This video and the Portal trailer blew people’s dicks off when they came out, but at least the Portal trailer, younger audiences can see why. So much of HL2’s tech is now ‘Yep, that’s a thing. Was it new?’

If you want the proper contemporary experience, here it is in potato quality, with live commentary.

Temporarily acknowledging the game you actually bought. It’s allowed to exist, for a FOMO-appropriate period of time. Then it gets yanked away from you, again.

Never give Nintendo money.

Bastards all.

… is there any existing infrastructure or ownership they can erase, this time?

“We propose an alliance.”

“Kneel.”

Everything has to look better up-close.

VR lets you get reeeal close.

This entire business model is criminal.

For anyone going “Atari still exists?” - it’s complicated. And stupid. It is equal parts complicated and stupid.

Atari was purchased by Warner in 1976 when they were still “that Pong company.” The home-gizmo division was sold to Jack Tramiel shortly after the crash of '83.

The remaining arcade division took a journey. Tramiel had bought the name Atari, and also most of the staff and facilities and licensing rights, so Warner was left with a generic video-game husk which they spun off as AT Games, AKA Tengen. For some reason Namco owned most of it. Uuuntil Time Warner bought them back, and renamed them Time Warner Interactive, and then very shortly sold them to Midway, under Bally. Under Williams. That pinball conglomerate situation restored the proper Atari Games name, and then very shortly rebranded everything as Midway. This Atari did pretty well as Midway West until arcades stopped existing and they went bankrupt. And then Warner bought them again. They still own them, even though all Warner wanted was the Mortal Kombat IP.

Meanwhile.

The home division released a fascinating variety of consoles and microcomputers that do not matter in the slightest. Everything after the 2600 was a complete footnote. Their final lineup of the Lynx, the Falcon, and the Jaguar are only interesting to engineering ultranerds. Obviously they went bankrupt. Hasbro bought their remains, then spun them off into Mattel Interactive, which also went bankrupt. Hard drive manufacturer JTS bought their remains (for some reason?) and did the smartest thing anyone has ever done with Atari: nothing.

Infogrames screwed that up by buying JTS simply the acquire the Atari brand, which they proceeded to wear like a dead skin mask. They made a few admirable titles like Gauntlet Legends before entering a death spiral of hocking classic IP to stay solvent. It didn’t work. They went bankrupt. Some oil-adjacent venture-capital robot bought their remains, spent a decade hawking vaporware, released a weird PC nobody bought, and then also went bankrupt. A different clique of venture capitalists gave them more money, for some reason, and started reacquiring old franchises from all eras. They’re the Atari that re-released the 2600 last year, as if it’d be a big deal instead of a curiosity. I have obvious predictions for where this all goes, and yet, I cannot imagine that’s where it ends.

That logo is like a cursed artifact in a horror movie. Sensible companies see it laying there, and talk themselves into putting it on, and oh no everything went wrong somehow.

This game will be less preserved than the one on Ngage.

‘Andromeda who?’

Obligatory Mike Montiero talk: Fuck You, Pay Me.

At the end of the day, all value is made-up, especially with digital licenses. I may value a cosmetic skin a lot more highly than you do, but that doesn’t mean I was defrauded, it just means I find more value in it than you.

Flashbacks to god-botherers insisting atheists must have faith in something.

I am explicitly distinguishing incompatible meanings of the word value. So are you, by the way, if you even hold an internally consistent view of what scams are. Otherwise, nooo, selling someone the Brooklyn Bridge is legit, because isn’t all value made-up?

The kind of value money represents cannot be the kind of value you see in scoring a goal in soccer, or you could fucking buy them.

But you also have to understand that the value in paying for a ton of MTX in those games is often less about those incremental dopamine hits and more about showing off to friends/randoms online

That’s the same thing. Peacocking for other pl-- I already fucking said this! Do you read things before responding?

Right, these are casual games, where you can pay to appear successful.

Yep, no ranked competitive games have this, stop fucking lying to me. Don’t make up excuses you cannot possibly believe.

Ignoring how thousands of brand-new games pull this shit from day one.

The existence of good options means nothing. This abuse should be criminal. The fact companies don’t have to commit this intolerable exploitation against their users, does not lessen the problem when some companies do it anyway. If you just mean to nitpick the word “nothing,” sure, congratulations. Someone somewhere will dodge this bullet. But I’m on about all the people getting taken by this systemic problem that’s already half the industry by revenue.

Any real money spent in games was defrauded, because all apparent value was made-up. As surely as someone selling you the deed to scrap the Brooklyn Bridge. The paper is real! You get the paper! But the paper is not why you handed someone a suitcase full of cash. There was a story you were told, and it’s not real. That’s what games are.

Games make you value worthless things. That is what makes them games. There is no real-world value to points or shards or rare drops. They’re arbitrary goals with arbitrary obstacles. They’re achievable so that your brain will squirt the happy juice. But treating them as valuable, the way money is valuable, is a category error.

The small charges are more insidious. Like the naked greed of paying instead of watching a counter tick down - a transaction that is neither a good nor a service. Or the lootboxes that everyone now agrees are intolerable, once the industry has moved on to calling them keys. Or anything consumable, proving your money went to something so worthless, the game will just hands them out in unbounded quantities. Even peacocking for other players makes people go, oh, it’s just a dollar. It’s just cosmetic. It’s just the only reason the game exists in the first place, to grind you against that constant nagging temptation.

These games are no longer optimized to make you feel good when you’re good at them.

They’re optimized to make you feel good when you open your wallet and look away.

And until you do, they’re as addictive and frustrating as we can manage.

This business model is built on exploitation of innate human shortcomings. Your brain is not very good at distinguishing sources of happy juice. It can easily be tricked, and literally the entire games industry exists to trick it. Again: that’s what games are. Their enjoyability comes from that fiction. That’s why pretending any of it can have real monetary value is a scam.

This specific business model is a scam, regardless of which numbers we twiddle.

Choice does not excuse systemic abuse for profit. People choose scams all the time. That’s how they work!

As previously mentioned, fuck them kids. This is about abuses committed against adults. This is about the central nature of games, and how they invent value, of a sort completely incompatible with cash money. The exchange rate between enchanted scimitars and hamburgers is nonexistent.

There’s no technical reason to connect remote auctioneering to this… horse. Blizzard does it so they can gouge people you’ve given a derisive label. Every player is affected. Every player knows this is possible, and the overwhelming majority of them are denied. The game was made objectively worse for them, through their engineered dissatisfaction, specifically to bilk some tiny fraction for unreasonable quantities of money. Enough money, per person in that tiny group, to make kneejerk excuses like ‘just boycott!’ utterly useless.

Being vocal doesn’t matter - the money talks louder.

Only legislation will fix this.

I don’t think you disagree with that. You don’t want the problem fixed. You’re denying the problem is a problem, even as you describe “whales” like you’d describe “problem gamblers” or “scam victims.” So what if they made bad choices? You didn’t. It was easy, apparently. Good choices abound! Therefore, rampant exploitation of human frailty doesn’t count.

You’re a libertarian who has personally told me corporations have unlimited right to manipulate people out of their money.

Sorry if I’m misremembering - you might’ve said “exploit.”

Developing a video game is not “inside a video game.”

When somebody’s playing raid sherpa or whatever, pay them in gold.

Even if stopping this cuts off some legitimate niche - that beats letting it swallow the entire industry.

A feature that costs Blizzard nothing, given an obscene price larger than any game or expansion they’ve ever sold, dangled with rationality-undermining time pressure, and using some bullshit tokens for artificial scarcity.

Only legislation will stop this.

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.

Never did.