The music playing was hilarious. The sharing cheese at a fireplace in a dungeon talking about dbz, iconic.

CONTEXT:

https://www.eurog*mer.net/dragon-age-the-veilguard-wont-have-an-arachnophobia-mode-because-it-doesnt-have-a-single-spider

Apparently the uber soys working on DA4 deliberately avoided the use of spiders as enemies, in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of those with arachnophobia.

The news of this going along the grapevine is just many tiny titbits of news, making even the most braindead slopconsuming DA fans hesitant about being excited regarding the upcoming Dragon Age 4 in less than a month - especially since 3 months ago, Bioware had released a trailer which garnered a large amount of dislikes from people for a myriad of reasons.

The reason for the backlash or dislike or lack of positive feedback are many, including the great fracturing of the fanbase - but most of it was also to due with the context within which the DA4 trailer was released. For the past 2 years gaming has seen spectacular mega-blockbuster game failures from AAA developers and publishers, stuff like Redfall and GOllum, Forspoken and Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones, Saits Row 2022 reboot and so on.

ALL of these uber AAA games had immediate uncertainty and pushback upon their trailers, Saints Row 2022 reboot's trailers back in 2020 & 2021, had immediate backlash from the core Saints Row fanbase, whom had gotten used to the dark humor and morally abhorrent but likeable protagonists of the series.

The student soyboys protagonists of the reboot, left many with uncertainty as to the quality of the rest of the game, if the developers could seemingly miss the previous tone of the series so badly to SUCH an extent. Even Saints Row 4, the batshit insane matrix alien invasion parody title, held the dark humor and moral abhorrence of the protagonists to old standard, even if Saints Row 2 fans hated the zany story.

Instead it gave the fanbase a fear that the developers of the Saints Row 2022 Reboot legitimately hadn't actually played the games, or legitimately didn't comprehend them and their themes.

In the ensuing months past its release in 2022, the /r/saintsrow sub was a perpetual battleground, where shitlibs wokes and soys tried to gaslamp everyone into believing the game was good or even of acceptable quality - yet this time, the spectacular critical and financial failure vindicated the detractors of the Reboot, in that their fears all the way back in 2020 were well founded - in that if the developers could not even hold the same writing tone of the previous titles, whether through incompetence or agenda pushing, then there was very little chance that the other aspects of the game would be up to par.

A similar phenomenon had occurred in the trailers, and pre-release period of many uber high profile failures. Forspoken to Gollum, to Redfall. And although a bad trailer is never a guarantee of a predictor of the quality of a game, these specific high profile failures, each so close to each other, each vindicating detractors from teh moment the trailers dropped, demonstrated that much could be inferred by veteran gaymers or even normies ESPECIALLY negatively if the writing tone of specific series was different, if woke girlboss or woke seeming modern contemporary politics were present within the trailer, like a canary in the coalmine,

or just corpospeak and obvious trendchasing. The now infamous Concord failure was another such prediction by detractors as much as 2 years ago, since many Hero Shooter genre corposhit trendchaser soulless games have already lost millions for their demented out-of-touch CEOs. In fact Concord WILDLY exceeded even the worst predictions of failure as we now in the present know with hindsight.

I had an exchange with @Losercel 3 months back (can't remember the comments) where he exclaimed it was foolish for dramatards and other detractors to already be so negative with regards to a game still 4 months away, and I espoused that in isolation this might be true, but within the context of so many high profile failures, the negativity was warrented.

ON SPECIFICALLY THE PUSHBACK ON THE DA4 BIOWARE TRAILER:

Again many reasons for the negativity, but basically 3 months ago, the pushback could be boiled down to 2 main factors.

Many peeps immediately despised the artstyle of the trailer, declaring it too be "too cartoony", and appearing to be targeting the zoomer or Fortnite or Hero Shooter fandom.

With an additional 15 years worth of build up disdain for Marvelesque dialogue and writing

Additionally peeps decried the tone for being waaaaaay offbeat, too similar to Disney/Marvel or too light hearted, in comparison to the previous entries of the series having been relatively grimdark in tone type Dark Fantasy, with certain portions of of ALL 3 games having had sections which were borderline horror in tone and theme. (The Broodmother quests in Origins, the female Frankenstein quests in DA2, and the MINDRAPE quest or Fade in Inquisition) Even inquisition could have many dark moments despite its more colourful palette compared to its progenitors

"This is what Tevinter Magisters saw in Golden City."

Anyways it's just a whole comment section meming and lamenting the fear that the feel of the game was too different from its predecessors.

Additionally since 2019-2024, another phenomena had occurred, a relative mainstreamification of chudtubers and anti-woke media critics on Youtube, for example the most infamous currently being guys like the Critical Drinker.

Born from many chuds, to eventually even normies having had no outlet to voice their discontent of modern Hollyweird woke slop from both Disney and Hollywood greater, in which race-bending of white european characters from traditional medieval periods, to disliked girlboss chars, to the perception that modern contemporary politics had found its way into escapism fiction.

These anti-woke critics/youtubers still wouldn't sway any liberally minded peeps, and their reach was still only a fraction of normies, but even IRL in my real world experiences, around the office water cooler, or worksites or between trusted friends or family, I have noticed explicit anti-woke sentiment or talking points espoused by peeps i would consider super normie and apolitical, with regards to modern Hollywood media

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/star-wars-lord-of-the-rings-bridgerton-toxic-fans-hollywood-response-1236166736/

Even Hollywood writers have actively written that detractor fandoms have started to have an actual word-of-mouth effects upon their bottom lines! With many blame being laid upon the feet of the myriad of anti-woke or chudtubers which had sprung up.

This exchange between @SpookNarca and @eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee best sums it up.

https://rdrama.net/h/vidya/post/307335/sweet-baby-inc-purged-its-client/7151111#context

https://rdrama.net/h/vidya/post/307335/sweet-baby-inc-purged-its-client/7151188#context

NO SPIDERS!

Back to the no Arachnophobia thing

Basically in the past 3 days Biowarefans have been slapping about how this is totally a non issue maaaaaaaaaaan, to this is another straw on the camel's back in terms of redflags

"On it's own, the lack of spiders is not an issue. The problem is quickly becoming all these small things that wouldn't really be an issue "on their own", they add up. No more spiders, only 3 choices (this is an issue on its own), only 2 companions, can't control your companions etc etc etc... DAV is quickly becoming unrecognizable."

"It's a sign that this game is going to have no teeth to it; it's going to be modern Marvel levels of Slop"

"Exactly, people like this would piss and shit themselves if Sten was a companion, or other character like Javik or Regill"

"I'm scared of spiders like most people but this is weird. This reminds me of a mod that replaced spiders with mabari. But they still spawned in by coming down from a web which is way FRICKING scarier than a spider doing that lmao"

<insert eyerolls="" here=""> </insert>

"I'm afraid of water. REMOVE THE OCEANS!!"

"To me this sort of thing raises concerns. These sort of changes feel more like "what we can do to appease the audience" whereas I don't think anyone who is creating a very good story would be worried about that because they know the game/story itself is enough that people will be a part of it and enjoy it regardless. Or it's just one less piece of art they have to design which would be in line with the Keep changes and scaling back scope."

This is especially noticable as ingame characters have joked at the amount of ingame spider enemies killed!

Spoilerstrags frick off. Last planet is finally here, looks really good.

!g*mers

!neurodivergents

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/

Throughout the game industry's short history, there's been ample debate about how much piracy actually impacts a game's legitimate sales. On one side, some publishers try to argue that every single pirated download should count as a "lost sale" that they would have logged in a theoretical piracy-free world. On the other side, some wiseacres argue that most pirates would never consider paying for a legitimate version of the game in the first place or that piracy can actually be useful as a word-of-mouth promotional tool.

While the true effect of piracy on sales revenue is likely somewhere between those two extremes, piracy's precise financial impact on a game has always been hard to nail down. Now, though, a recently published study uses post-release cracks of Denuvo's DRM protections as a sort of natural experiment on games sales in pre- and post-piracy worlds. The results "imply an average proportionate loss of revenue of around 19 percent in each week of release if a crack is available," according to the study, suggesting that effective DRM can actually have a significant impact on a publisher's bottom line.

The data dance

In "The Revenue Effects of Denuvo Digital Rights Management on PC Video Games," published in the peer-reviewed journal Entertainment Computing, UNC research associate William Volckmann examines 86 different Denuvo-protected games initially released on Steam between September 2014 and the end of 2022. That sample includes many games where Denuvo protection endured for at least 12 weeks (when new sales tend to drop off to "negligible" amounts for most games) and many others where earlier cracks allowed for widespread piracy at some point.

A majority of Denuvo games studied remained uncracked during the crucial 12-week sales window after release. Credit: Entertainment Computing / William Volckmann

Crucially, the presence and/or specific timing of a crack's availability couldn't be effectively predicted by characteristics like pricing or critical review scores. That makes the existence of a crack "a practically exogenous event" that can be used to effectively segregate a game's revenues in a no-piracy world (i.e., before the Denuvo crack is available) and a piracy-filled world (i.e., after the crack's release). The variable timing of different crack releases also helps the relative analysis, since "revenue is highest close to the release date, and therefore a crack that appears close to the release date has a disproportionately large effect on revenue," Volckmann writes.

Unfortunately, the lack of good publicly available sales data for most games makes it difficult to measure these revenue effects directly. To estimate a Steam game's relative sales decline in each week after release, Volckmann uses a proxy that combines the number of new Steam user reviews and, for single-player narrative games, the game's average active player count. While Volckmann acknowledges that these imperfect estimates represent "the biggest limitation of this study," any estimated biases away from actual sales data seem likely to cancel out across the various games in the sample.

"The no-crack counterfactual"

After applying some complex statistical models to the underlying data, Volckmann finds that, unsurprisingly, relative revenues in the weeks following a crack's release are lower than the baseline expectation for uncracked games in the same time period. These negative effects of a crack on revenues—which are highly statistically significant (p<0.01)—"impl[ies] that the appearance of a crack reduces revenue relative to the no-crack counterfactual," Volckmann writes.

The longer a game's DRM lasts, the fewer new sales are left to be affected by piracy. Credit: Entertainment Computing / William Volckmann

Just how much money a publisher can expect to lose from a Denuvo crack, though, depends heavily on how quickly the game is cracked, Volckmann finds. A Denuvo-protected game cracked in the first week after release can expect to make about 20 percent less revenue than if the DRM had remained in place, according to the study, while a crack six weeks after a game's release only costs an estimated 5 percent of theoretical total revenue. After 12 weeks, new sales are so negligible that "developers could eventually remove unpopular DRM schemes with minimal losses (and possible gains from strongly DRM-averse consumers)," Volckmann suggests (and some publishers have done just that after Denuvo is no longer effectively protecting new sales).

Volckmann's data lines up with public statements that Denuvo-maker Irdeto has made regarding the need for DRM to protect a game's crucial post-launch window. "We don't position Denuvo Anti Tamper as being uncrackable—no anti piracy solution is," Denuvo VP of Sales Robert Hernandez told Ars in 2017. "However, our goal is to keep each title safe from piracy during the crucial initial sales window when most of the sales are made."

The difference between a week 1 Denuvo crack and a week 6 crack can be significant amounts of revenue. Credit: Entertainment Computing / William Volckmann

Overall, according to Volckmann's data, Denuvo is doing just that. The median Denuvo-protected games lose almost no sales to piracy, Volckmann suggests, because the protection "more often than not" goes uncracked in that initial 12-week window. In a world with no DRM, on the other hand, Volckmann projects those games could expect 20 percent less revenue at the median.

Whatever you think of DRM schemes like Denuvo, the potential to protect against that kind of revenue hit is something that major publishers might find hard to ignore. And there are signs that Denuvo's protection is becoming more crack-resistant in recent months; the CrackWatch subreddit lists 28 Denuvo-protected games released so far in 2024, 26 of which remain uncracked and two of which were cracked well outside the 12-week release window. As we see in this study, that kind of robust protection can be worth a significant amount to a piracy-wary game publisher.

Hey, here's a radical idea: make good games again and people will buy them again. Continue making shit and people will continue to not buy it.

!g*mers

Don't worry, gang. Soyney is here to save you from those potentially harmful pixels you purchased!

The drama that is Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number will seemingly never end. Almost a decade after being released globally (except for Australia), it's still causing issues for publishers.

The game was available on PlayStation Plus Extra a few months ago, and it was also available for purchase as part of the Hotline Miami Collection, but a complaint has clearly come from somewhere as it has now been removed, with those that paid for the game being refunded and unable to re-download the game in Australia.

In an email sent to customers, PlayStation admitted that the game hadn't received a proper rating from the Australian Classification Board and therefore has been remove from sale (and libraries) in Australia

lol, lmao even.

>duuude come on, it's so consoomer friendly, unlike those other live service games!

And then it turns out to be like all the other live service games

Anti-FOTM bros, I kneel.... I should have listened.....

Also !g*mers PSA, if you've ever downloaded HD2 onto your PC, you now have a rootkit on your PC that you can't uninstall. Enjoy!

I always had spearow, bulbasaur, and then swooped up that jigglypuff.

P.S. magicarp does NOT count

I really can't stand videos like this. Remakes are a great way for old AND new fans to experience a beloved game.

People act like remaking a game is going to somehow make their original physical copy of the game disappear lmao. #SilentHill2Remake pic.twitter.com/j2Q0mk2kgo

— RapidCrafter (@RapidCrafterYT) October 5, 2024

Mr enter responds:

It's not that remakes cause original work to vanish, it's the fact that companies are pushing for them to outright replace said original works.

Like for starters, games like the PS1 Crash and Spyro series aren't available on modern hardware, so as such, most, if not all fans… https://t.co/rY2U1xhBIm

— Tabreez (@tabreezsiddique) October 6, 2024

Also the guys twitter account is JUST shilling for the new remake

Jasper Byrne is a musician and game developer. I'm going to be focusing on his music today.

Jasper used to make music like this:

(^This one was good enough for PewDiePie to use as an outro^)

That last one is important. We'll get back to it.

Suddenly, a not very well telegraphed Lone Survivor remaster comes out called "Super Lone Survivor"

*(It's essentially just an engine change with some minor new content. I'm not sure what was wrong with the old one other than it using a big .swf internally )

The important part is that Jasper creates a new soundtrack for it. My pants tighten and I wonder how the remasters of all my favourite songs are going to be fricked up.

Spoiler: He (quite wisely) didn't actually touch any of the originals and just made hours of extremely generic "80's movie" synth music.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lQnT3XMxjITDjfmpNROqrB77EI8YR1vgs

What the frick happened? Why is it all in a completely different style? Was he too afraid of ripping off Akira Yamaota?

I listened to his new album, Mirrors, and it was also just kinda meh

本日の小島監督。
Hideo Kojima today.
（腰痛） pic.twitter.com/d7jmYHfxBJ

— Ayako (Touchy!) (@Kaizerkunkun) October 9, 2024

@JanniesTongueMyAnus @AntiJannieAktion @Janniephobe @BAN_JANNIES_FROM_LIFE @JannyStomper @FrickJannies1234 @Jannycide_Now @alljanniesrs @JanniegetmeBannie @Discuss

A win is a win.

Lower Difficulty and Retry ◀️ pic.twitter.com/klr55NWD2Y

— Bandai Namco US (@BandaiNamcoUS) October 8, 2024

!g*mers !texas

NEW FROM US:

Roblox—Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kidshttps://t.co/62fZ2VFyia $RBLX

(1/n)

— Hindenburg Research (@HindenburgRes) October 8, 2024

Full report here

https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/

Some selected paedo highlights from the report

!g*mers !r-slurs !lawyers

https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1fyh4d8/nintendo_switch_modder_who_refused_to_shut_down/

https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/1fyep3z/nintendo_switch_modder_who_refused_to_shut_down/

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1fyos44/nintendo_switch_modder_who_refused_to_shut_down/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1fyorg8/nintendo_switch_modder_who_refused_to_shut_down/

its bait

League of Legends players have been found to be the most intelligent in an IQ survey of g*mers, with an average score of 120.4.

It's reported that playing video games can be beneficial for your brain and cognitive function. But if you've ever played a multiplayer game online, you may very well question that... however, the folks at WhichBingo surveyed 1,002 g*mers to find out which video game player bases are the smartest.

They partnered up with a team of psychologists to administer an intelligence test.

The remote IQ test assessed the cognitive skills of participants in four areas: verbal communication, mathematics, logic and visual reasoning.

Popular online strategy game League of Legends secured the highest IQ score of 120.4.

Following close behind in second was the player base of the successful single player title Black Myth: Wukong with an IQ of 119.8.

Baldur's Gate 3 players placed third overall, with an average IQ of 117.9. Then, Counter-Strike was fourth, with a 116.1 score, and it looks like Valorant wasn't part of the study.

On the other hand, FC 24/FIFA 23 players recorded the lowest IQ in the study, with an average score of 89.8.

For context on IQ scores, sub 85 is deemed below average intelligence, 85 -- 115 is deemed average intelligence, anything over 115 IQ is deemed above average intelligence.

The study also found that PC players had the highest average IQ with 114.1, and mobile/tablet g*mers had the lowest at 99.9, when working out the intelligence by platform. PlayStation g*mers had 111, Xbox 105.9 and Switch 103.4 on average.

In terms of gender, female g*mers had an average IQ of 107.9 in the study, and males 105.8.

Which games have the smartest players in terms of average IQ?