As foretold in a memo to staff earlier this December, swooping leadership changes have been made at Activision Blizzard as the company enters 2024 as its first year under the helm of Microsoft following the $69 billion acquisition.
While it’s not confirmed if the allegation is true, Kotick has faced accusations from multiple employees over the years, either of direct mistreatment or disregarding problematic workplace attitudes and swiftly settling complaints out of court.
Andy Belford, formerly of the community team at Activision-Blizzard, sounded the alarm that Overwatch 2 would be immediately review bombed after hitting Steam.
Belford recounted how Bobby Kotick himself was happy to drop the game straight on Steam without giving the community team any form of additional support.
With allegations of the company and Kotick himself not taking sexual harassment, assault, and unequal pay complaints seriously dating back to 2006.
According to WSJ, Activision has said the state has agreed to file an amended complaint that withdraws its 2021 claims alleging widespread and systemic workplace harassment at the company.
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I’m somewhat excited for this one, curious to see what gameplay loop could hook me in. I can’t help but hope it will capture the same feeling I had when I started exploring Azeroth in WoW. I know it’s a proc gen world but maybe they figured out how to make worlds more lived in.
Onus is on them to actually release a good game, not on the potential customer to have any faith especially with their track record. Turning NMS into a decent game was the least they could have done.
Maybe but turning it into a good game was the least they could have done in the end for people who gave them money. That would apply to TDB devs too going forward.
While I am impressed that No Man’s Sky pulled a 180 in the end and I doubt they’ll repeat the same mistakes with this, a dose of some skeptism is always healthy.
Also, doesn’t hurt to check what the thing looks like at release–we just had The Day Before pull the ol’ switcharoo on people, after all–and how it plays when it’s out before making a purchase (looking right at Cyberpunk the game vs Cyberpunk the game that was pitched to people, here…no amount of “it’s better now” is gonna bring the game that was hyped up before release/used “Work in Progress” as a shield to life. Not without a complete rework. Could also apply to the above The Day Before too). By all means, believe that the devs learned, I really hope they did, cuz as a Fantasy junkie, this looks like something I’d really enjoy…but also be at least a little cautious in what you’re gonna throw money at
Fair enough. Just like Cyberpunk tho, they’ll never be able to give people the game they were hyping NMS to be. Unlike Cyberpunk, IMO anyways, it does get closer to it tho (and i give it brownie points because 1) they used the money they made and put it back into the game to fix their mistakes and gave these “expansions” to players for free, and 2) they never tried to downplay anything like CDPR did. They knew they messed up, admitted to it, and fixed it. None of this “oh, the game launched better than people make it out to be. It was just a cool thing to hate Cyberpunk” thing)
I only started playing it after they fixed the PSVR version. It’s a very deep game. I found the controls pretty infuriating for at least the first few hours of gameplay. I didn’t really feel comfortable in the game until about 10 hours in. But if I get that far into a game, it’s earned it’s spot in my library, especially as I got it for half off. I’ve got to say that it’s a very impressive game, but yeah I can’t say that the missions are completely holding my interest. My interest has sort of plateaued and now that RE4 VR mode is out, I’m playing that. We will see if I come back to it. But it was worth the $30 I paid for sure.
I keep getting tempted to try it, but honestly it doesn’t look like it would be my jam. I don’t want to build bases, and I don’t want to grind and collect resources. I’m kind of not into sandboxy stuff anymore. Maybe there’s more to the game, but that’s all it looks like to me as an outsider.
I do wonder about that, Gen Z and Alpha are less tech savvy than millennials, so there’s non zero odds that it doesn’t work out because Linux isn’t easily accessible in the tablet/phone space yet.
Mobile Linux is a thing, though I think it would take governments mandating unlocked/user-unlockable bootloaders to gain literally Any market share. It would also probably take a compatibility layer for running Android apps similar to Wine in desktop Linux, but Android already runs a Linux kernel, so projects like Waydroid are most of the way there already by just running Android inside a container.
I think we need rock-solid Wayland before we can expect TYLD. So I’m feeling 2026 minimum, then add a couple for some padding; so 2028 realistically. Think of how far we’ve come in 5 years, then imagine 5 years more.
If Nvidia’s consumer GPU market share dropped a bit too, that’d help.
Why do you think that Wayland is necessary for adoption? In my opinion it is the missing hardware drivers, compatability issues and “getting your hands dirty” while constantly tweaking stuff. Yeah it got better over the years, but most people want things to just work.
Wayland is necessary because Wayland will be necessary in the near future, if it was next year then that would put a lot of people who don’t know about X.Org and Wayland through a major shift which could rock-the-boat a bit too much and cause them to go back to Windows for the “just works” experience.
Look, I just finally tried steam on Linux and the game booted up. I am absolutely amazed as I thought I’d never see that day. Also windows is somehow just getting worse and worse. It’s like they just want an entire ad platform. They lost me at this point. I have 0 need for any ms products again and that’s a great feeling.
I know that phrase is the most beaten dead horse around at this point but the year of the Linux desktop is going to be different depending on what your requirements are.
If you just need to browse the web, it’s been there for over a decade. Same for most dev work.
For gaming, it’s already there for most titles. Pretty much everything I try works now unless it has anticheat. It’s been in a pretty good state for 2 or 3 years now at least.
For media creation and specialized software, it’s not there yet. The big stuff like adobe will probably never get ported and the free alternatives vary wildly in quality. Blender is awesome. GIMP is not. There’s also issues like lacking color management and iffy HDR support.
Yeah people often forget the sheer amount of quality checks and testing that windows updates go through. Sure it might do annoying things like changing your default browser but it never truly breaks.
There’s also the fact that Windows native antivirus is so good that installing antivirus software is actually a downgrade. On Linux meanwhile you gotta run third party antivirus.
It should not happen if you use debian, Ubuntu or Mint stable. As long you don’t do anything exotic it should not break, at not since 2018.
And if it breaks remember you compare free software made by volunteers (and paid employees from companies) with much less money and they still manage to compete with the multi billion dollar company Microsoft.
Is exactly what I’m trying to say… this is why Linux will not be ever better unless it is an actual product that can have real money poured into it. Except they don’t really “manage to compete”. Unless you count 1vs99 as non-laughable competition. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to use something else but as of right now, nothing can really compare with stability and being “plug and play”
Hmm. My partner’s Linux machine is perfectly stable and has been for a decade. I administer it for them, but that’s just running updates and distribution upgrades every now and then
My server takes more effort, as distribution upgrades sometimes break stuff, for example the mailing list manager I have used for a long time became deprecated and was disabled on the recent LTS upgrade
My laptop running Ubuntu from the factory is perfectly fine, I’ll probably make it less stable by moving it to Debian
I’m I the only person who wants the Windows OS to do less, not more? I strongly prefer a non-intrusive OS that isn’t constantly calling attention to itself with needless bullshit and distractions. MS has forgotten (or wants to ignore) the fundamental role of the OS, which is a platform for the apps we actually want to interact with to run on.
Of course this phenomenon isn’t only limited to MS Windows. Far too much software these days thinks it constantly needs to grab your attention. I’m sick of the whole “all push notifications all the time” mindset of designers.
To revise my complaining a bit, the return to one “big update” per year could be a good thing…hopefully.
No, but Windows is so entrenched that they don’t need to actually be competitive in order to keep making profit. Instead, the Windows team has to invent things nobody ever wanted or needed that they can advertise to make it look like they’re still useful. Software UX polish-passes don’t make good marketing. You can’t seriously put “you know that one weird thing that only happened to a fraction of users sporadically? we fixed it” on a marketing campaign.
You make some good points. I would be happy if they just made it faster, more reliable, and more secure (incremental improvements) and I personally don’t want or need a lot of “wow factor” out of the stupid OS. But I do understand what you’re saying. A lot of those MBAs, etc, that they hired need to justify their jobs and so on.
Trust me you want to use an online Microsoft account as your sign in for your personal PC. Are you sure? You’ll be missing out if you don’t! Trust me…
^ windows when you install it.
I mean how else will you get wicked fast search results for your apps when you push the windows key? Ha! Gotcha, first we will search the web, and slowly. Your work can wait.
Experience on Linux and Mac is way better for launching apps.
In 2023 it’s really easy now. Honestly the install process like 9 years ago was easier than windows because you got a proper Gui.
90% of shit runs in a browser now. Browsers have been fine on Linux since forever. I still game and video edit with a professional editor no problem. Just give it a whirl on a spare disk or something, I promise it will likely be painless :).
Not much to “learn” unless you have quirky hardware that doesn’t have proper drivers but most everything works out of the box these days.
I am sorry but if any gaming journalist is not the least amount of sceptical about ANY release today, then they either don’t play games or are sleeping under a rock.
Without a doubt, Hello Games pulled NMS around and made it into a great title but this took years and we also have seen this blind optimism before with Cyberpunk 2077. Even a “wiser” Game studio can fail and not deliver.
Too many titles over the last years were lukewarm even highly anticipated and hyped titles either were “meh” or failed at release. The number of games that redeemed themselves is only a few and can be probably counted on one hand. A gaming Journalist should know about this!
So, I am not even sorry if I am not hyped about it. It does sound interesting but “I believe it when I see it”. There is too much time that has to go down the road for this to come out and there are a lot of things that can/will go wrong in that time.
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