@amyggen: Every gaming website has the goal of continuing to bring in revenue to pay its employees salaries (not to forget traffic linked bonuses,) so they don't really care where that revenue comes from. I don't think that the writers of these kinds of articles hate gamers; I think they are cloistered, often middle-class individuals with a negative, sometimes childish worldview. They've gained reinforcement of their ideas due to the fact they drive traffic and generate ad revenue, but they've never stopped to ask why. You only have to watch how these articles are spread on social media to see how they easily reach non-gaming social circles and demographics. You only have to look at the statistics for adblock usuage to see which demographics are the most lucrative. It is pretty simple to put two and two together from there.
@defaultprophet: Yes, I honestly believe that. It's not like they set out with a plan to do that, it's just something that they saw worked and so they have kept on doing it. There are no mental gymnastics involved; it's just inductive reasoning. If you want mental gynmastics then read that Polygon article. The average reader of drivel journalism enjoys reading about things that outrage them rather than anything remotely positive. Do not underestimate the vast numbers of people--even young people--that think games are nonsense and will click on a link that suggests they are too violent, or sexist, or racist.
It is such an ignorant perspective of ethnicity to categorize people by the colour of their skin. I'd go so far as to say that it is racist to do so. There are many "white" ethnicities, as there are many "black" ethnicities too, and so on.
Let's be realisitic. Polygon publishes these articles for an audience that actively dislikes games. They spread via social media because they are clickbait: they annoy gamers, delight game-haters, and shock the uninformed. The annoyed gamers mostly use adblock, but all those people that hate games or are utterly clueless about them usually don't. There is no big discussion to be had about "gaming's race problem"; It is entirely manufacturered by trolls games journalists.
Does anybody know if there is a Twitch policy for unrated games, because as far as I can find there isn't? It's kind of a shame that Hatred went through the ESRB for a rating--they didn't have to since they only sell on Steam and directly so no rating is required. I would've liked to see Twitch have to ban it directly rather than try to weasel out of it by banning it indirectly in this way. What happens when there is an unjustified, Polygon-led moral panic about an unrated game? Will Twitch ban all unrated games--a policy that would hurt tons of unrated indie games--or bite the bullet and start banning specific games?
This will sound heartless but I couldn't care less about the impact on small developers. If a game is getting lots of refund requests, the problem is with the game, not the customers. It is wrongheaded to presume that customers are out to scam retailers.
This policy needs to go further: remove the cap on time played completely and extend it to 30 days.
First try I got to the start of Disc 4 when you're on Lunatic Pandora and have a boss fight vs. Adel. I was severely under-leveled (all characters around level 35 iirc) because that game is totally borked. You can't leave Lunatic Pandora and all the enemies only give 1 exp per battle, so I had no way to level up. I had to restart...
So second try I get my characters to level 89 on Disc 1 and max out my GFs. I did that over end of term break from school by fighting Vysages for hours in a certain part of the world map prior to the forest on the way to Galbadia Garden where they were the only enemy encountered. They're super easy to kill and give levels extremely fast--no idea if that's the most effective strategy at that stage of the game, but it's what I stumbled upon and chose to exploit. It was the most boring grinding ever. Anyway, I continue on to the end of the disc and boom... corrupted save data when trying to start Disc 2. I foolishly had been using only one slot. The memory card was fine, just the FF8 save wasn't loading. I assumed at the time the game couldn't handle the fact I was so over leveled, though I don't know if it's just a coincidence or not.
Never beat that game. Though I did play it again and get past Adel with a normally leveled party. Then I lost interest in finishing it.
@altairre: Jim is right about Molyneux's history with over promising and under delivering, sure. But Godus is the only time he's responsible directly to his customers for funding. None of the previous stuff with Fable, Black & White, Project Milo, etc is any reason to get angry with him. After all, in those cases the press were at least half to blame for reporting things he was saying in early interviews, usually around announcement time, that were so obviously flimsy ideas unlikely to see the light of day. The customers of those games never had any right to be upset over things he said in interviews early in development and to me it always stank of entitlement on the part of those who did.
This time he messed up big and deserves to be questioned as to why. But he didn't mess up bigger than the significant number of other developers who asked for Kickstarter money--or money from other methods like Early Access--and then failed to deliver a complete game on schedule.
Good journalism is factual, truthful, and above all it is written with the interests of the reader as the primary concern. Even inherently subjective forms of journalism such as reviews can meet those criteria. The RPS Molyneux interview fails because it is scandal-mongering, which is not in the interests of the reader and is inherently dishonest. The intention was clearly to get him to admit to some kind of lie or trip him up and force him to contradict himself--although it failed to do so. The reasons an interviewer would do that are fairly obvious; to get more traffic, which is in service of the publication and not the reader.
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