Wow, Silverlight - now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

This has nothing to do with SKG.

The games aren’t being disabled, they’re being pulled from sale due to a legal/rights dispute. That’s not what SKG is about.

Very interesting - and charmingly presented with the little demonstrations!

The definition of indie is always contentious, but there are definitely studios out there who are independent (as in not owned by a larger company) but work with a publisher for funding, marketing, and other support.

Even beyond that bit of semantics, many indies rely on funding from investors of one sort or another, be that angel investors, startup funds, or even just small business loans.

Many of those investors have lost their appetite for games, making it extremely difficult to pay the bills unless you’ve already got a sizeable cash reserve to cover costs.

Tell that to all the smaller studios that have already been decimated and forced to close because of their publishing/funding deals falling through over the last couple of years.

You don’t hear much about it because they’re smaller and/or working on things that hadn’t released yet, vs the occasional big media splashes from companies like MS doing more layoffs, but indies and AA are being gutted too.

It’s comforting to believe that only the biggest companies are struggling, but the industry as a whole is currently in active collapse from the inside out.

I wish that was true, but funding has dried up across the entire sector and that affects the viability of smaller studios more than it does the mega corps with bottomless warchests.

Realistically, it’s Animals for me. Solid narrative theme, Roger Waters’ trademark cynicism at peak potency, great tunes.

But part of me also wants to play devils advocate and say The Final Cut? Okay it’s not the greatest album they made, but it feels raw and real and heartfelt in its own way.

(Yes I also enjoy Waters’ solo albums)

Founded in 1985, Rare is one of the UK’s most historic game developers, best known for Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie.

Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, and it has since gone on to create titles such as Kameo, Viva Piñata, Kinect Sports, and Sea of Thieves under the Xbox banner.

Says it all, really. Rare has been mismanaged into the ground for the past 20+ years.

Sadly(?) I don’t think it was actually made with FrontPage 98 - the source is far too neat and clean!!

Agreed. Permanent hardware bans have been a thing since the PS3/360 era.

I’m not saying it’s a good thing that they can unilaterally disable hardware you purchased (although I certainly understand the reasoning wrt cheaters and pirates) but the author here is acting like the idea is some completely new scheme from the diabolical industry villains du jour.

It’s disingenuous at best.

No, I mean the completely unfounded claim that discord’s typing indicators are somehow a tool for analysing users’ writing styles and selling that on to data brokers.

It’s so bizarrely specific that it comes across as an unhinged conspiracy theory, especially when it’s delivered as part of a link salad.

Or acid!

It’s kind of impressive that you managed to squeeze in so many links to references but without including any that actually back up the accusation you’re making.

See also: video game AOE FX.

Big glowy green area? Could be a healing aura, could be poison. Good luck!

Like what?

There’s more than one argument against generative AI being used in games, and they don’t all apply to proc gen content. It’s an apples to oranges comparison in most cases.

From the article:

Danilov posited that the mistake was either the work of a “careless translator taking shortcuts”, or it was “done by someone on the dev/publisher side who couldn’t be arsed sending last-minute missing lines for translation and decided to throw them in a random LLM without oversight”.

Handong Ryu, who handled the Korean translation for the game, replied: "I was responsible for translating the vast majority of the Korean version of The Alters. Unfortunately, the same issue exists in the Korean version as well, which makes it more likely that the second scenario you mentioned is closer to the truth.

Sounds like this text was either added late in development or simply overlooked until after the last set of translation work had been completed, so the devs decided to let an LLM do it rather than getting billed for another batch of localisation.

Very dumb, especially as this puts them in direct violation of the Steam AI disclosure policy, but given the context I guess they figured no one would notice.

Specifically the hops used to flavour beer are a potent herbal sleep aid.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a fake name to order anything online.

I can understand doing it for something potentially embarrassing or compromising, but until I saw this post it never even crossed my mind that there might be people that do it as a matter of course.

Sadly (at the time of writing) you’re just getting downvoted, because Lemmy’s hateboner for Nintendo is more important than context