If you want to get weirder, Tengen released the first version of Tetris on NES. It looks better. It plays worse.

Copyright’s explicit purpose is to give the public new works. You can’t “unpublish.” Once it’s out there, it’s ours, and you are entitled to money… or not.

NASCAR has chosen not.

Take everything freely.

Inverting the PVP to be intra-team sounds brilliant. You’re there to be the best on your side, at any cost… and then there’s five other schmucks present. There’d still be a contest between teams, but it wouldn’t really matter. That’s the background noise for trying to steal kills from the other guy in your lane. One player can even be “the albatross,” the worst loser on your side, motivated above-all-else to foist that label onto another player.

The simpler fix is to make rounds so fast and chaotic that people can’t develop narratives about how so-and-so fucked them over. Let people win some rounds and lose some rounds, even if the outcome is a devastating three-and-eight loss. Make their catastrophic fuckups contained. Allow everyone the opportunity to clutch critical moments, by making more moments critical, without creating one continuous hour-long panic attack.

Key to any of this is scoring via bots. The game can snapshot any moment of gameplay, and run it back over and over, with AI substituting any given player. It’s VORP. If you just got your ass handed to you - would any bot have done better? If not, then that failure shouldn’t count against you. If this failure was caused by the game introducing randomness, then your bad karma can be made-up-for with better luck later on. But if you fumbled a fight that 99% of simulations survived, the game is free to laugh at you, and so are the other players.

Lossy codecs could cut that down tenfold, without any noticeable difference. A JPEG encoder from 1999 would work fine at this resolution. If you were sitting close enough to your 8K monitor to notice even the most glaring artifacts, you’d need to sit up and wipe off your nose smudge.

It’s a zero-sum team project. Half the people playing will lose, and none of them will feel responsible. Even though they need to work together the entire time, to such a degree that any single person can ruin it for everybody… and one player quitting counts as ruining it for everybody. You’re handcuffed to these people for an hour. If this was all silly fun-times then you’d laugh it off, but of course, no, it’s a competitive sweatbox.

This is a formula for a stranger in Nebraska to blow out your headphones screaming obscenities because you clicked NPCs wrong twenty minutes ago.

Compare other hyper-competitive team games like Counter-Strike. One player can clutch a 1v5. Quitting is heavily discouraged, but is roughly balanced through numeric adjustments. And most importantly, games are quick. A round can happen in under a minute. Whole matches can be as long as a MOBA round, but being broken up into multiple phases - each one a separate win or loss - lets people feel that they did okay. Even if they stood no chance. Nobody invents a racial slur, mid-aneurysm, when they lose an aim-duel in silver.

One of the ex-devs for LoL or DotA said people should get kicked just for picking the wrong guy. If you can commit a bannable offense on the character select screen, maybe the game has intrinsic problems.

Did this image really need to be a 50 MB PNG? Did it really?

Beatings won’t improve systemic problems with your genre.

There’s a reason every MOBA is this toxic, and only MOBAs are this toxic. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. You designed this problem.

Making one game a “saga” was pretty messed-up.

People made the same excuse for the Wii. ‘Oh it’s not competing with the PS3 and 360. It plays completely different games.’ The same people inevitably turn around and say those real consoles ‘have no games,’ because they mostly play the same games.

The Switch has both a shitload of first-party exclusives, and a shitload of ports. They’re killing it. Their legal department can burn in hell, but the platform is clearly dominating the industry. It’s so fucking good that everyone else is rushing to compete with them.

The Switch has outsold it by an order of magnitude.

This company should fire their entire legal department.

Yes.

Text to the contrary is bullshit. It can and should be ignored, rejected, and opposed.

Added chance of fire damage!

Here’s the right approach to rightsholders:

Did you get the money?

Great, fuck off.

Literally mind your business.

Sony heard about Nintendo’s blue ocean strategy and said “I am also the first one here, now.”

Specify the country in the damn headline.

I meant me.

They announced a battle royale cash-in a few months ago?

Or for something from this century, Death Rites.

Get get get get God God God God.

Kid ‘n’ Scandal.