Psyael

How is the government supposed to have people who can see justifiable quality in something that the people actually paying for this can't?

Funding whatever gets thrown under your nose is exactly how Uwe Boll managed to make loads of crap game licensed movies. Between subsidies and tax deductions, he came out with dud after dud, virtually risk free, until the spigot was turned off.

I look at it more like this...

It's really easy to be someone from Canada or France or Belgium or Germany or Australia or so on and talk about public funding for arts, particularly games. These places would not be as wise to fund arts if they were closing schools, closing hospitals, and so on.

America is a country where many children aren't getting a good education, medical facilities are understaffed in vast parts of the country, and the most recognizable example of a state funding a game developer was 38 Studios. We are a vast, spread-out nation that still spends money on rural electrification and largely untraveled highways, and more money on defense than the rest of these parties put together. Where there's no state broadcaster but a loosely affiliated network of independently operated TV/radio affiliates who receive a very limited government funding to buy the programs they choose to watch, and have to make direct appeals to their audience for cash.

BUT...

We also happen to have the most powerful cultural reach of any place in the world, part of the reason these countries can and do fund credits for films, games, etc is to make sure that "Hollywood" isn't completely dominating the world's cultural output. There's no public seed money for creative output here, but if your work has public appeal and a stable business plan you can go farther here than you can anywhere else.

The only counter argument is this thing I've seen that public funding preserves what's "truly beautiful" instead of merely what's widely accepted as art in the court of public opinion, which an incredibly elitist notion that's gained acceptance as hipsters and their culturally anti-establishment views became thought of as sexy. There is nothing wrong with the public directly funding art that has limited appeal to the entertainment and arts industry. That's what Kickstarter is about. That's why PBS gets big donations from opera lovers. But forcing us to seed these games at a government level as a "public good" is just bad priorities. I'd rather give tax breaks (which economically speaking is the same thing as spending money) to a large game company to set up shop and employ people than spend tax revenues on games that have an incredibly limited appeal. As a Keynesian I'm not a fan of either plan, but if I had to pick my poison...

Picasso's most avant garde paintings are some of the most expensive works of art to ever go up to auction.

Of course, there's a lot of debate about what "good" public funding is.

How about no?

Being an artist is a job that often toils in obscurity, and figuring out whether you're making a project for yourself or for commercial success is an issue that affects all of them. Even the most influential directors, writers, and musicians occasionally must "sell out" to commercial appeal in order to fund their passion projects. JK Rowling didn't write her adult books looking for more commercial success (initially she tried to avoid attaching her name to them), and it's obvious that Guillermo del Toro has an interest in filmmaking as an art but also sometimes indulges in Michael Bay like spectacle and explosion to fund his more artistic endeavors.

Apparently, making a game that appealed to fans of indie VR fiction like Gone Home was this couple's attempt at "selling out," previously they were using their government's taxpayer money to produce games about ideas like being weird hybrid deer/humans who jitter around to communicate. I'm not Belgian, so it wasn't my tax money, but I wouldn't want my money spent on that. But many forms of art find generous benefactors that do and would spend their money. And we're in an age where it's easier to find these people than ever, and a large number of lower-middle class people can effectively work in concert to the same effect as a single upper-class patron of the arts.

Unfortunately, they spent an additional $40,000, or so they claim, which I assume is on top of the $70,000 they made on Kickstarter, and seem to have been spent on bad advice. People buy fewer games than ever based on web advertising, and blog posts pointing people to weird niche games alienate and bother just as many readers as are entertained. If you want to be commercially successful right now, you have to make a game that doesn't appear tedious to watch somebody else play, because we're in an age where Quick Look style videos are what sells more copies of games than anything else.

For all it's money, Twitch has very few community terms of service and filtering. It's kind of a sad statement that it's up to the actual channel owners to outlaw harassment, epithets, etc on their channels; and it was up to the community to create the bots that handle most of the spam and crap that comes flowing through the channels.

I just don't believe that it's a matter of resources, because this isn't as expensive as transcoding videos for partners. Set up a global filter list of certain hateful speech and crack down on assholes. What they have presently is the softest handed moderation this side of Reddit.

Most of the issues surrounding Ukraine are in the southeastern Crimea region, not in Kiev.

And while I know that Dota Fever hasn't spread too far beyond Brad in the GB offices, one of the three or so top teams in that game's eSports scene is based out of (3/5th) from Ukraine. Someone asked Dendi at the Free To Play premiere in SF about current events, and he gave a sarcastic response followed by a straight-faced explanation that things aren't day to day different for him.

In fact, the Star Ladder tournament just held it's finals in Kiev last week.

Lists have been working for me until now. Suddenly I can't add anything to a list whereas a couple weeks ago I added Bioshock Infinite to a list with no problem. Using Chrome.

I didn't like this show and, in a way, watching a classical geek-centric cast like TWiT get into the much more 'bro' world of video gaming was a bit like watching the TechTV-G4 trainwreck in reverse. But on the other hand, Leo is spending thousands of dollars on podcasting and supposedly making money. He's selling Ford cars while other people are sponsored by 99 cent iOS apps at a much lower rate.

This gaming show came on right after This Week In Tech, their flagship show where you can see guys who remember Steve Jobs' ORIGINAL run at Apple talking about network security and debating how strongly we need privacy in a digital age. Going from that to two hours of multiplayer gaming, on the other hand, eh...

As for the swearing, in free-form podcasting it's a common thing but in more structured shows it's less common.

@Patman99 said:

They werent THAT bad. I absolutely hated the "teabag" the acceptance speech people and the fact that the host drank BLUE liquid to regain his health.

Blue Potion is a zelda thing.

The whole "on Origin" thing doesn't matter anyhow, since if you're going to buy this game on PC any which-way you're going to use it anyway.

All the more fuel for the console versions, I guess; since hit detection is wonky and a lot of people could never really control BF planes with a mouse+keyboard anyway.