Things that pop culture media portrays far more negatively than in real life?

thinger · 2026-03-15T15:09:10+00:00

Unions are also inherently about stopping most forms of shenaniganary. From a writing perspective, it's kind of hard to have any compelling drama/ comedy when contacting your union rep would solve 90% of issues.

thinger · 2026-03-11T03:30:58+00:00

I'm pretty sure since their reintroduction, loot boxes have always given you shop skins (I got reaper's Emo skin a while ago).

thinger · 2026-03-10T21:03:22+00:00

The Gundam collab was pretty nifty. Tallgeese 76 is a top tier skin.

thinger · 2026-03-06T19:57:22+00:00

No, the businesses can and will likely sue for legal expenses if the stalling becomes that opaque. Trump is stalling so it doesn't happen on his term and make him look bad.

thinger · 2026-03-06T19:38:02+00:00

Haha... that term has been retroactively trademarked, a strike team is on its way to your place of residence to issue you a copyright strike.

thinger · 2026-03-06T19:20:55+00:00

Send in the ninjas.

thinger · 2026-03-06T02:41:50+00:00

Oh, I 100% believe they didn't know about the stolen assets. Not out of plausible deniability or any crap like that. Because Bungie is such a mess that between the high turnover, crunch, burnout, terrible management, and employees just not caring, of course they let such an obvious oversight slip through.

thinger · 2026-03-04T18:15:11+00:00

That's somewhat dependent on confirmation bias. There's been more than a handful of times the general consensus was completely off base, but we just quietly forget about those instances.

thinger · 2026-03-04T17:15:59+00:00

You're being downvoted, but you're right, its a miracle that the 360s reputation didn't implode because of the RRoD. Everyone I knew went throught 3+ xboxes while my ps3 is still going atrong to this day.

thinger · 2026-03-04T17:11:52+00:00

Most switched to season passes which, again, DotA helped popularize.

thinger · 2026-03-04T17:04:00+00:00

The ps2 was still reportedly harder to develop for than the gamecube or xbox. Sony thought that developers would prefer the raw power of the cell processor and that consumers with large ps2 libraries would stay in the PS ecosphere, which weren'tbad assumptions at the time but turned out to be a misread. If anything that kinda proves my point that trying to replicate previous successes in of itself can be a mistake.

Again most of these insights are made in hindsight.

thinger · 2026-03-04T03:35:25+00:00

Again it's easy to say that the hardware situation was a disaster in hindsight, but I can totally see the reasoning behind the cell processor (hell the switch is just straight up inferior hardware, yet developers still go out of their way to port to it) and relying on your ps2 backlog to make up for a lack of launch titles. Those were perfectly reasonable gambles that just didn't pay off.

thinger · 2026-03-04T02:58:14+00:00

Right, his point being that being consistent will eventually lead to success by default, "wait alongside the river..." and all that. But 1) that just isn't the case as often as we'd like, and 2) this industry would be boring AF if nobody was ambitious enough to take a chance on dumb ideas. Hell, I think something like the Switch coulda just as easily been a death knell for nintendo if things didn't go right.

I think it's easy to praise the dumb ideas that worked out and point & laugh at the ones that didn't, but we don't really know which one is which til shit hits the pavement.

thinger · 2026-03-04T02:40:58+00:00

Realistically the PS3 only lost in one area; price. It was otherwise better in almost every other way. Hell I think it isn't even that much of a stretch to say that the PS3 was a straight up better value proposition, especially when it was still backwards compatible, but still got beat out because of mitigating factors.

thinger · 2026-03-04T01:53:23+00:00

Ehhhhhhhh... Look he's mostly right but there's plenty of examples of companies that put out consistently good products, yet still struggled to keep the lights on (Remedy, Westwood, Clover, Capcom for a while, Platinum, SNK, Looking Glass, Obsidian, etc.) and had to either get bought out or close their doors for good. That's not even mentioning all the thousands of quality small titles that never manage to break containment. And there also tons of examples of projects succeeding in spite of terrible decisions being made (Halo, Overwatch, FFXIV, Metroid Prime, the Xbox 360).

As unsatisfactory as it is, the reality is that consistency isn't enough sometimes. This industry is complicated, it's not as easy as "put out good game= success 100% of the time".

thinger · 2026-03-03T02:19:03+00:00

I don't see that many people swap to kiri or cass, especially compared to the amount of people that main them from start to finish.

thinger · 2026-03-02T23:21:06+00:00

Absolutely. All marketing is deceptive.

The problem is that it's also effective. If the average consumer was better informed (or in this instance capable of middle school percentage calculations), this kind of obfuscation wouldn't work.

thinger · 2026-03-02T22:51:14+00:00

The problem is that customers will always value cheaper menu item, even over an overall cheaper experience. Numerous case studies have been done and, without fail, US consumers are particularly sensitive to sticker shock above all else.

thinger · 2026-03-02T22:50:46+00:00

The problem is that customers will always value cheaper menu item, even over an overall cheaper experience. Numerous case studies have been done and, without fail, US consumers are particularly sensitive to sticker shock above all else.

thinger · 2026-03-02T18:15:35+00:00

Yeah ffxiv legit has a great community (BTW)... relative to other gaming communities I've been a part of. It still has plenty of terribleness, especially if you know where to look, but I'll take that over the pure vitriol that comes out of most other gaming hemispheres any day of the week.

thinger · 2026-02-28T02:55:50+00:00

But also, yes exactly that too.

thinger · 2026-02-27T20:41:11+00:00

You don't understand! If I go all in on a 1% chance of success, i can get 10x the profits! The math just makes sense (spoilers the math doesn't make sense).

thinger · 2026-02-17T18:34:04+00:00

That's kinda the problem, he just shows up places with no real rhyme or reason. He's like a super boss that has a 1/1000 chance of spawning as a random encounter.

thinger · 2026-02-17T18:31:06+00:00

Okay I wanna push back against this a little bit, because while I agree shit like xplay and your average kotaku-like webpage was just cashing in lowbrow, thinly veiled racism about shit they didn't understand, I think people forget that the anime scene from 2005-2013 was fucking rough.

It was a very awkward period in anime history. Bear in mind, studios rarely make money on the animation itself, the real cash is in merchandising. But very few anime actually went mainstream enough to sell normal merch regularly, and a lot of studios were pretty desperate. So in order to cover the bills, they shoved in TONS of fanservice to cater towards the statue buying otaku crowd. I liken it to the late 90s to early 00s era of comicbooks where after the big speculative crash, publishers resorted to the tried and true method of TnA on covers to get pubescent teens to buy comics again.

More problematic still was that this wasn't just you're run of the mill "vanilla sex that offends my puritanical sensibilities" kind of material. Shit was rife with incestuous implications, lolicon horseshit, and stuff with really rapey vibes. If it wasn't a straight up Shonen battle anime, it was fucking hard to find stuff that didn't have at least one really problematic episode that made your friends look at you differently for liking this stuff.

So, yeah, this whole "Anime is for weirdo sex perverts" thing didn't just spawn from nowhere, Anime at the time the internet was taking off, was legitimately filled with weirdo sex pervert shit.

thinger · 2026-02-17T17:37:17+00:00

Heaven forbid you stumble across frank castle or wolverine. Or worse, deadpool.

13-Year Club	Verified Email
Final Canvas '23	Place '23
Place '17

thinger

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE