141–150 of 230 posts
I'm not under an illusion that it does any good, but I swore off all Blizzard products after the Blitzchung incident. It doesn't feel right giving money to a company that would side with the CCP over human rights in Hong Kong. I'd previously played Hearthstone and Overwatch, and I'd been a Blizzard fan since the original Warcraft. That happy company is dead, and something ugly is animating its corpse. I think company…
Quitting Blizzard meant giving up my primary source of entertainment at the time, and having a lot less contact with some dear friends since then. It wasn't easy, but the right choice for me was clear: I am unwilling to support a company that silences/punishes people for promoting human rights. I won't even touch their free-to-play games any more, since that helps populate their servers.
I'm not sure what my point is here. Maybe just to acknowledge that it's somehow comforting to know I'm not alone. Thanks for sharing.
What's a "caster"?
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You can look it up online. Xbox Series X and S Manufacturer: Flextronics and Foxconn Nintendo Switch Manufacturer: Foxconn Sony Manufacturer: PlayStation 5 In-house (my mistake on them). PlayStation 3 and 4 were both made by Foxconn assisting. But it also applies to others: Google Pixel 5 Manufacturer: Foxconn Kindle Manufacturer: Foxconn (Fire Tablets are made in Hong Kong by Quanta due to AOSP Anti-Fork rules) Nint…
Foxconn has lots of factories in lots of different places. Does it matter to specify which factory / place has the problem?
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> Does anyone know why this happens? Oh it's easy to explain. Steve Jobs said it best [1]. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years. Game studios are a bit like a large film studio. They don't like the creative process. It's too unpredictable. T…
>Steve Jobs said it best. He talks about innovation at Pepsi being a new bottle. That's what Activision Blizzard is. They have a "monopoly" with their key franchises, most notably CoD and WoW. They just release a new "bottle" every 1-2 years. Isn't this also kind of what Apple has become in the post-Steve Jobs era?
The development line of the A CPUs that led to the M1 is definitely not ‘a new bottle every 1-2 years’. The M1 out-innovated Intel, Qualcomm and to a lesser extend AMD.
Apple also branched out to other categories with the Apple Watch and AirPods.
Apple is most definitely still innovating.
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> Overwatch - imbalanced. Overwatch 2 with weird changes As a counterpoint, IMO OW is in the most balanced place it ever has been now. A lot of it has to do with the making of OW2, which has meant no new heroes, but still I do think the OW team has done excellent work with competitive balance recently. This is reflected in the most diverse hero selections ever in Overwatch League (pretty much making hero bans there o…
Hasn’t the meta in OW been double shield for a while? One of the worst ones?
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Do you think worker-owned businesses can mitigate this? After all, one of their pluses is supposed to be that the workers can choose to prioritise things other than profit.
Worker owned business can't even compete. Name one such company that is in the top 5 in any product category.
Generally however I think worker-owned companies are unlikely to take risk but value the workplace of current workers over future workers. (i.e. closing a department in order to build a new market will be delayed)
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> Blizzards reputation has been going downhill since the merge with Activision. That was in 2008, right? So their reputation has been going downhill for 13 years?
Probably 11, When the first third of Starcraft II released without LAN support, borked custom games, and with that mess of a story. But that was just an aberration surely. Then 2012 was the real money auction house in Diablo 3 with an even worse excuse for a story and I gave up on the company. They got a few brownie points back for coming up with the successor to TF2 in Overwatch, but by that point that was the aberr…
Either way, I enjoyed SC2 for a while but it just felt like it was missing something compared to Brood War. I never did buy the other 2 parts.
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You can look it up online. Xbox Series X and S Manufacturer: Flextronics and Foxconn Nintendo Switch Manufacturer: Foxconn Sony Manufacturer: PlayStation 5 In-house (my mistake on them). PlayStation 3 and 4 were both made by Foxconn assisting. But it also applies to others: Google Pixel 5 Manufacturer: Foxconn Kindle Manufacturer: Foxconn (Fire Tablets are made in Hong Kong by Quanta due to AOSP Anti-Fork rules) Nint…
Foxconn has lots of factories in lots of different places. Does it matter to specify which factory / place has the problem?
I can’t find how many people worked at Foxconn at the time, but right now it’s employing more than the population of any of the smallest eight US states. Wikipedia’s list of suicide rates by state is from a different year than the population, but it looks like those states are about 5 times the population-adjusted rate that Foxconn had.
Wikipedia also says that China’s national suicide rate is difficult to study due to political concerns, before saying the WHO says it was 9.7/100k in 2016. That would mean you should expect closer to 126 suicides per year (in Foxconn’s current workforce), rather than the 14 in 6 months that made the news.
Blizzard once made games for $60. Then inflation happened, and they had to pay their employees more. But gamers are stuck in a "back in my day candy bars were a nickel" mindset, and refuse to pay more than $60. So they had to hide the true cost of the games inside dark patterns and upsells. The end.