Aren’t most of those examples from like… the mid 2000s? We’re like two CEOs and a remarkable amount of arthritis away from like 90% of that.
I like the loot boxes piece because everybody throws it at EA, but when you point out that Valve re-released CounterStrike two years ago and they very explicitly kept the loot boxes in all you get is crickets. Not that I think loot boxes are a deal breaker, myself, but hey, you’d expect some consistency.
I do not believe they’ve been in trouble for violating labour laws, either, but I’m not their lawyer. I know they got a pretty bad reputation like in the 90s or early 00s about a specific studio, but my understanding is they’re actually pretty good about that these days. If you’ve heard otherwise I’m happy to be given new evidence.
In any case, I don’t need them to be spotless. Big corpos are gonna big corpo, they’re all the same. But much as I do agree that they’ve done shitty stuff (I disagree particularly strongly with their stances on piracy and IP and how they enact those as part of larger orgs) I also have no issues acknowledging when they do cool stuff, like their recent release of C&C code as open source, whatever it is they’re doing with Faris or that time they got banned from selling in Russia and other places for adding explicit trans support to The Sims. Again, corpos gonna corpo. Best you can do is pat them in the back to incentivize the less crappy stuff.
Aren’t most of those examples from like… the mid 2000s? We’re like two CEOs and a remarkable amount of arthritis away from like 90% of that.
I like the loot boxes piece because everybody throws it at EA, but when you point out that Valve re-released CounterStrike two years ago and they very explicitly kept the loot boxes in all you get is crickets. Not that I think loot boxes are a deal breaker, myself, but hey, you’d expect some consistency.
I do not believe they’ve been in trouble for violating labour laws, either, but I’m not their lawyer. I know they got a pretty bad reputation like in the 90s or early 00s about a specific studio, but my understanding is they’re actually pretty good about that these days. If you’ve heard otherwise I’m happy to be given new evidence.
In any case, I don’t need them to be spotless. Big corpos are gonna big corpo, they’re all the same. But much as I do agree that they’ve done shitty stuff (I disagree particularly strongly with their stances on piracy and IP and how they enact those as part of larger orgs) I also have no issues acknowledging when they do cool stuff, like their recent release of C&C code as open source, whatever it is they’re doing with Faris or that time they got banned from selling in Russia and other places for adding explicit trans support to The Sims. Again, corpos gonna corpo. Best you can do is pat them in the back to incentivize the less crappy stuff.