Nuclear Monster

  • This follow-up to Dust: An Elysian Tail from Dean Dodrill is a Nintendo Switch exclusive for later on in 2017, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if Never Stop Sneakin’ came out on other platforms next year.

  • Humble Bundle was bought out by IGN last week.

    The increasing reliance of writers on affiliate marketing deals is extremely bad. Most larger sites have some kind of wall between their editorial department and any advertising or affiliate linking, but it still looks wrong. I’ve done the same kind of linking myself, but never kept up with the process to where we are today when many sites have a daily or weekly roundup of deals that are almost entirely affiliate links.

    Humble has had their own affiliate program for some time now, and this may end being a pretty big deal for games that have distribution in their Humble Store (outside of bundling) and even bigger for games that they’re publishing.

    There were other options for how this was presented. IGN is really one part of a larger company called Ziff Davis that has been bought and sold so many times. The announcements could have said that Ziff was buying Humble, but the people making these decisions must have thought that IGN was going to look the best, or the actual organizational structure will have IGN on top.

    I wouldn’t be upset with anyone writing at IGN for this, and it depends on what changes a result, but whatever changes happen to IGN and the Humble Bundle probably won’t look good either way.

  • Kotaku’s Heather Alexandra:

    Whether they dole out cosmetics or gameplay-affecting items, loot boxes of any sort exist for the purpose of exploiting players. Whether it’s offering the chance to get Symmetra’s new skin or get a better rifle in Battlefront II, the only reason the loot box exists is to prey on the economically vulnerable. You are not a valued player; you are a statistic on a spreadsheet. You are red or black ink. Loot boxes certainly aren’t there for fun. They have always been designed for the purpose of making sure that a company turns a profit.

    They’re in so many games now. This garbage needs to stop.

  • As good as interviews with game designers can get, designers are sometimes more open about their work when they’re talking with other designers. The Idle Thumbs podcast network has two great podcasts with these kinds of interviews, get blasted:

    • Tone Control
      Steve Gaynor (Tacoma, Gone Home) interviewed developers for 13 episodes. You’ve got your Ken Levine and Tim Schafer interviews in addition to greats like Tom Francis of Heat Signature and Gunpoint and Brendon Chung of Atom Zombie Smasher and more.
    • Designer Notes
      Adam Saltsman (Canabalt, Overland) and Soren Johnson (Civilization 3 & 4 and Offworld Trading Company) even interviewed Steve Gaynor with their take on this genre of podcast. It’s so good at giving you insights into game designers. I’m currently on episode 2 of the 4 episode series with Sid Meier and there’s so much great stuff in there about the process of working on his incredible games. Some of the best episodes are with designers I wasn’t familiar with at all. One of the recent episodes had Margaret Robertson on and she discussed her work with a game about a movie where a woman was found dead in her apartment after three years.

  • Daniel Jalkut:

    Yesterday, Gizmodo reported that Uber had been granted an entitlement for their iOS app that allowed them to capture an image of an iPhone’s screen at any time, even when the Uber app was not the active app on the phone. This is a big deal, because users don’t typically expect than an iPhone app that is not active might have the ability to eavesdrop on anything they are doing.

    I have long felt that the sandboxing infrastructure on both iOS and Mac should be used to more accurately convey to users specifically what the apps they install are capable of doing. Currently the sandboxing system is used primarily to identify to Apple what a specific app’s privileges are. The requested entitlements are used to inform Apple’s decision to approve or reject an app, but the specific list of entitlements is not easily available to users, whose security is actually on the line.

    This is absolutely fucking ridiculous. Fuck Uber. Apple should be ashamed for working with them at any level. Allowing an app to covertly record your screen without any prompting is exactly the kind of thing that Apple’s iOS app review process should prevent.

    Uber claims they didn’t do anything wrong with this ability, the security researchers told Gizmodo that they didn’t detect anything going on with this code.

    There are companies that are less trustworthy than Uber, but few have the opportunity to be as evil on such a large scale. Enabling them to do anything more than operate at a basic level on your platform is a mistake. At this point Apple should block them entirely and attempt to help the Taxi industry to reform and compete with Uber. Not that Apple would ever would, but still that would be the best thing to come out of this. The next best thing would be the improvements to the entitlement system that Jalkut suggests.

    I wouldn’t even bother to wonder what Uber are doing on Android, where security is a fucking joke and carriers are still selling devices running ancient versions of that operating system that are affected by dozens of security vulnerabilities. This is especially true for pay-as-you-go phones sold cheaply at places like Walmart, Target, and so on. Those carriers and stores are endangering their customers by continuing to sell these devices.