CraigM
4647
Not claiming victimhood, just annoyance.
Again, thank you for illustrating why I stopped posting in this thread.
Aceris
4648
You are concerned about working conditions in the game industry so you are backing epic, which has a bad rep in that respect, and is something like 40% owned by Tencent where the working conditions are much worse.
cant we all just get along?
Sure, on the Fortnite side, but since I don’t play Fortnite, so, I feel okay about that.
And, last I checked, the whole Tencent argument was silly, since they are a minority owner.
Nope, I care about the small and mid level developers. If they get a bigger pay check, it’s all good. It means a smaller piece of the pie is going to middlemen.
More money in the hands of the developer, without costing me anything extra seems like a win/win.
As for working conditions, the only real solution is to form a union. Nothing short of that will make a difference.
Nope, false. A minority investor is not an owner and Tencent does not have any say into Epic’s business dealings. Those banging the Tencent/FuckEpic drum are either racist and/or misinformed.
I see I’ve had a couple of my posts flagged as inappropriate by the community. A first for me after 12+ years!
I was literally complimenting insightful things Nesrie has said about racism in P&R and trying to draw a comparison to how they might apply to her thoughts on this discussion. I failed to get my point across to her, but then, 'twas ever thus. But I honestly don’t think I violated the spirit of the rule which I thought was about dragging unpleasant conflict and baggage around the place. Am I getting something wrong?
I’m just a natural born rule follower who always picks the good-guy dialogue choices in RPGs so this is terribly disconcerting! ;)
peterb
4654
I keep trying to return to first principles here and ask myself “Why are people so upset about the Epic Games store to the point that they’re hurling racist and antisemitic slurs around and issuing death threats?” and the only place my mind keeps going is to conspiracy-theory level stuff like “Of course, people who have a side business selling freely obtained review Steam keys are trying to keep the world from changing so they can still make a few hundred bucks a year on it.” That’s it. That’s all I got.
(I totally understand I don’t want to use another storefront or I’m worried this is some Uber-like market disruption that will be bad in the long term or I think the UI of the epic store is garbage but none of that warrants the amount of utterly unhinged vitriol around this topic, IMO)
Heh, interesting theory!
Well, we’ve got our deplorables so we might as well have our version of Russian bots as well.
I think we also have a lot of teen boys, including the types who spray paint swastikas for the lulz and call SWAT teams on Twitch streamers.
Aceris
4656
A 40% owner is a minority investor, so stop it with the oxymoronic nonsense.
As to the accusations of racism, my complaint about tencent is based on the testimony of their own Chinese employees.
stusser
4657
Basically, just don’t drag P&R into other forums and it’s all good.
Saying Tencent sucks and is evil doesn’t make anyone a racist.
Aceris
4658
i think it’s really a matter of there being awful people on the internet who will behave in an awful way because they can. It’s very hard to predict what bandwagon they will join, but a bunch have clearly jumped on the anti epic bandwagon. Since I don’t really read any other game forums I haven’t seen any of the more extreme behaviour that keeps getting mentioned though.
stusser
4659
And to be clear, just because you here might be anti-epic, that doesn’t make you a gamergater or racist or white supremacist or the type of person that would threaten to kill the pets of anyone supporting them or whatever. Nobody is implying that. Thanks.
Now for my good cop side. Ish.
Maybe it does, companies do things for shareholders, as the theory goes, but probably not. I believe Epic’s choices are their own, otherwise I’d run out of tinfoil looking at tech companies alone.
I don’t think you did, even if I disagreed with it, but I’m the wrong person to judge. It’s hard to argue about words full of painful context without sounding callous, even if you’re very sympathetic. I end up not trying, which isn’t productive either.
You’re likely correct, for a small vocal minority. There’s all sorts of reasons with so many people, though. And none justifies threats, but I haven’t seen anyone try to justify it, so it’s not the worst theory.
Well, maybe butthurt ego too, I suppose.
A lot of the most vocal opponents in the ResetERA thread when EGS rolled out regional pricing inadvertently outed themselves as mostly being mad that they could no longer manipulate the market by buying foreign keys on the cheap because Epic had protections against that.
Right! Got it… and yet but still, “dragged” is carrying some negative connotations there which I don’t think fit my hidden posts.
This thread is really going places. Where will it go next? Eugenics? Objectivism? Maybe a dip into Holocaust denial?
Good stuff. Bravo.
This is one of those words. One can say the escalation logically followed the dismissive announcement while saying it didn’t provide a moral or ethical justification for it, it was just the silly world we have providing an excuse.
Nesrie
4665
Tencent is involved with a lot of stuff; it’s a giant company, huge. Games, music, movies… And they’re not really doing much that other foreign investors don’t also do. In addition, they partner with a lot of companies, no ownership stake but still involved, probably a lot of stuff most don’t know about… heck there are a lot of companies involved in things most don’t know about.
The amount of investment out there, in favorite and disliked companies can be pretty… well substantial and complex.
Aceris
4666
Really the tencent comment was solely about the incongruity of supporting epic because of working conditions in the game industry. I didn’t want to rehash the tencent issue. Ten years ago I might have said 40% owned by ea if they were 40% owned by ea.
I think there is a discussion to be had about the different approaches of the Chinese tech industry in the market and whether they are valuable innovations or unwelcome changes that would make the internet yet more dystopian if adopted outside China, but as you rightly say the subject is all very complicated and doomed to failure in this thread. It’s not just the Chinese internet titans, all big tech and media companies have this huge complex web of ownership, influence and partnerships; there’s nothing unusual about tencent in this respect.
