Tag: Chaturday

Chaturday: The One in Which I Get Myself Blacklisted, And That’s a Good Thing


I had some extra time to work on today’s Chaturday article, so I thought I’d make this one extra long. Sit back and enjoy.

This week I’d like to take a look at Valve’s recent decision to no longer curate games on Steam, barring games that are illegal or blatantly trolling. This has prompted an immediate and unsurprising backlash from a population of the internet whose income and livelihoods are directly proportional to the amount of drama that they can stir up. The doomsayers came out of their holes to proclaim that the service is now damned to be a hellscape of disgusting pornographic games where Nazis and white supremacists murder babies! The National Center on Sexual Exploitation claimed that there were one thousand games on Steam with sexual content, and every single one without exception was objectifying in nature.

It’s important to note here that none of the games journalists you may have seen talking about this are trying to take your games away, and I know this because they’ve been telling us repeatedly for the past five years. If I am repeatedly slapping food out of the hand of a small child, it doesn’t mean I’m against that child eating or trying to control him, I’m just saying that his hands can’t hold the food that I don’t personally like.

And for what it’s worth, I think that a lot of these recent decisions at Valve come down to the flat corporate structure. The decision to remove Hatred all those years back was done and then reversed because there is no real managerial structure in the company. Nobody to come out and squarely lead with a vision for how the Steam store should exist. As a result, factions form with differing opinions which arguably led to the warning letters being sent to certain developers a few weeks ago, and you have a company that massively disagrees on how to police the store with nobody around to pull rank and say “my word is final.” Nobody can agree on who gets to push the big shiny “approved” button, so nobody gets to push it at all.

I could spend a year going over quotes from our friends in the games media losing their collective sanity over this announcement, but I don’t have that kind of time. Inverse posted a piece saying that Valve’s response to trolling was to monetize it, despite that being a complete lie, saying that Valve’s answer to bigotry is to monetize it, despite not having any evidence of games genuinely advocating bigotry appearing or attempting to appear on the platform. Polygon’s Ben Kuchera wrote a piece with the subheading “anything goes as long as you give Valve a cut,” a blatantly false statement followed by paragraphs of trying to connect how Valve is wrong for deciding what constitutes an “illegal game” as it makes them the arbitrary decision maker, but also wrong for not acting as arbitrary decision maker on which games pass muster for the store. Freelance writer Nick Capozzoli compared the statement to Valve essentially saying “We believe we should bring Nazis together,” a flagrant misrepresentation.

Even the founder of Itch.io got in on the salt-throwing, posting “A platform that allows “everything, unless it’s illegal or straight up trolling” is ridiculous. Please keep your malicious, derogatory, discriminatory, bullying, harassing, demeaning content off . Our ban buttons are ready.” Incidentally, within five minutes of searching, MMO Fallout had managed to pick up a lengthy list of titles hosted on, and thus presumably endorsed, by itch.io, including hentai games with less-than-consensual sex, games where the objective is to beat up aggressive, beautiful girls, and a game that simply describes itself as “Learn Japanese You Faggot!” Itch.io is a veritable dumping ground for virtually everything that would never make its way on to Steam, be it meme games, troll games, outright piracy, and unfettered copyright infringement. If there are any stores that have no standing to criticize Valve’s curation, it’s itch.io.

It’s not entirely surprising to see outlets deliberately misinterpreting Valve’s statements, bringing up titles like Active Shooting Simulator and conveniently passing over either the fact that the game was removed, or why it was removed, and presenting hyperbolic questions on whether or not Valve will accept certain games, pointing to titles that a reasonable person could conclude to fall under the trolling rule. I say unsurprising because many of these writers are the same people whose bread and butter lies in outrage bait, throwing out accusations and feigning offense to drive hate-views by the thousands, otherwise known as trolling for profit. If these articles had been video games, they’d be banned from Steam.

One subject in which I will agree with my fellow press on is this: If Valve is claiming that they are going to only block illegal games and troll games, they damn sure better start actually doing that. As I said previously, Valve has pretty explicitly stated that they had no intention of selling Active Shooter Simulator on Steam, a statement that would hold more water if Valve weren’t clearly getting ready to sell Active Shooter on Steam. The same goes for titles like Aids Simulator, Gay World, and that shooting game where the only goal is to kill gay people. Titles that are so obvious from the slightest glance to be troll titles and yet they managed to get their way on to Steam before being removed.

In reality, the media should be happy about these changes, as should Youtubers. After all, the idea of Steam being flooded with dozens of games on a daily basis just means that people will be going back to modern and traditional games media in order to find the titles worth playing. It also grants a fantastic opportunity to the portion of games media that really likes writing troll bait but hates actually playing games. If Steam actually becomes the cesspool that you predict, you will have a lifetime of articles to express faux outrage.

The only people who have a genuine right to be angry about these changes are the developers, for whom many this open door policy means drowning in an even larger ocean of competing voices.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Chaturday: You Can’t Download A Console (Yet)


The Pach is Bach! I have a particular affinity for Michael Pachter, partially because he gives me hope in my qualifications of becoming a respected analyst for the gaming industry ala Michael Pachter but without the few products I’ve assisted with being market failures, ala Leigh Alexander. Pachter isn’t right with his predictions all of the time, but then again who is?

This week Michael Pachter made the prediction that the next generation of consoles will still have disk drives, for reasons that are completely grounded in sensible logic: Retailers. Pachter makes the argument that there is no way consoles are going to go all-digital because retailers would revolt and many would likely refuse to stock them. He also notes the strong presence of the used game market.

“So, if you have to buy a console at retail, you can’t say to a retailer ‘Hey, please promote and sell my console but we’re not going to have any games available, so once you sell the console to your customer we’re going to take over the customer and own the relationship, we’re gonna make them download everything and screw you, we’re never going to let you sell a game again’.”

He’s right, and we know this because it has happened before. Ignoring the fact that the PSP Go sold like a wet fart, a number of retailers (read: small stores where employees would have more information and discussion with customers) were openly advocating against sales of the PSP Go, because the system was digital only and the store had no opportunity to recoup profits via software sales. The PSP was small potatoes, the idea of the Xbox Two selling without a disk drive? There is almost no incentive for Wal Mart to stock it, given how low profit margins on consoles are.

We can sort of look toward the PC market as an existing example of this, as that industry essentially went digital only over a decade ago with very few remnants of physical media still existing, and the majority of those being fancy plastic boxes with Steam keys inserted. My local Gamestop’s PC section is smaller than its display of Hatchimals, consisting of a keyboard (on clearance), two mice (on clearance), a bunch of cash cards, and ten boxed games (on clearance).

But I don’t think that Gamestop particularly cares about PC because they never had a stake in the hardware part of sales. Sure you had stores selling Steam machines for a hot minute, but that venture floundered and assuredly the physical retail market now considers the PC as that thing that doesn’t make up a notable portion of its income but is relegated to little cards that don’t take up much shelf space, so the two factors balance each other out.

But Connor, you might say, the PC market is doing just fine and there is neither physical media nor a used game market. True, but you also have to factor that the PC used market was stomped out well before the market boom of video games, swapping games mostly died with the 3.5 inch floppy and Microsoft DOS.

Unlike the PC market, retailers have a stake both in the hardware and the software aspects, with the second half helping the first in terms of revenue. Ignoring the backlash from consumers, the retailer revolt would pretty much torpedo sales and harm long term business relationships between retailers and the manufacturers.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

Chaturday: Thinking Back To Far Cry 5


(Editor’s Note: Some spoilers for Far Cry 5 abound)

I enjoyed Far Cry 5 in the same way one enjoys a triple cheeseburger from McDonald’s. It was tasty and filling and pretty much exactly what I was looking for at the time that I bought it, but I wasn’t exactly seeking depth of character and thus wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t really get any.

Far Cry 5 never stood a chance of escaping controversy because it exists and that’s enough of a qualifier these days to crucify someone, be it the makers or the audience or both. Video games are normally pretty uncontroversial in their stances; Wolfenstein hates Nazis, Call of Duty hates terrorists, Mass Effect hates genocidal aliens and is also cool with two entities of separate species but the same gender bumping uglies.

Humanizing the enemy is a great idea for developers who wish to partake in a little PR suicide, it is for this reason that while we will see media where Germany wins World War 2 and conquers the United States (Wolfenstein, Turning Point, Man in the High Castle, Philadelphia Experiment 2), I can think of only one game where the player can not just play as the German forces, but actually lead them to victory (Panzer General). It’s the whole notion of acknowledgment of existence being interpreted as support of the position and the very fact that I used world war 2 as my example would no doubt be used as fodder in presuming my true intentions.

In Far Cry 5 you really have to let logic go in the face of alien artifacts and mind control drugs. The idea of Joseph Seed cutting off communication to the outside world and closing off the roads to prevent people from going out for help made sense right up until I started buying helicopters and airplanes. I’d be a bit more comforted if the game also mentioned that Seed had some kind of air defense set up and was shooting down planes. It would be a blatant bandaid and if it did I missed it, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason why I can’t fly off and get the National Guard.

Actually the narrative dies when you find out at the start that the dispatcher who sent you out was a cult member from the start. I have to presume that the game doesn’t take place over a long enough span for the courts to start wondering why nobody showed up after that arrest warrant execution for the murderous cult leader. Characters in the Far Cry series have always been more closely akin to realistic, awkwardly attractive mannequins. The premise of the stories are acceptable but you know from the start how this play is going to work itself out with you building up the meter until the boss comes out, kill the boss, rinse and repeat three times, then kill the big boss.

I have to hand it to Ubisoft for cosmetically altering loot stashes to “prepper stashes” and somehow creating far more controversy than the topic is worth. It goes back to the whole acknowledgement equals support idea, that Ubisoft is trying to paint preppers as mystical visionaries when the reality is that yes, the people who stash supplies will have supplies stashed when the need comes along.

Along the way you are going to kill a hell of a lot of cultists, and this is where Far Cry 5 stood out to me among the prior games. You still have the laundry list of chores required to progress through the story, but you don’t have to finish the list in order to get to your destination. Me, personally, I deliberately went for outposts and prepper stashes to fill my reputation meter, allowing the ensuing kills to fill what the missions did not.

As a result, the game felt more like tucking in to a Hungry Man sized meatloaf dinner rather than a full ten pound slab of beef that I would be sick of eating halfway through. The very ending itself was surprising, but no aspect of the game really creeps up on you because Far Cry telegraphs everything, and it does it loudly.

The moment that really killed my immersion into Far Cry 5’s world came along with my first abduction experience. Each of the three generals for Joseph’s army will abduct you at several points during your trek for a drawn out speech or escape scene. These moments are unavoidable, period, no matter where you are. I just happened to be flying really high in a plane when someone on the ground managed to snag me in the ankle (apparently through the plane floor) with a tranq dart. As I watched the plane nosedive to the ground and the screen go hazy, I imagined the cultists picking up whatever was left of me from the plane wreckage for some good old fashioned interrogation.

The game also doesn’t care what you’re doing at the time it decides you’re cruisin’ for a baptism, and I’m fine with that. I tend to mentally lump games into one of two categories: Video games and experiences, and Far Cry 5 is definitely a video game where you do game things.

Otherwise, I found myself enjoying the gunplay once I got used to the rather slow bullet speed. Helicopters and planes were a massive pain in the rear until I got a way to deal with them, making it all the more enjoyable every time I shoot a plane out of the sky with my armor piercing sniper rifle and anti-vehicle weapon perk. Dogfights in the skies with planes and helicopters is fantastic and I have yet to have an experience that matches rolling down the street in that massive armed semi truck.

Hunting this time around isn’t mandatory since you aren’t collecting crafting materials to upgrade your inventory or ammo limits, and because of that change I found myself actually wanting to hunt animals. You’ll still want to do some hunting since each species has a small challenge to kill 1-4 of them for perk points, but there is a big difference compared to Origins for instance that still makes you farm hundreds of animal pelts to upgrade your character.

Incidentally I would have stopped playing Far Cry 5 after beating it were it not for the live events pushing me towards a 100% completion. Each week Ubisoft posts a new challenge from blowing up vehicles to roasting animals and playing in the arcade. There are personal and community goals that offer basic skins for weapons/vehicles and new outfits. The events themselves take less than an hour, generally, and I’m more willing to spend some time tracking down some more stashes and zones that I haven’t picked up yet.

Far Cry 5 is begging for a New Game + mode and considering its addition to Assassin’s Creed Origins, I’m sure Ubisoft isn’t against the idea. There is already the option to reset outposts and retake them for poops and giggles.

How did you feel about Far Cry 5? Boil down this article into one half sentence and rip it apart in the comments below.