Adell

I actually love how sad the Steam Awards are just for highlighting how miserable some of these people are

The equivalent of making up a fake competition and prize just to make themselves feel slightly less irrelevant

(also love that going into the Steam Community is just people going "No, it doesn't run well on the Steam Deck, it runs like trash on everything but the woke mob didn't nominate it for any awards SO")

I handpicked these five, which I think most resonated with me this year. Obviously, I trend towards shithosting, so goofy ones end up filling up all five nominations for me. I'd love to hear other nominations and they don't have to necessarily be funny to be your favorite.

My one request is: only suggest chosts from other people, not yourself.

Jigsaw and Jury Duty by @bcj

Yoda and Luke by @Sullivan

Love Honk by @silverspots

The French by @Willow

Rip Ryan by @Willow

First, two posts about a game I don't really a strong feelings towards but love reading about:

The Problem with BG3's Racism Is The People Around It TBH by pleasantlytwstd

and

Baldur's Gate 3 Is Finally Finished And I Have Opinions by AshenCant

then

Hack all consoles, why not by Obspogon and Lifning along with Digital Piracy 101 also by Obspogon (This is more of a repost but still valid to me)

With a non-gaming entry of

Zionism isn't what people think it is (it's worse) by Shel

back when the first Dark Souls got ported to PC, I remember Gamers™ would get beyond mad if players posted screencaps wielding a Drake Sword. If you aren't aware, it is a weapon that has quite high stats and can be obtained very early, but you need to know exactly the trick - shooting a hanging tail of a Dragon with a bow in one of the very first areas of the game.

Since it was such an obscure secret, the hardcore gamers would bemoan anyone wielding one as a noob, scrub, casual, or any other word that made them feel better about themselves. Doesn't matter that obscure negative and positive secrets were always part of FROM repertoire: to them the only thing that matters is struggling because otherwise they've got nothing to show but the emptyness inside.

Anyway, I've just been thinking about it because for the first time I'm playing Elden Ring, I'm looking up any named NPC I come across and if their side quests are bullshit, because otherwise I'll just kill them and get done with it. That's how I've come across a +8 Halberd very early on. They'd be furious at that, and I love it.

With uncertainty on the rise in society as a whole, change was also underway in the realm of digital entertainment, where we position our core business. In 2023, we saw the release of eye-catching products and services in multiple domains where the commercialization and adoption of emerging technologies had seemed a more distant eventuality. The potential of these offerings also garnered greater attention than ever before.

For example, whereas the extended reality (XR) domain had previously developed primarily around business applications for the metaverse and other virtual spaces, 2023 saw the rise of many new services fusing virtual spaces with the real world. A case in point is the way the architecture sector, which previously had limited integration of XR in its business, began increasingly adopting these technologies because they enable the conversion of real-world architectural structures into data, a process also facilitated by the widespread use of commercial drones. In the realm of digital entertainment, where the focus has been on pioneering the development of new content, the experiential value of digital content itself increased dramatically as devices came to market that were capable of delivering even more immersive, realistic experiences using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). The next step will be applying these technologies to new forms of content that fuse the real and virtual worlds.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential implications had for some time largely been subjects of academic debate. However, the introduction of ChatGPT, which allows anyone to easily produce writing or translations or to engage in text-based dialogue, sparked the rapid spread of generative AIs. Its release made it apparent that the applicability of generative AI was by no means limited to text, and the subsequent months saw a quick succession of launches of new services and content that expanded generative AI into a variety of domains with close ties to digital entertainment, including images, video, and music. I believe that generative AI has the potential not only to reshape what we create, but also to fundamentally change the processes by which we create, including programming.

We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cutting-edge technologies to both our content development and our publishing functions. In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts. In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.

In terms of new business domains, we previously identified three focus investment fields, namely blockchain entertainment/Web 3.0, AI, and the cloud. Last year we redefined our overarching mission and goals for these three fields. We are currently working to modify our organizational structure and optimize our resource allocations to support these efforts.

There’s nothing I wish more for Square Enix than a solid earnings loss, if not an outright bankruptcy scare.

(Of course it won’t happen because companies are too big to fail, see the Metaverse fiasco, but one can dream)