Tag: waypoint

Categories
video games

Steam Deck Shipping & Reviews

The Steam Deck handheld gaming computer from Valve is finally shipping to users who pre-ordered it last year, and final reviews are going up. 

Patrick Klepek wrote for Waypoint that it offers personal computer gaming freedom, with some caveats:

That magic comes with caveats: the (hot) fan runs loudly and constantly, even when idling; the battery life is all over the place and rarely lasts more than a few hours on games that are modestly taxing to the hardware; it’s large and awkward to hold. But time and time again, it accomplished a simple but complicated task: play games wherever I want, whenever I want. It suggests a world that broadens the definition of a “PC gamer,” making it less about how much you overspent on a GPU and more about PC gaming’s other biggest benefit: freedom.

I think that freedom is a great way to think about it, a handheld gaming computer that ships with Linux, starts at $400 and isn’t locked to just running Valve’s software is potentially very freeing compared to what people are used to from consoles and it’s a great option for beleaguered people who are interested in computer gaming but can’t buy the parts because they’re too expensive and unavailable. 

Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer ran into the problems I was concerned with regarding Valve’s WINE fork, Proton:

What’s harder to predict is how quickly Valve will expand its selection of ‘Verified’ games that it has tested and declared to be ‘Great on Deck.’ Out of the 540 games in my Steam library, the number of Verified games has crawled from 40 to 59 since I got the Deck. SteamDB notes that fewer than 500 of Steam’s nearly 65,000 games have earned the badge. Another 350+ games have been marked as Unsupported. There’s simply no way the Deck comes anywhere close to Valve’s goal of playing every game on Steam in the near future. 

Still, Valve will let you install any game in your library and give it a shot—you can even choose to boot a game with a specific older version of Proton (the software that makes Windows games work on SteamOS) if you’re the type to read through bug forums and think Dragon’s Dogma will run better on Proton 5.13-6, for example. Of the dozens of games I’ve tried that Valve has yet to verify, almost all of them have worked just fine.

I still believe that any game working with a Windows compatibility layer is a coincidence and that seems to still be true given these reviews. A user shouldn’t need to roll back to an earlier version of Proton or even know what Proton is, and I’m concerned that Valve may still be pushing game developers towards Proton instead of native Linux game ports. That puts developers like Ethan Lee out of a job, which is absolutely horrible to think about. It is also not great for Linux as a platform and the Steam Deck overall because game compatibility will continue to get worse over time as games that were once Deck Verified could become broken due to Proton changing.

Games that were ported natively to Linux also break over time, but I believe that’s a slower process and less likely to happen without underlying hardware changes like the move from 32 to 64bit architectures. I doubt many of Loki’s software from 1999 and 2000 runs smoothly today without some work, but that’s also true of some games from that era on Windows natively. It would be curious to test games from that era in Proton. Stuff like Heavy Gear 2, and especially something like Quake 3 that has a native port of that era, a Windows version, and later became open source. It’s wild that game console emulators are a more stable platform than Windows compatibility layers like Proton and they also run great on the Steam Deck according to Fenlon:

I ran into a few other issues here and there that were simply quirks of emulation and not unique to the Steam Deck, but on the whole it’s been as smooth as I could’ve hoped. The one emulator I didn’t test is Yuzu, simply because I don’t have any Switch games ripped (guess I have some jailbreaking to do). But I now have Super Nintendo, PS1, PS2, PSP, GameCube and Wii games on a portable device with the power to play (almost) all of them, and this is before emulator developers have a chance to test the Steam Deck themselves. It’s a damn good start.

I hope to check in with Ethan Lee and other developers again soon. If you’re a game developer with thoughts about the Steam Deck and Linux, or someone who is on the fence about keeping their pre-order for the Steam Deck due to Proton, please get in touch. I don’t have a Steam Deck yet so I can’t speak from personal experience with the hardware and software combination, but I’ve been writing about Linux for over 20 years now.

Categories
video games work

Waypoint: Activision Blizzard Reports Record Revenue as They Fuck Over 800 Employees

Waypoint’s Patrick Klepek:

Activision Blizzard, a company of more than 9,000 employees who’ve built some of the world’s most popular games, is a few things. They are a company who bragged about having a “record year,” on an earnings call this afternoon, a quarter where only raking in $2.4 billion in revenue was considered a disappointment. They are a company who granted a $15 million signing bonus and a $900,000 salary to a high-ranking executive who joined last month. And they are a company who just laid off around 800 employees, or 8% (!!!) of its total workers.

800 people will be without jobs at the end of the day. 800 people head into an uncertain future, wondering how long their severance and health insurance will get them before the next job.

Eric Bailey’s “Blizzard Gives Employees Box With 8.3% Chance of Containing Pink Slip” for The Hard Times:

After a recent earnings report announced record revenue, Activision-Blizzard initiated layoffs by handing out boxes to its 9,600 employees that had 8.3% odds of containing employment termination paperwork.

“A lot of companies might just hand out pink slips to a select few, but our ‘layoff boxes’ allow every employee to be part of the overall firing experience,” said Blizzard human resources manager Clint Bullock. “Our employees have all worked hard to make our company so successful over the past few years, so it’s only fair that everybody have an equal chance of having their lives totally upended while we keep making huge profits off their creations.”


Unionization in today’s companies and employee-ownership of new businesses would help prevent mass layoffs.

Categories
video games work

Red Dead Redemption 2, Games Labor, and Dan Houser’s Office

Red Dead Redemption 2 is out today, it’s another game that doesn’t understand that a bigger number means sequel because this is Rockstar Games’ prequel to Red Dead Redemption. Not Red Dead 1, that was a different game called Red Dead Revolver which as near as I can tell almost nobody played but impressed somebody enough to greenlight Red Dead Redemption.

Keza MacDonald calls RDR2 “a near miracle”:

Anybody coming to Red Dead Redemption 2 expecting Grand Theft Auto with horses will be rather baffled by this slow-paced, sumptuous, character-driven Old West historical drama, in which you spend probably 60% of your time simply riding around the American wilderness. There’s action too, in the form of shootouts, train robberies and frequent thrilling escapes on horseback, but these flashes of excitement punctuate a game that is largely about just being somewhere; about hunting, fishing and having long conversations on cross-country rides or around a campfire. In a mad fit of indulgence, Rockstar Games – the creators of Grand Theft Auto and one of the most successful game developers in the world – appears to have spent seven years and hundreds of millions creating the video game equivalent of Deadwood.

Sounds great, I’m excited. Fire up the consoles, we’re going to ride horsies like big boys, yeehaw.

Oh wait, Rockstar Games founder Dan Houser had to talk about the working conditions in this article from Harold Goldberg:

The polishing, rewrites, and reedits Rockstar does are immense. “We were working 100-hour weeks” several times in 2018, Dan says. The finished game includes 300,000 animations, 500,000 lines of dialogue, and many more lines of code. Even for each RDR2 trailer and TV commercial, “we probably made 70 versions, but the editors may make several hundred. Sam and I will both make both make lots of suggestions, as will other members of the team.”

The result of all their labor, Dan says, is “this seamless, natural-feeling experience in a world that appears real, an interactive homage to the American rural experience. [It’s] a vast four-dimensional mosaic in which the fourth dimension is time, in which the world unfolds around you, dependent on what you do.”

Who was working 100 hour weeks? “We”

Rockstar followed-up with Jason Schreier and denied the interpretation that the whole studio was that mismanaged and forced to work 100 hour weeks, sort of. Houser said the quote was only about the senior writing staff, and nobody else was forced to work that hard:

“…that additional effort is a choice, and we don’t ask or expect anyone to work anything like this. Lots of other senior people work in an entirely different way and are just as productive – I’m just not one of them! No one, senior or junior, is ever forced to work hard.”

That’s not a real denial of anything, and keep in mind that it has been 8 years since Red Dead Redemption shipped. 8 years sure sounds like plenty of time to ship anything, even if they also shipped Grand Theft Auto V 5 years ago and have been working on Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V Online since. Clearly Red Dead Redemption 2 is a huge game and the high scores benefitted from the work these people put into the game they love over that seemingly vast time, but there’s no way this gets better.

Rockstar then made a half-hearted attempt at remedying the situation by allowing current employees to speak publicly without fear of retaliation, which, I don’t know what you think that means but it definitely doesn’t actually mean you could talk about working conditions without fear of retaliation. Anyone who has worked for more than a few years knows that you can’t speak frankly about a current employer unless you are the executive running the company.

Jason Schreier was already working on a story about this that you must read, and of course the majority of the 77 current and former employees he spoke with requested anonymity. It’s a depressingly realistic look at the practice of crunch at Rockstar:

Three people who worked at Rockstar San Diego between 2011 and 2016 recall a period where they were told that overtime wasn’t optional. “It was mandatory 80 hours for basically the whole studio,” said one person who was there. “If you don’t have any work to do on Red Dead 2, just test GTA V for another eight hours.” Said a second: “Maybe they didn’t tell anyone 100 hours, but they definitely told us 80. Concept artists were sitting there being glorified QA.”

[…]

For some people working on Red Dead Redemption 2, crunch started as early as 2016. For others at Rockstar, crunch periods started in the fall of 2017, a year before the game’s release date. Even when the company wasn’t in official crunch mode, dozens of current and former employees say they’ve felt compelled to stay late for a variety of reasons. “Rockstar pressures employees to put in overtime in several direct and indirect ways,” said one current Rockstar developer. “Coming in on weekends is perhaps the only way to show you are dedicated and care. So you can be very efficient and hard-working during the week, but if you don’t show up on the weekend, you’re accused of not doing your share and will be constantly harassed.”

Schreier also confirmed that an employee who worked on a Rockstar game for multiple years and leaves before it ships won’t be included in the game’s credits:

“That has been a consistent policy because we have always felt that we want the team to get to the finish line,” said Jennifer Kolbe. “And so a very long time ago, we decided that if you didn’t actually finish the game, then you wouldn’t be in the credits.”

Rockstar have a website up to credit people who left before the game shipped, which is good except it doesn’t include any mention of title or contribution, and this list should also be in the fucking game. People working on games everywhere need a union to collectively bargain for their time, pay, and define standards for receiving credit for the work they’ve done.

Later, Dan Houser was quoted by Sam White in British GQ as saying that he feels like games are magical because people don’t understand how they’re made:

…and it’s that games are still magical. It’s like they’re made by elves. You turn on the screen and it’s just this world that exists on TV. I think you gain something by not knowing how they’re made. As much as we might lose something in terms of people’s respect for what we do, their enjoyment of what we do is enhanced. Which is probably more important.”

Not knowing how something is made, or caring about it, is the hurdle that players need to cross in order to help the people making these games attempt to have a life outside of work. If you appreciate games, even ones with highs as high as Red Dead Redemption 2 (and there are some incredible lows in the writing of it and other Rockstar games), then you need to learn that everyone working on them needs to be able to have a life outside of them.

Patrick Klepek has a great article on Waypoint talking about how to make a difference in the lives of everyone working on games, and how a boycott might not be the best way to bring change. There’s this one really important tip Klepek has about buying games that are on Steam when the developer also has other options for buying the same game without giving up a 30% cut to Valve:

Another note: if a developer has a game listed on Steam, itch.io, and a personal website, buy it anywhere but Steam. Sure, yes, Steam is a useful tool and it’s nice to have your games in a single spot, but itch.io gives developers greater flexibility in profit margins, and on a personal website, nearly all of it goes to them. For smaller developers, the dollars add up. Other forms of economic reinforcement include supporting creators on Patreon—or tipping.

Maybe the most telling quote about this situation was from Houser in Goldberg’s original article that sparked the current conversation about poorly managed crunch. Speaking about his office, Houser said: “It’s an absolute shithole,”

Categories
security

PSN Account Hijackers

Patrick Klepek has a terrific read up on Waypoint about his investigation into Sony’s incompetent security practices around user accounts, and the social engineering crews that steal them:

$1,200. That’s how much someone is asking for a PlayStation Network account I’ve been investigating for the past few weeks. “Secure,” the person calls it, claiming the account will “never be touched” by the original owner again. “He won’t be getting it back,” they claim. More than a thousand dollars? That’s a little rich for my blood, and so I counteroffer: $700.

He also has a few updates on twitter for after you’ve read the article.

Categories
video games

Far Cry 5 is Disappointing and Available

I’ve loved Far Cry games in the past, 3 was a particular high point, but that was 6 years ago and Far Cry 4 lost me somewhere along the way. I never finished it. 5 looks to be more of the same kind of an outdoor adventure through a beautiful land that is beset upon with chaos, light RPG mechanics without the role-playing, and this time they’ve set it in Montana.

The most important difference with this game is that it once had some promise in making a statement about the current political situation. There’s a lot of things that it’d be incredible to see a game even try to talk about, but Far Cry 5 isn’t that game despite having all of the opportunity in the world to try.

Austin Walker:

Thematically, Far Cry 5 is such an inconsistent mess of ideas that there is hardly a recognizable through line at all. Instead, the game gestures towards ambiguity as if looking for a shield to save itself with.

This is a game that undeniably knows that Donald Trump is president, but cannot decide if that fact should be punchline or key plot device. When, in two different scenes, cult leaders make oblique references to “America’s leadership” or the failures of the person “who’s in charge” as proof of the American empire’s final days, the game reaches for sincere relevance. But an hour later, you’ll be recovering the notorious piss tape from a Russian spy in a pun-filled quest.

Jeff Gerstmann:

There’s probably a great story you could tell around a Christian Doomsday Prepper Cult that has you fighting them off as they prepare for the End Times by murdering everyone around them and stealing all the resources they can. That’s meat that few games even attempt to chew. But the ambitious setting doesn’t pay off in this story that seems to want to hedge every chance it gets. The end result is a story that goes nowhere, says nothing, and fails to live up to the previous settings and villains in the franchise. If you can get past that… the rest is pretty much fine if you’re up for another Far Cry game.

Far Cry 5 is up now on Steam for Windows, as well as your Xbox One or PlayStation 4. It’s also got the traditional slap in the face of $60 not being enough, and offering both Deluxe ($70) and Gold ($90) editions.

I have a stack of open-world Ubisoft games that I haven’t finished, Far Cry 5 isn’t joining them.