General gaming discussion

Shiminay

That's literally the worst part of GTA IV - your ungrateful prick of a cousin or whoever harassing you whilst you're trying to do missions. I fking hated those interruptions and did my best to ignore them.

Jordan 199

Shiminay wrote: »

That's literally the worst part of GTA IV - your ungrateful prick of a cousin or whoever harassing you whilst you're trying to do missions. I fking hated those interruptions and did my best to ignore them.

I agree cousin. How about a trip to Memory Lanes for a game of bowling?

Zero-Cool

Anyone play The Sinking City and recommend it? Argos selling it for 31 euro.

RasTa

God of War is only £14 in Tesco UK atm, should be similar in Ireland. Picked it up finally.

marcbrophy

RasTa wrote: »

God of War is only £14 in Tesco UK atm, should be similar in Ireland. Picked it up finally.

Do Tesco still do games?

Anyone know a Limerick one that does games?

K.O.Kiki

https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1181442535962632193

Yeah, gonna have no problem boycotting Activision-Blizzard from now on.

Spear

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1181442535962632193

Yeah, gonna have no problem boycotting Activision-Blizzard from now on.

They've also made their own subreddit at /r/blizzard private to stop the rush of criticism. Coming a week after that pointed South Park episode, they couldn't be handling this worse.

pixelburp

They didn't just sack the player, I believe even the presenters got the heave-ho, though watching the clip it's hard to see what on earth they could have done. Cut to commercial quicker? It'd be a hilarious over-reaction if it wasn't symptomatic of both China's zero-tolerance policy to dissent & the increasing prevalence of Chinese money in the Entertainment industry. Hollywood and Gaming is awash with money from that country, and between gaming's social-media existence & the growing political unrest in China itself, the centre couldn't always hold

J. Marston

So many bend the knee to China. The NBA are the latest. They're scary powerful.

johnny_ultimate

We absolutely support an individual’s right to hold and express their opinions, unless it impacts our business in an authoritarian state that’s also a lucrative emerging market.

super_furry

This has been coming ever since they put those Pandas in WoW.

Grumpypants

Nothing like a big bag of money to kill that moral compass.

johnny_ultimate

Some staff understandably not best pleased:

https://twitter.com/lackofrealism/status/1181639970332659712?s=21

gizmo

BlizzCon in what, 24 days? That's streamed live, isn't it?

Should be interesting...

pixelburp

If I'm reading things right, Tencent own 5% of Activision too, but 48% of Epic Games. So the question does bounce back to the consumers: if you have a moral objection to Chinese money, should boycotts be applied, and should it be blanket? Gamers don't do boycotts and historically have shown themselves to be unwilling to follow through.

Not being sanctimonious here either cos Hollywood is the same, and I'm damn sure I've watched plenty of mainstream cinema co-funded with Chinese cash. It's harder too with cinema, given how many co-producers and funds go into film production.

johnny_ultimate

Couple of US senators getting involved now. Quite fascinated with how Hong Kong seems to be maybe the one major social issue that bridges partisan and ideological divides these days... outside China of course :pac:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjw535/blizzards-hong-kong-screw-up-is-officially-an-international-incident

gizmo

pixelburp wrote: »

If I'm reading things right, Tencent own 5% of Activision too, but 48% of Epic Games. So the question does bounce back to the consumers: if you have a moral objection to Chinese money, should boycotts be applied, and should it be blanket? Gamers don't do boycotts and historically have shown themselves to be unwilling to follow through.

Not being sanctimonious here either cos Hollywood is the same, and I'm damn sure I've watched plenty of mainstream cinema co-funded with Chinese cash. It's harder too with cinema, given how many co-producers and funds go into film production.

Well on the games side of things there's two angles to consider, the Blizzard-based one and the Tencent one.

In the former case, Blizzard's actions were taken because they, through their parent company, have a vested interest in staying on the right side of not only the Chinese government but also Chinese gamers. Any potential boycott should, in this instance, be directed at them.

The Tencent side of things is slightly different as they were one of a number of firms who responded directly to the similar the NBA incident. If you wanted to boycott Tencent then the list of companies involved would be considerably longer. They own stakes in Grinding Gear Games (makers of Path of Exile, 80%), Epic (40%), Funcom (29%), Bluehole (10%), Ubisoft (5%), Paradox (5%) and Activision (~4.9%). Riot Games is wholly owned by them. They've also established partnerships with Square Enix, Take-Two and Lego on top of the distribution deals for a myriad of titles as part of their WeGame platform.

Want to organise that boycott? Bear in mind that Tencent have also invested in both Discord and Reddit so that may complicate things further.

Benzino

pixelburp wrote: »

If I'm reading things right, Tencent own 5% of Activision too, but 48% of Epic Games. So the question does bounce back to the consumers: if you have a moral objection to Chinese money, should boycotts be applied, and should it be blanket? Gamers don't do boycotts and historically have shown themselves to be unwilling to follow through.

Not being sanctimonious here either cos Hollywood is the same, and I'm damn sure I've watched plenty of mainstream cinema co-funded with Chinese cash. It's harder too with cinema, given how many co-producers and funds go into film production.

Yup, it's hard. So much of our clothes, footwear, electronic devices also come from China. It's understandable why boycotts aren't followed through, as so many products are made or partly made there.

pixelburp

Benzino wrote: »

Yup, it's hard. So much of our clothes, footwear, electronic devices also come from China. It's understandable why boycotts aren't followed through, as so many products are made or partly made there.

Well, "fast fashion" is proving to a total scourge to the environment anyway (a cheap pair of jeans is supposedly horrendous for industrial waste?), so it's worth the effort to boycott cheap tat made in China / India etc. IMO. Entertainment is much harder IMO given the provenance of the output or the production company can be very hard to track down compared to clothes. Labels usually give a quick summary & the industry as a whole feels more scrutinised and exposed to publicity than the entertainment industries.

In other news, finally got around to playing Hollow Knight and ... ... yeah, it's OK. Its art style and atmosphere is fantastically beautiful & suspect this is accounting for its fame, cos the actual Metroidvania parts are sometimes quite subpar.

The fact you have to purchase the mapping ability, as well as the iconography within (and your position!!), but the game doesn't tell you this, must have doubtlessly left some folk flailing around for ages. And there's a special place in game development hell for those who don't put a Save Point next to a Boss Room. That's the kind of nonsense that went out of style with Castlevania II.

Boycotting China means not getting out of bed. Actually, you'd probably have to get rid of the bed too.

PopePalpatine

*sighs in OnePlus owner*

Nody

pixelburp wrote: »

They didn't just sack the player, I believe even the presenters got the heave-ho, though watching the clip it's hard to see what on earth they could have done. Cut to commercial quicker? It'd be a hilarious over-reaction if it wasn't symptomatic of both China's zero-tolerance policy to dissent & the increasing prevalence of Chinese money in the Entertainment industry. Hollywood and Gaming is awash with money from that country, and between gaming's social-media existence & the growing political unrest in China itself, the centre couldn't always hold

They said "Say it in Chinese" before ducking under the table; that's the reason Blizzard use that they were guilty as well. This is beyond the fact one of them was a huge commentator on Overwatch over there but did HS on the side so to speak and he got a lifetime ban for it in Overwatch as well.

As a fun note Blizzard really **** the bed on this one as it's causing all kinds of push back. Kibler (one of the most famous Hearthstone presenters) have informed Blizzard he's not going to present the Grand final as planned and there are plenty of planned protests going to be done at Blizcon as well and of course other streamers on official Blizz events are getting in on it...

Link to American University Hearthstone team supporting HK live

Oh and of course Blizzard makes an official apology to China...


Now we only need to wait for Trump to wade in because this has hit Fox news...

And if you want to do something; well there's this new law around GDPR...

EoinHef

gizmo wrote: »

Well on the games side of things there's two angles to consider, the Blizzard-based one and the Tencent one.

In the former case, Blizzard's actions were taken because they, through their parent company, have a vested interest in staying on the right side of not only the Chinese government but also Chinese gamers. Any potential boycott should, in this instance, be directed at them.

The Tencent side of things is slightly different as they were one of a number of firms who responded directly to the similar the NBA incident. If you wanted to boycott Tencent then the list of companies involved would be considerably longer. They own stakes in Grinding Gear Games (makers of Path of Exile, 80%), Epic (40%), Funcom (29%), Bluehole (10%), Ubisoft (5%), Paradox (5%) and Activision (~4.9%). Riot Games is wholly owned by them. They've also established partnerships with Square Enix, Take-Two and Lego on top of the distribution deals for a myriad of titles as part of their WeGame platform.

Want to organise that boycott? Bear in mind that Tencent have also invested in both Discord and Reddit so that may complicate things further.

Iirc you could add frontier developments of elite dangerous fame to that list,now devleoping multiple titles.

9% stake i think.

Nody

Admirable (another very big Hearthstone caster) has stepped down as well from Blizzcon and GM Bucharest.

And the US team holding up a "Free HK; Boycott Blizzard" sign on a live official Blizzard stream received no penalties:
https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1182409678371934212?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1182409678371934212&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.redditmedia.com%2Fmediaembed%2Fdg52wf%3Fresponsive%3Dtrue%26is_nightmode%3Dfalse

Shiminay

None of this is surprising because this is the same mindset and company/fan disconnect that gave us the Diablo mobile phone game as a big announcement. It is all terribly disappointing though.

Chris_Heilong

See the thing is China has not really changed, China is China but how the companies that want the Chinese money are behaving is a disgrace.

Robert ninja

Mark Kern doing a livestream interview about this topic right now: https://dlive.tv/TheQuartering

Canis Lupus

I actually didn't have an issue with what Blizzard did up to the point where they didn't penalise AU. If you have rules you apply them consistently.

johnny_ultimate

Blizzard President wrote:

I want to be clear: our relationships in China had no influence on our decision.

Blizzard finally releases nonsense statement, immediately makes situation worse.

https://twitter.com/blizzard_ent/status/1182813270639431681?s=21

super_furry

Jesus Christ, they really don’t get it at all do they?