deleted it at some point—I don’t know if that was any kind of retraction, but I expect she just scrubbed a lot of her old writing when she took the Kotaku job. But the Wayback has it:
I remember it made some hobbyist game creators actually feel weird and sad and guilty!
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while I agree with the sentiment of “fuck it get paid”, this article reads like someone pinning you into the corner at a party and interrogating you because you said “yeah i released my experimental platformer for free cuz i felt like it” and they overheard
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Preserving Worlds season 2’s first two episodes are out now, including the first episode which features @thecatamites! I think Twitter embeds are broken at this time but the new trailer is here:
https://twitter.com/means_tv/status/1660722267108548641
And here’s an announcement of a live premiere of the two episodes tonight at 6PM EST:
https://twitter.com/means_tv/status/1660723024415301668
My co-creator and I will be there! You’ll need a Means TV subscription to attend. If you don’t have one, then getting one would support the show! There’s also a free week trial if you want to try it out first. Here’s the link to sign up for the premiere if you’re interested!
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jokes on you sisi, i released my game for free anyway
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I am all in favor of people saying “fuck it i’m gonna get paid” but I also think it’s okay to have hobbies where you create something and don’t need to monetize it. some of her supporting statements are really ??? to me
Free games aren’t really free. They demand the player’s time. If you tell me that your free game is 10 hours long, that’s not really free to me. That’s demanding hundreds of dollars worth of my time. When you think about it, games that are longer than 10 minutes are never free.
Compared to what players’ time is worth, $5 is super cheap. The price is not the reason why your game isn’t doing well. Even if your game is brilliant, you have to give busy adults a reason why your game is worth the time. “FREE” doesn’t make the time burden go away.
this bit still extremely rubs me the wrong way. I think I get the premise of what she’s arguing here, but I dont’ buy it. and the “no game is free, because games demand a player’s time, which is more valuable to them than money” as an argument for why it’s essentially wrong to release a game for free is just, well, ???
and to add to the premise i don’t really agree with, i’ve recently experimented with releasing games with a pricetag, and while there are numerous factors that lead to any individual game getting attention or not on itch, i’ve only seen evidence that for small hobbyist creators who are mainly interested in their stuff getting played by people, a price tag is a detterent to finding an audience, not an attractive feature
we don’t necessarily need to relitigate it because not only has it disappeared from its original home on patreon, but I couldn’t even find sources doing a verbatim search for a couple of key phrases. it’s effectively gone. but at least on my corner of twitter, it was a really big point for like 72 hours, and it’s stuck in my mind.
and then she had her whole kotaku career and now it sounds like she’s where she needs to be lol
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those are the words of someone who just doesn’t like games as a concept, and as such, can have all their game opinions discarded on sight
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I didn’t realize this but the Preserving Worlds S2 premiere at 6pm EST (in 15 min) is actually free to all, not just subscribers! Come out and show some SB representation!!
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I want to know what kind of lifestyle cocktail gets one from the above universe-brain level take to working for a game company whose revenue is predicated on gambling
also why isn’t Lord Cygames rewarding me, one of their loyal dirt-farm laborers, with a job. I do my horse writing for free.
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this person wrote for a game that reduced social conversations to a pair matching deck building puzzle, and thought that said a lot about the way people relate with each other. her takes and the social climbing she participates in should not be a surprise, but it is frustrating to see everytime.
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writing about games is just such a precarious and shitty industry that’s growing evermore precarious and shitty. it’s also very thankless, where you’re a constant target of hatred and harassment. as much as Kotaku has run bad articles before they also have some of the worst people in the world dedicated to hating everything they do to a degree i’m not sure there’s any analog to. whereas working a game company you basically are under the umbrella of the company and don’t have to be a public figure nearly as much. i think that’s why so many people jump from being a journalist/critic to working on games. and why there’s not a lot of incentive at all to be super duper critical or take game companies to task in a serious way. it is a reflection on how dire the larger landscape is in general though.
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yeah, as much as I generally more or less hate most of what kotaku (and most games outlets) runs, I’m careful not to just attack kotaku or “games journalism” in a blanket way. always for specific things, and at pains to sound nothing like the “kotaku in action” shitbags
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i feel like we’re basically staring down youtube video essayists (or things like them) being the primary venue for games crit indefinitely, at least until youtube changes their business model or copyright law changes in a way that makes it harder to do decent video essays about video games.
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your problem is you actually have interesting and insightful things to say
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no one who plays mmos (does genshin count as an mmo? it has the same time wasting shit on top of gacha right?) actually respects their own time
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i dont understand hwo the takeaway from the time=money article isnt EVERYTHING COSTS TIME SO NOTHING SHOULD COST MONEY instead of 'charge more to waste peoples time"
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i will shit on kotaku forever. no one will stop me from believing an institution is stupid just because my opinion overlaps with whatever 2014 liches are still crawling around
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sisi jiang being such a craven shill that she’s working directly on marketing the slop she shilled for is hilarious. Not a kotaku writer alive who has written something worth reading.
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The best game writing is the free game writing
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also let me throw real shade:
Zhongli is a unit for people who can’t dodge
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Rare do devs dare to match Metal Slug /
so Roku Division deserves to be dug /
I will download this demo /
I will help them debug
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