Video games specifically get away with this because, as we saw with Diablo 4, people are going to give game companies money regardless how bad and unpalatable the game is.
Man. My Reddit account became limited in the Diablo subreddit for saying that I cancelled my preorder after the beta.
After DI, and D3, to expect D4 to launch in any decent state would have been naive at best.
I've said as much in the Diablo subreddit. D3 is now a good game, if it is what you are looking for. It's a fun romp, but... It isn't a truly heavy ARPG. If you want that POE is calling you.
I also completely ignored the opionion of whatever communities existed for it, because they ALWAYS complain and turn toxic, especially for Blizzard games. It’s inevitable and says very little about the actual game. Same thing happened with Overwatch 2 as well. It’s a great game yet somehow has only 10% positive reviews on Steam.
It comes down to personal preference. If you find yourself liking a game/expansion when most of the playerbase does not, it is best to avoid online forums/subreddits where the game is put on full blast (sometimes unfairly) becuase people are extrememly emotional, when the best thing for the to do is to walk away and play games they enjoy, it is just a game the stakes couldn't be any lower.
Or it's an objectively very bad game that you just happen to enjoy.
You think they want to pan the people handing them early review codes TOO hard given that it is how they make a living?
Often critics have little time to review a game, a few hours, etc... they have a ton of games to review, they'll use cheats in single player games, or play through on easy mode etc.
For a game like D4 that is played at the end game, and really the big problems will only show up later in the game... There's no way a review was going to be right.
Understanding what a critic can, and can not see is critical to understanding what they can tell us about a game. Personally, I give them some weight, but I've taken to waiting a bit and listening to people who love the genre speak about it.
When Raxx is panning D4... it's bad. Bad enough that 79 is a WAY overrate.
They are games we come back to again, and again, and again.
Overwatch got review bombed because they just remonetized overwatch 1 and did things they said they wouldn’t do. It’s actually a pretty good parallel to the unity story.
Unfortunately people have convinced themselves that some opinions -those they disagree with- are dangerous for others to read. From cancelling your preorder for a game after a beta to “let’s think twice about pharmaceutical companies’ motives, there will be someone who thinks your motives are unclean, you’re an agitator, or full on evil, and therefor deserve to be silenced.
Or more likely than seeing them as "dangerous" they recognize that if you allow opinions to be expressed, others may gain a new perspective by reading it or even adopt that opinion themselves.
Or in the case of HN, certain topics of conversation are censored or discouraged because they tend to lead to boring/repetitive/annoying/aggressive comment threads.
Of course, we usually call this "moderation" instead of "censorship", but it's mostly the same, except it isn't done by a government.
So the quality of any forum just comes down to the quality of the moderation. Good moderators keep out the off-topic crap and general nastiness, shitty moderators ban people for saying they don't like the company's new game.
Side note honest question, do you think your comment falls under flaming and should be flagged? What you’re basically baiting me here. Wouldn’t this last bit be a direct way that leads to exchanging insults between each other? I don’t know what’s your intended point behind it, but it certainly could be interpreted this way imo.
Regardless, I think there’s for the least possible amount of moderation based on subjective opinions. If you want to have a constructive discussion about Covid response, you have to listen to all opinions and have them openly discussed for example.
There are hundreds of times that comments about mask mandates for example that get flagged, just because people disagree with the CDC. Eventually now we see it more openly discussed (1) after a few years, but still some politically motivated people think it’s a topic deserving censorship.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-...
Have a nice day!
I'm not anti-vax at all! What did I say that made you think so?
> So again, go fuck yourself, troll.
I'm not trolling at all. And you're breaking multiple HN guidelines in your last three replies: name-calling, dismissiveness, snark, and you're definitely not maintaining a respectful tone.
Maybe you're the one that needs to be hanging around on 8chan?
Commenters here need to stick to the rules regardless of how right they are or feel they are. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
Personally I get it. I found D4 to be a fun, but bland and uninspired arpg. It has terrible class balance and skill balance. Despite a lot of promises, there’s almost no endgame to speak of. And there are basically no new ideas in D4 that weren’t already pioneered in D3 or path of exile. The art and music is beautiful, and the first few hours are definitely fun. But it’s not excellent by any means. It’s a bland, uninspired game lacking the depth, creativity and longevity that used to make blizzard games great.
Thanks!
Edit: Specifically, reading through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiation#Tactics, I believe both the "Highball/Low-ball or Ambit claim" and "Anchoring" sections describe the phenomena I was thinking of.
I also found that vaguely explaining to GPT-4 the description you start with, also produced the proper names for me. Unstructured querying that I could not Google-Fu
But the fact that they tried tot hide the original terms suggests to me they thought they could get away with the original plan, despite its obvious illegality.
That's why they removed the repo too, too easy to see the changes.
Also I’m not sure how are “promises” legally binding unless they are part of a contract?
You'd be surprised. Claims that are made as part of any marketing material or promotion can absolutely result in lawsuits if someone built their business on that claim and then Unity screwed them over. Unity is liable for the things that they say in a public capacity.
(IANAL)
This doesn't follow - it's entirely possible that the execs planned to do this, a bunch of dev's said "that's insane and we'll quit if you do this", the execs followed through, and the devs followed through on their threats to quit.
They would have to be, because deniability is important for a gambit like this. I'm not sure how you would announce "we're going to psychologically manipulate our customers" to the team anyway.
Basically each game developer is gambling their time and livelyhood, and no one would start a game studio just to make money (that would be crazy given the odds). In this respect, a platform has to also show they're commited and will fight in the trenches with everyone else when winter comes (basically the exact opposite of Stadia...).
Unity playing with developers' trust feels like showing your pregnant wife divorce papers. You can retract it and apologize, but it will never be the same from there after.
Businesses should consider the pregnant wife divorce papers test of any change they're making BEFORE they make it.
He mentions an FAQ used to discuss between devs and an newcommer in the console market (I assume xbox) going like:
Q: Won't you quit the market as soon as you see how hard it is ?
A: We'll do this to the bitter end. As long as I'm on this team this project will keep going.
[0] https://rebuild.fm/344/#chapters on the chapter on Stadia around 2h12
For me the whole thing reeks of a decision by the classical manegerial narcissist, that thinks they (and by extension their company) are important because it is them and not because of a value they deliver to those using their product.
Never make that mistake. Unless you sell commodity goods like toilet paper your relationship with your customer is to be treated as a valuable asset. You totally are allowed to increase prices, but if the existence of your customer depends on it, maybe consider doing so in a predictable manner (e.g. "in one year the price will increase to X amount"). This way customers don't feel betrayed and can decide whether they will stay with you on a rational basis.
This is purely down to C-suite's arrogance and moving into extraction mode. And not understanding their core audience. As Cory Doctorow said - enshittification.
Otherwise they would have released the 2nd update faster, since they would have prepped it beforehand to reduce the pressure and bad PR building up over multiple days.
There's probably a wiki link somewhere to the Proper Noun PR phenomenon in business school for this strategy, but the "terrible plan then less terrible plan but still worse than before the initial terrible plan" strategy seems like essentially a confirmation Unity is not to be trusted for small developers. It's sad to lose a great dev community but it sounds like BUG is making the right call here.