Spyke

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Lack of rage bait

You're absolutely right, everything's so civil here that the moment someone is remotely hostile to anyone it stands out like a sore thumb. Reddit was hell in some places in this regard, one word against the general consensus and everyone piles on you like you're a terrorist.

And that's without mentioning people who are there clearly just to stir up arguments, I don't know how so many people don't realize this. The "old" saying "don't feed the troll" has been forgotten by a big portion of the internauts.

games

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Larian Studios CEO posts speech he didn't get to say at game awards

Winning Game of the year is a great honor and I want to first thank everyone that voted for us and I want to congratulate all the other nominees. This has been an incredibly competitive year and you each would have deserved to win this award @CapcomUSA_ @remedygames @insomniacgames @NintendoAmerica

I want to thank @geoffkeighley and the people that organized the #gameawards for creating an award show so big that it gets mainstream attention. While 30 secs is a bit short , there’s nothing like the game awards and it’s an incredible achievement

I wore armor at the #gameawards because BG3 is a game that couldn’t exist without its our player community and I wanted to pay tribute to how important they’ve been for the development. You rock community BG3

Making a game like this only works if you have an incredible passionate and talented team and in that regard I am incredibly lucky with the @larianstudios – they are some of the finest and they did a truly amazing job

Over 2000 people are listed in the credits and since I can’t call out everyone, I want to focus on a group of people that don’t always get the credit they deserve

Team QA, team localisation, team customer support, team operations, team publishing, team play testers, and every other developer at Larian, BG3 wouldn’t exist without you and you all deserve to be very proud of this

I want to dedicate this award to the friends and family members we lost during development including Jim, our lead cinematic animator who passed away last month and personally to my father who passed away the week before we launched our early access campaign

You don’t get to make something like BG3 if you don’t have the support from the people around you. Personally, I really want to thank 5 special people, a crazy dog and a one-eyed cat for sticking with me

Big shout out also to our localization partners and @PitStopTweets who had to use every corner of their building to record and performance capture what was an insane number of lines

To our actors – you did great. I hope our paths will cross again in the future and your agents will remain their usual reasonable selves :)
I also want to thank @Wizards_DnD and specifically the DnD team for giving us carte blanche. I’m really sorry to hear so many of you were let go. It’s a sad thing to realize that of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left. I hope you all end up well

There are many more partners I want to thank. We asked much of you all, but you delivered and without your efforts, BG3 would not be what it is

I want to end with a story of a conversation I had a long time ago with a publisher. He told me, luckily for them, games are driven by idealism. He meant it in an exploitative way but he was right

Games are a unique art form, as important as books, music or movies. Many developers, myself included, make games because they love seeing others engage with their creations in a way only games can offer

They don’t care that much about the money made beyond it being the fuel they need to create new and better games. It’s worth reminding everyone that fuel is but a means, not a goal. Whereto and how we journey are what matter and what we remember

Thank you.

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Social Media Has Run Out of Fresh Ideas

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Social media is having its quarter-life crisis, if a quarter-life crisis is a thing, if we can even put a lifespan on social media, which might in fact play a role in our society from now until the end of time. After 25 years of status updates, news feeds, clever tweets, performative photos, and endless scrolls, the US social media companies that have commandeered our attention and monetized it so successfully have run out of fresh ideas and are looking to reinvent themselves.

Lucky us?

Some 18 months ago, 3D immersion via face computers was going to reinvigorate our online social experience. Facebook believed in this vision so firmly that it changed its name to Meta to reflect it. Having determined more recently that something a little simpler might jack up engagement, Meta launched Threads—basically, Twitter for Instagram.

Now the video app TikTok is introducing a way to compose text-based posts—its own version of the Create feature found in Instagram Stories. Accessed through the app’s camera, where users typically go to post videos or photos, the new text option is billed by TikTok as “the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok.” Text: It’s the future. This comes right on the heels of Twitter rebranding itself as X, part of the company’s broader strategy for becoming an everything-app, like China’s WeChat.

TikTok’s new text feature, which feels mostly additive, and Twitter’s brand pivot, which feels mostly superfluous, are not by themselves causes for existential angst. But they’re part of an evolution in the social media landscape, where the polite “borrowing” of features has turned into a full-fledged land grab for our frayed attention spans. Whether through subscriptions, shopping, payments, or AI-infused products, social media companies are throwing everything at the wall to counter both an unpredictable ad market and people’s limited capacity for using a dozen different social apps.

“If we evaluate these apps from the legacy technology-innovation lens, then yes—they’re copying each other and there are no new ideas,” says Chris Messina, a software product designer who is credited with introducing the hashtag to Twitter. “But the better way to understand it is that social media is now a fashion industry, so as a product manager, you’re evaluating success based on engagement and retention, not innovation.”

Messina also adds that he believes X (née Twitter) is now “incredibly vulnerable, and the most competitive teams, like Meta and TikTok, aren’t going to sit idly by if they can carve up Twitter’s former advertising base.”

Meta’s early success with Instagram Threads—over 100 million sign-ups in under a week—has largely been credited to its platform advantage; over a billion people already use Instagram, and porting one’s Instagram identity over to Threads is frictionless. But that’s success in metrics only—quantitative, not qualitative. (In any case, daily active users on Threads have reportedly fallen off.) Threads still doesn’t have a web or desktop app, hasn’t yet rolled out its promised chronological feed, and doesn’t yet support a more open-source protocol that the company has said it will support.

games

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What's up with Epic Games?

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better revenue shares for developers?
Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers?

It actually goes to publishers, so the only way devs see that extra cut is by self-publishing. So I guess for smaller indie devs it can be a good deal.

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Social Media Has Run Out of Fresh Ideas

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“As social software has become more probabilistic and personalized, the more important thing is to have ‘shots on goal’ to keep people engaged and prevent churn,” Messina says. “And so Instagram does limited, progressive feature rollouts.”

Masha Liberman, a tech investor who previously built 3D bitmoji for Snapchat, believes that social media is experiencing a “crisis of ideas,” but she says that’s not a new thing. “It’s always been tough to invent something new,” she says. “What’s happening with social media companies is that they want to see themselves as media networks that offer everything inside the app. That’s the competitive advantage right now. And at some point we will probably view some of these things as new formats rather than copycat features.”

Social media as a category is probably overdue for a serious rethink, both in the usability sense and the regulatory sense. The time-suck it has become for some people, its potential mental health harms, and its fire-to-gasoline spread of misinformation are all reasons enough to question it.
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It has also, over the past 20-plus years, offered connection, community, entertainment, and access to information unlike anything humanity has ever experienced before. And a new group of apps is now promising a decentralized social media experience instead of the founder-driven model of the past two decades.

But this era of platform identity crises, brand pivots, and frenetic feature reinvention isn’t necessarily in service of users, either. “My experience working at a social media company during turbulent times, especially when there’s a separate app or even a separate page, is that these are huge internal political projects,” Liberman says. “They’re not for users directly, and users sometimes feel this.”

It’s hard not to feel it, to have a persistent sense of déjà vu after another new app feature is announced, or to feel like you never really asked for the thing to begin with. It’s hard not to feel like it’s getting a little late at the social media party, and that there has to be some other reason to stay.