Called it

Stakeholder capitalism had to die to make way for the pump and dump economy.

I’m no defender of China, but this seems like common sense. If you shat on my front lawn, I’d expect you clean it up before we talk about modifying our shared fence.

Pretty much any immersive-sim, Prey, Deus Ex, Thief, Dishonored, System Shock Remake.

Probably worth doing if you can afford it

I remember when I first started working full time. The exhaustion is real. It doesn’t ever really go away but you will eventually learn to live with it.

Russia has considerable interest in Syria and likely isn’t watching Israel’s invasion into Southern Syria with glee.

Interesting seeing this after the flurry of positive articles he’s been receiving over the last month.

I cannot for the life of me imagine the fear and heartbreak of watching your child die in such a horrific way. What a nightmare.

You should check out the work being done by the anti capitalist Solidarity Collective.

If there is one thing that is clear, it’s that the Ukraine war is a late stage capitalist war. Units are sponsored. Ukraine has not resorted to widespread nationalisations or labour conscription. Unlike the total war of the 20th century, Ukraine’s war effort heavily relies on market mechanisms and civilian donations.

Ukrainians are left in darkness and many without heating. Yet, shopping arcades are lit in garish lights, with lavish displays of luxury fashion brands.

And yet this has created an opportunity for grassroots movements like solidarity collectives who supply anarchists, human rights defenders, trade unionists, eco-anarchists, anarcho-feminists, punk-rockers, and political refugees from Belarus and russia as military units with everything they need laying the foundations and build the knowledge needed to topple the authoritarian ruling class, independent of the state.

“In a Sea Parks??”

These economy fuckers are all obsessed with growth above all else. With that in mind I propose that the new G8 will only consist of the Top 8 highest growth economies in the world:

Guyana - 43.8% Macao - 10.6% Niger - 9.9% Samoa - 9.7% Palau - 8.1% Georgia - 7.6% Rwanda - 7.0% Tajikistan - 6.8%

We all know it’s actually the hyperlinked text, the buttons are a lie

I worked in advertising for over 10 years before a career change. I saw how much money was wasted on programmatic digital advertising. I’d recommend checking out the book, The Subprime Attention Crisis

‘Targeted advertising’ is shockingly untargeted. As the underpinning of our digital economy, the value of online advertising is dangerously overinflated.

What was that story warning people that if they use RedNote they’ll experience ‘Chinese style censorship’ for the first time?

US using the old if you can’t beat em approach

Aftermath is an independent worker owned cooperative. They rely on subscribers and split the funds amongst themselves.

Anyway here’s the article:

We Can’t Keep Doing This Ubisoft’s XDefiant is the latest live service game to quickly die

By Nathan Grayson 8:14 PM EST on December 3, 2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A major publisher launched a live-service game intended to compete with one of a small handful of industry-eclipsing giants. It did not immediately succeed to the tune of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Now studios are shutting down and workers are getting laid off. Just another Tuesday in the video game industry.

The latest victim of what’s effectively become a cycle is Ubisoft’s XDefiant – or rather, the people who made the recently-released game and, in doing so, followed management’s ill-advised edict to swipe a slice of pie from Call of Duty’s endlessly mashing maw. By many measures, the free-to-play shooter, which featured factions from a veritable rainbow of wrung-dry IPs like Far Cry, The Division, and Watch Dogs, was solid, a “perfect antidote to those tired of Call of Duty’s modern-day bloat,” according to PC Gamer. But as we’ve seen time and time again, “solid” doesn’t convince millions of people to abandon habits and communities they’ve spent years building up in whichever game rules the roost.

“Solid,” at best, inspires brief curiosity, which is why executive producer Mark Rubin was today able to boast that “we broke internal records for the fastest game to surpass 5 million users and in the end we had over 15 million players play our game” while the Ubisoft mothership declared that it’s pulling the plug on the game, shutting down studios in San Francisco and Osaka, planning to “ramp down” another studio in Sydney, and potentially lay off hundreds of workers.

“Unfortunately, the discontinuation of XDefiant brings difficult consequences for the teams working on this game,” Ubisoft chief studios and portfolio officer Marie-Sophie de Waubert wrote in a post on the company’s official site. “Even if almost half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft, this decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney. To those team members leaving Ubisoft, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your work and contributions. Please know that we are committed to supporting you during this transition.”

This masterpiece in refusing to name the parties responsible – Where are the “difficult consequences for teams working on the game” coming from, de Waubert? Who is making these decisions? Certainly not the workers themselves – harks back to similarly grim ends met by Concord and Redfall, as well as unannounced games from companies like Blizzard and Sony that never even got the chance to launch and face off against their genre’s respective entrenched boogeymen.

The triple-A strategy of trying to muscle in on the turf of giants with just a brand portfolio and a dream, only to throw up your hands when you don’t strike gold after a few months, is a dead end. The Ubisofts of the world cannot keep doing this. And yet:

“Developing games-as-a-service experiences remains a pillar of our strategy,” wrote de Waubert, citing successful series like Rainbow Six, The Crew, and For Honor, the most recent of which began in 2017, all of which arguably tried to do something unique, and all of which were given actual time to find their footing. “It’s a highly competitive market, and we will apply the lessons learned with XDefiant to our future live titles.”

For a more serious news sister site, i’d also recommend https://www.404media.co/

A lot of their best writers moved to https://aftermath.site/

Useless old bastard isn’t he?