2914

I think it could have survived without Sessler, but Max Scoville, Anthony Carboni and Scott Bromley all left shortly after. It was pretty doomed at that point. Sounds like Tara Long has recently accepted a TV job so without her it wasn’t worth even keeping up appearances any longer.

2915

The guidelines aren’t the law. They are examples of behavior the FCC believe is illegal under the law. They would prosecute you for violating the law, not the guidelines. If you asked for an example of first degree murder a prosecutor might describe an act that he considers would apply. In the same way that description isn’t legally binding, but the law still holds and any given scenario is tested by the courts.

2916

I would think since they use that as their example, it would be assumed to be a concrete example of something that would be impacted by the law. Otherwise, what’s the point of the example?

The only thing left is legal wriggling.

And I don’t give a shit about getting a free game. Everybody gets a free game. Look under your chair, you’ve got a free game.

I’m talking about “Hey, we’d like you to prioritize your streaming of Call of Duty this week. Here’s a check for $5,000”

Pewdiepie disclosed $4 million income last year from streaming. Was that all youtube ads?

2917

Pewdiepie lives in Sweden. Maybe he doesn’t care what the FTC says.

2918

I’m just using him as an example of scale of income some of these guys are making. He’s the only one I know a number for.

2919

A nice read on M.U.D:

which i pulled from critical distance:

2920

in the same way that the latest 3D movie today is fundamentally the same thing as a Charlie Chaplin short

I see, so he argues that if something is even vaguely the same medium, they are descendants and offspring and raise their very raison d’etre from whatever loosely preceded them.

Well, that’s pretty…silly.

2921

Regarding the Assassins Creed Unity review embargo:

f6hb.png613×952

2922

Full article:

As such, you can take this as policy that, in the future, Kotaku will not accept post-release review embargoes tied to early review copies. That doesn’t mean we’re guaranteeing day-one reviews. We may still decide to wait to review a game if we feel we haven’t been able to have a fair go at the game’s online multiplayer or if, say, a game creator has advised us that there’s a last-minute pre-release patch we should test out… but if the only thing holding us back from running a review is an arbitrary amount of hours on the clock, we won’t wait and will publish our review the minute the game is released.

2923

What Totilo wasn’t saying to Ben Fritz in that conversation, it’s that they accepted because that way, even if the embargo finishes 10 hours later than the release date, they are still “winning”, as if they need 3 days to review it, 72 hours - 10 hours = 62 hours of advantage vs someone who didn’t use the review embargo.
And you know they want the hits of the people checking out reviews in the release day, I’m sure 70% of the page views of a review are done the first day.

2924

Absolutely. It’s why PR guys like embargoes even on titles that they think are 10/10 GOTY material. Keeping the reviews all popping at the same time keeps the buzz at a high level.

2925

Actually, it’s about ethics in games publishing.

2926

I wonder if a post-release embargo is just for “we want all reviews to drop on the same hour!” or it’s really more like “We don’t want anyone backing out of pre-orders moments before release because they read something negative.”

I’m hearing very mixed things about AC, otherwise I wouldn’t question it that way.

2927

Both. There’s no downside for the publisher when they ask for embargoes. If it’s a good game, then the embargo serves to coordinate review releases like a PR event. With a bad game, an embargo keeps sites from eviscerating the title during the buildup to launch.

2928

A very nice couple of articles on RPS entitled ‘Games For Humanity’ (part one and two, so far), which has some great game recommendations:

Part 1:

Part 2:

2929

Remember Code Avarice? That’s the studio that got their game, Paranautical Activity, pulled from Steam because one of the devs, Mike Maulbeck, threatened to kill Gabe Newell.

Maulbeck said he was quitting from Code Avarice and selling his shares to his partner. He had hoped this would convince Valve to put the game back on their service. Valve hasn’t reversed their decision.

In what should be no surprise to anyone (even Code Avarice admits it) Mike is back at the studio.

First off, Mike is back. This is probably not hugely surprising to some of you, but Mike couldn’t commit to his decision to leave Code Avarice. Travis publicly denounced his departure, and in the weeks following his official stepping down Mike had second thoughts. Looking for a new source of income was extremely overwhelming and when it finally came time to put pen to paper, Mike and Travis agreed the best thing to do would be to have Mike return to Code Avarice.

Good luck to them. I don’t think their games will be on Steam anytime soon.

2930

What else are you going to do when the gods don’t accept your offering?

2931

Every time anyone googles the name of their company this is going to come up. Awesome publicity! They should DEFINITELY keep going like nothing happened, since that’s the most professional thing to do.

/s

2932

They’re pretty much admitting that Mike never actually left the company, so his statement that he was leaving for the good of the company rings a bit hollow now.

2933

Did they threaten GoG and Desura also? There are other options, that with the mass of traffic of titles that Steam controls, might give them nearly as much ‘noticability’ and sales. Heck by not being on Steam but on either of those they might get 1 sale from me that they would not otherwise (not going to feed their families for long, granted!).