It really is. I would go as far as to call it a clickbait article. The title is intriguing but the only addition to the statement is that that the era is over because every game doesn’t need to release with something new. And that’s essentially the whole article as the rest is just filler.

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I decided to give Vintage Story a try. I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. I can already say it’s not for everyone. It’s like if you took Minecraft survival mode and then turned it into an actual survival mode. One of the first things everyone makes in Minecraft is a pickaxe. It took me about 2 hours to get the first pickaxe and then another 10 hours (though I did a lot of other things before upgrading my pick) to get the next tier of pickaxe. I probably would’ve gotten it quicker if I had only focused on that but I had a lot of other survival needs that had to deal with. But to go over what you need to make your first copper pickaxe.

Obviously you need copper. Copper bits can spawn above ground (and a small hint that everyone mentions. If there’s copper on the ground there’s a small vein of copper right below it in the first layer of sedimentary rock). When you’ve collected enough copper you need to smelt it and cast it. To smelt copper you can’t use wood, you need to use charcoal. How do you get charcoal? You make a charcoal pit and burn wood into charcoal. You need an large amount of wood. How do you get wood? You make an axe. How do you make an axe? You flintknap an axe head and combine it with a stick. Now we can smelt copper but how do we cast it? For that you need to create a pickaxe mold. To create a pickaxe mold you mold clay and then fire it in a pit kiln. A pit kiln is pretty much a hole in the ground that you fill with the clay mold, dry grass, sticks and wood and then let it burn for a whole in game day. When you have a mold you put molten copper into the mold. But you can’t just take molten copper and stick it into the mold. You need a crucible to hold the liquid copper and tongs to hold the hot crucible. A crucible is made the same way a mold, you form it from clay and the fire it for a day. Tongs are probably the easiest part of the part of the process as you need just sticks and rope (which you make from cattails). If this feels like it takes forever it’s because it does. This is why it’s not for everyone but my god did this push the right buttons because unlocking the pickaxe felt like a real milestone.

And in case anyone cares what I did for the next 10 hours, I harvested probably about 1000 tule plants to make a thatch roof. I started a farm and collected different kind of seeds (because you need to rotate crop to keep the soil healthy). I made a cellar because your food will spoil within days if you don’t stick them in the cellar. I collected enough copper to make a copper anvil so I could make more advance copper tools. I prospected the land to find tin and lead veins so I could make other metals than copper. I foolishly believed making leather might be easy so I hunted some animals until I looked up leatherworking and then gave up because I hadn’t found limestone (or it’s equivalent) to start the tanning process. Instead I started to make compost from the leather which I will later use as a fertilizer. Oh and I made a fruitpress to make juice from all the berries I’ve found.

It’s a real survival experience and I’m definitely enjoying the complexity of it all. There’s an in-game survival guide that is pretty informative so I don’t need to go online to understand how something works. The game also has a very customizable gaming experience. You can very much tailor your experience to be a bit less survival or significantly more survival. You can also modify the worldgen to fit your needs which is something that got removed from Minecraft. There’s also a really good modding support. So far I’ve added the Carry On mod that lets me move chests and barrels around because when I expanded my base (to have more space for my stuff) moving my stuff around was a pretty annoying experience. I also have my eye on some other mods but those require starting a new playthrough and I want to get a bit better grasp of some of the mechanics before pulling the trigger on a new playthrough.

TL:DR I absolutely recommend Vintage Story to anyone willing to put in the effort it demands. You will be rewarded for that effort.

Because despite who he is as a person his video essays are quality content.

I understood your point because we’re on the same side and I took a generous interpretation of what you said. Now that I’ve taken a really critical look I have no fucking idea what you were trying to say because the numbers make no sense.

If I correct your 500 and 4 years, your statement becomes “Nintendo sold their consoles at industry pricie for the average console lifecycle”. Oh the horror, Nintendo does what every other console seller does. And the part about selling a reskinned game at full price every 2 years? If I’m being generous I’d say you’re talking about BOTW and TOTK. But that’s not 2 years and it’s not a reskin and your argument implies multiple games but I can barely come up with one.

Your entire comment could’ve been only the second part and it would’ve been just as informative as what you actually wrote. That’s how worthless your fucked up numbers have made the point.

Bad Empanada has an hour long video going over this topic. There’s definitely some western propaganda in circulation but there’s even more Chinese propaganda trying to hide the truth.

Using years and hundreds of dollars is not min/maxing precision. That’s a stupid excuse for something you should own up because your made up numbers detract from your point. If the numbers don’t matter then this shouldn’t make your argument look ridiculous.

Nintendo, the company that makes gamers pay them $5000 for a new console every year, and then $800 for a new skin of the exact same game every month, and calls it innovations and consumer friendliness.

You can’t just make up numbers and expect to have reasonable argument. By making up numbers you’re just opening yourself up to criticism (which it seems you can’t take) even if the actual point you’re making is right.

I got it for free and I still didn’t finish it. It had some interesting ideas but a lot of the gameplay elements were extremely shallow, the main character was annoying, the story was boring and I couldn’t get it running on Linux and I wasn’t going to boot into Windows just to play this game.

I probably would’ve been disappointed had I paid any money for it.

unless it’s a business shattering literally apocalyptic event.

If that’s not an issue relating directly to their role I don’t know what it.

The only reason they’d wake up 3AM for some crisis is if either the market is collapsing or their company is collapsing. Those things happening unexpectedly is something the majority of CEO-s will never experience. I guess it doesn’t suck to be a CEO when the sucky thing almost never happen.

We don’t know the exact state of the game but what we know is that it’s early access ready. If previous Unknown world games are of any indication it’s still 2 years away from final release. They might make some money back with early access but it will be negatively reviewed under the pretense that it will not be properly finished. The release is already guaranteed to take a financial hit.

Standard practice has been to fuck over the developers after release. They haven’t released Subnautica 2 yet. They’re screwing the developers over before they’ve cashed out the game. That’s the part that made it implausible in my mind.

I didn’t want to think they’re completely incompetent so I decided to do some digging. That $250 million is actually part of their acquisition deal. Krafton technically bought Unknown Worlds for $750 million. $500 million was paid up front and the extra $250 million was due for 2026 if Unknown Worlds met the performance clause. That $250 million has nothing to do with the sales of Subnautica, it’s part of the buyout.

This could mean they were always going to try and stiff Unknown Worlds. It also means it’s probably less about the people working at Unknown Worlds getting stiffed and more about the leadership expecting a payout that was agreed upon.

That’s according to Krafton and we know they will bend the truth to create a narrative. But even if it’s true I still think Krafton are the assholes here. I’m less concerned when people in positions of power don’t get their position enabled bonuses, but Krafton is also taking away whatever bonus the actual workers were originally promised.

When I first heard about the firings and the delay to the game I thought “This doesn’t sound plausible. Are they really going to ruin their investment and effectively kill the company to supposedly save a quarter of a billion. That would be unbelievably stupid”. But with every subsequent nugget of information it’s getting increasingly clearer that they, Krafton, actually are unbelievably stupid. They’re pretty much guaranteed that if Subnautica 2 gets released (and that’s assuming Subnautica 2 is in a good enough position to be released) the studio will shutter as all the talent will move on and all the money Krafton spent acquiring the studio is thrown in the wind. They’re not even going to save the quarter billion because the delay means they’re going to be paying at least 6 months wages for minimum effort work because I doubt anyone at that studio is willing to put in the effort after being cheated out of their bonus.

Even if it’s all so obvious I still find it hard to believe the publisher is THAT stupid. But that’s the world we live in, where people get to make idiotic decisions because they’re greedy as fuck.

I think you’re seriously underestimating how big VISA and Mastercard are. Valve is estimated to be worth around 8 billion, Visa made 4.5 billion in profits Q2 of 2025. VISA makes more money annually than Valve is even worth. Furthermore if we exclude China, Visa and MC make up 90% of all online payments. Steam’s entire business depends on online purchases. Steam would be thoroughly fucked if Visa and MC dropped Valve.

What Visa and MC are doing is despicable and something should be done about them, but Valve is not in a position to do anything but bend over and spread the cheeks.

If you’re a hobbyist you’re very unlikely to release something that would be affected by SKG. If you make games without any online components (or some other kind of fuckery that renders the game inoperable) then your games already align with the spirit of the initiative.

Even if you make online games as long as you allow consumers set up their own servers you’re good as far as SKG is concerned. The initiative impacts primarily bigger studios with the resources to set up and run their own services that they can (and will) shut down which then renders the game unplayable. The only thing SKG cares about is keeping games in a playable state.

Politicians would have to completely fuck up the legislation for it to impact you.

Found the guy who would use a flathead screwdriver to regulate a demon core.

As evident from Australia, Canada and the US, every government does not care. There’s no guarantee that the EU commission will care either, but because we’ve (hopefully) met their pretty significant requirement they have to care enough to address it. And in an ideal society they would have to care because the government is for the people and enough people have voiced their concern.

Also considering there’s at least one prominent EU parliament politician showing public support it’s bound to get a bit more political attention than just a simple “No” that we’ve seen so far.

Yeah. There are a lot of story beats that everyone knows GRRM would write (if he only cared to continue the series) and those story beats were in the show. They had enough material to work with, they simply chose to rush through all of it.

Well, if you had been here since the start you’d know that Ross started SKG by having multiple petitions around the globe. The EU initiative is one the last (if not the last) petition he pushed for. For Australia and Canada the ship already sailed, Australia said no and Canada gave a roundabout no. Ross didn’t even try in the US because the US is such a lost cause there’s nothing to even petition for. I don’t remember what happened with Brazil but it was on Ross’s radar. Most other countries would simply be too small to have an impact on the global scale. Which is why the last two bastions left are the UK and the EU, because the haven’t said outright “No” yet and they’re big enough to influence the market. The rest of the world has to wait because the other influential parts of the world have already failed.

As for a boycott, you’re free to start organizing one. I see that as a lost cause. If we can barely get 1 million Europeans to do the bare minimum of signing one petition I don’t see how you’re going to get 10+ million people across the globe to do more than the bare minimum for who knows how long. Boycotts don’t work because 99% of gamers do not give a fuck. I’ve seen different groups of people boycott Ubisoft for 20 years now and I personally had boycotted them for about a decade, it had no impact as Ubisoft made even more profits despite the different boycotts. Modern Warfare 2 boycott had no impact on the removal of dedicated servers. People even boycotted Valve when Steam launched and that did nothing. Boycotts have only had very limited consumer rights successes in individual games, like EA removing pay to win mechanics from Battlefront 2. Meanwhile Australia ended up made Steam to offer refunds to everyone and Belgium and Netherlands restrictions on lootboxes has noticeably reduced their usage in games.

You’re free to prove to me wrong but government actions end up being far more successful than boycotts.