Fucking Kotaku

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

  On 3/2/2011 at 3:40 AM, excel_excel said:

basically, the side bar doesn't work for me. I click on an article there and nothing happens. Pure shit.

 

Ie6?

[deanb]

He's defiently not IE6. Excel is the guy who started up the "What Browser do you use" and preceding 15-or-so reply status updated.

 

Edit:

Firstly read this:

http://en.wikipedia....ki/Content_farm

Sound familiar?

 

Then read this:

http://www.pcworld.c...tent_farms.html

 

p.s I'd follow that link for the Chrome Extension.

[excaliburps]

  On 3/2/2011 at 3:39 AM, Deanb said:

Okay for the lulz I popped over to kotaku and had a quick scan.

Do these guys know it's GDC?

But yeah looking at the stuff I've been going through the past few days and kotaku, it's like it's in it's own little time-space bubble.

 

When I read this I immediately went to Kotaku to check. And you know what? It's like GDC isn't even on their minds.

 

Know what I saw?

 

Crap such as this: http://ca.kotaku.com/5774107/threes-not-a-crowd-four-is Wow. Luke sinking to new lows? So the box art is similar? Um...Ok. Even some of the commenters were asking him what the big deal was?

 

Also this:http://ca.kotaku.com/5774075/your-first-look-at-someone-playing-battlefield-3 Way to word it again, Luke! fanboy baiting at its finest! Seriously, even their BF3 preview from Totilo wasn't that much of a read.

 

It's like they asked me to do a preview on the Petz game or something. Clearly Totilo is not a Battlefield fan in any way.

 

Yep. I might sound like a BF fanboy but I've read other articles and theirs (kotaku) was the most disconnected one. I didn't get the feeling that they were there watching the live-demo.

 

All I read was Luke trolling again for hits. Lord knows they need it now. And Totilo, while a good writer, writing out of his comfort zone.

 

I'm guessing if this was CoD related Crecente would be all over it like white on rice. Not to mention plaster the entire site with CoD mouse pad posts, car posts, how his son likes CoD posts.

 

Not just about BF3 either. The overall site content has been bland or looks like they were posted for the sake of getting hits. I actually wouldn't be surprised if Luke did that intentionally just to get more hits. If their payment scheme is anything similar to mine their posts correlates to the number of hits it gets and their pay. Ugh. I think I might have overshared a bit regarding that.

[excaliburps]

  On 3/2/2011 at 6:14 AM, peteer01 said:

  On 3/2/2011 at 3:40 AM, excel_excel said:

basically, the side bar doesn't work for me. I click on an article there and nothing happens. Pure shit.

I just don't go any more. Too frustrating. When/If all the kinks are worked out, I certainly wouldn't be opposed to going back, but at this point, I'd rather go through the work of making a thread about a topic here and talk about it with a few rational people here.

 

Same here. I tried going there yesterday and today. Looked at the headlines. Saw yet again that their news are late and a bit irrelevant to what's happening to the gaming industry and left.

 

Tried to comment, but lost the will to do so. New commenters make me die a little inside when I read what they post.

[Mal]

Wait... they are seriously ignoring GDC? What the hell? If they start posting about stuff happening at GDC a week from now, I would happily comment on how late they were and get banned. Again.

 

Anyways... Gawkers' writers morale at a new low. More at 11.

[TheForgetfulBrain]

http://kotaku.com/#!5774861/epic-says-this-is-what-next+gen-should-look-like/gallery/1

 

The comments...

 

They've just gotten so bad.

[excel_excel]

Yeah I'm using Chrome. Side bar is working now. But fuck it. just fuck it.

[deanb]

Oh god that headline.

It's Unreal Enginge 3, which is a 7th gen engine.

They've stated multiple times the reason Unreal 3 is holding out this long is because they're waiting for Unreal 4 next gen. The main improvement is they're adding Dx11 support(which kotaku don't mention). This isn't next gen, it's PC current gen.

But Kotaku post that mistruth and that's what the commenters gobble up as fact.

 

I bet most of the guys at kotaku don't know That the Source Enging in Portal 2 is different to the one Half Life 2 came out with.

[Cyber Rat]

  On 3/2/2011 at 11:55 PM, TheForgetfulBrain said:

http://kotaku.com/#!5774861/epic-says-this-is-what-next+gen-should-look-like/gallery/1

 

The comments...

 

They've just gotten so bad.

 

There's one fun exchange with Jon:

  Reveal hidden contents

 

  Quote

Jon: So it's what games would be now if publishers had the funds/could be assed to fund decent PC versions of games.

 

The fact this is coming from Epic is laughable as well considering they have become part of the "problem" that faces the PC market - being held back by console ports due to them being cheap to do.

NoelVeiga Wed 02 Mar 2011 4:39 PM

@Jon: This pisses me off so much.

 

You do realize Epic is not part of any "problem", right? You are, though.

 

Because you won't pay 150$ for a game and you won't buy enough games each year to put twice as much money in the market. So game devs can't use twice as much money to do graphics twice as detailed (only the cost escalates much faster than that, but you see the issue).

 

If the PC was the only gaming platform in the world you would still get the same games. Simply put, there aren't enough people buying full price boxes out there to make games look like that. Game industry professionals are already wildly underpaid and wildly overworked when compared with other software developers and media creators.

 

If you want games to look like that you'd better stop complaining and round up five or six friends to buy the same games you do, because otherwise it ain't gonna happen. Nobody is going to spend 300 million in making a game look as good as a Hollywood movie unless it can reliably make that amount back and, I'm sorry to say, that currently doesn't happen.

 

Jon Wed 02 Mar 2011 4:51 PM

I'm sorry, let me more specific.

 

I don't give a shit about the graphics - and if I have to point it out to you, my first short paragraph acknowledges the costs involved.

 

The problem that Epic is part of is the general acceptance of the industry to not take PC seriously, either (as in Epic's case) denying the PC market is growing, or using Piracy as an excuse.

 

I don't care if the game looks better than the console version or not. I do care when the game I paid money for won't run due to shoddy QA work on a port that was half assed to the point of not working on modern hardware (see Bulletstorm and the many problems users have reported with their cards - I must point out that I don't have any problems myself, but I am on much older hardware).

 

And no matter how you stretch the wallet, some basic bugfixing QA does not cost the extra 250m ontop of the 30m (can't remember if it was that or 50m) or more that AAA titles cost nowadays.

Edited by Jon at 03/02/11 4:53 PM

 

NoelVeiga Wed 02 Mar 2011 5:03 PM

That just doesn't work. First, if not you (although, you know, totally you too), everybody else in this thread is reacting to the perception of wated potential in PC graphics because of consoles. It IS a thread about graphics to begin with.

 

Second, there is no such thing as "some basic bugfixing". Thought experiment. Pop in one of those PC console ports. Go to the credits. Count the number of developers and engineers and designers listed. Then, count the number of QA people. Then go find one of those industry salary surveys and multiply those numbers.

 

QA? Not cheap.

 

And my point still stands. If you want more of that in your game, buy more games. Or pay more for them. Because there is nothing else holding PCs back. It's not the consoles, or the engines or the ports or Epic. It's you and me not spending enough money to support it.

 

I mean, what's the alternative? People going "I have a plan, let's not spend this money on making our game run bug-free. Instead, we'll pocket it and let people have a bad experience and not buy our games in the future and tell their friends to not buy them either. That's good business strategy."

 

Of course not. PC devs are grasping at straws. Minecraft is charging people for an Alpha build out there. Zynga is overdoing microtransactions. Every other MMO has gone free to play because nobody will pay a subscription for anything other than WoW. Stardock released Elemental in terrible shape. I'm sure they didn't do it because they liked it, they must have run out of money and they needed the income to keep the project afloat and patch it after the fact.

 

And, again, all of this with overworked, underpaid dedicated pros. And, quite frankly, the whiniest, most petulant and self-entitled community of any media industry, ever. So no, you're not in the right in this, by any standard.

 

 

I love gamer rage <3

[Vargras]

  On 3/3/2011 at 12:14 AM, Deanb said:

I bet most of the guys at kotaku don't know That the Source Enging in Portal 2 is different to the one Half Life 2 came out with.

 

And the Source Engine in Half-Life 2 Episode 2 was different than what was in Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 1 (way too many numerals in that sentence).

[deanb]

You could probably put all of kotaku writers technical knowledge into a thimble, and still have space left over.

 

(Their SEO knowledge would more than likely take a good few jerry cans)

[excaliburps]

  On 3/3/2011 at 12:33 AM, Deanb said:

You could probably put all of kotaku writers technical knowledge into a thimble, and still have space left over.

 

(Their SEO knowledge would more than likely take a good few jerry cans)

 

Aside from Totilo, I think their writing ability can fit into that thimble as well. Ok. Owen and McWhertor do write some good stuff from time to time, but the rest? Erm...No comment.

[Thursday Next]

@CyberRat: Jon's being a prick. QA are one of the most undervalued, underpaid departments in the industry. No one in QA in the games industry is in it for the money. I left an office job on £18k to get a job in QA for £12k, one of my former colleagues recently left his QA role (he was on ~18k after 7 years in the job - yay progression!) to get a job testing financial software and immediately got a salary over twice that. Everyone who hasn't done QA thinks it's a doss, that you cock around all day playing games, well that's bullshit. It's a job that requires a lot of expertise to do well and you NEVER get thanked for it (dev always get pissy when you "break their game" rather than being thankful that you saved them from releasing a broken piece of shit).

 

Seriously, don't fucking rag on QA.

[deanb]

So he'd still be right. They're low cost, so adding QA on wouldn't be massively increasing a budget.

His main point, and that's not all of the thread, was mostly focusing on the graphics side of things. The other guys point been that to make better graphics you'd have to sell games for $150. When the better engines generally make things much easier. There was a time not so long ago when graphics were put in via mathematical equations, these days it's a grpahics tablet and Zbrush. Which yes if you were to make the same model you make in Zbrush over in Maya or Max then you're going to be spending many man hours on it. But that's the point, 7th gen folks moved onto to zbrush and million poly models became a breeze.

 

Anyway that Noelviga guy definitely needs a couple of slaps around the head.

 

edit: I just noticed that Unreal Engine article got 200,000 hits. How the fuck? Why? Why is trash mistruthful writing like that able to get that much. It was a fucking screenshot gallery.

ARGH.

[Thursday Next]

1. I didn't say he was wrong. I said he was being a prick.

 

2. QA aren't "low cost", they are "low paid". QA costs a significant amount because while the individual wages are pathetic, even internally billed QA man hours are quite high (£30 - £70/QA Man Hour depending on the specific test group... functional, certification, etc.).

 

3. You need to increase QA hours by a huge amount to capture and fix a high number of graphical issues. Graphical Issues (especially minor ones like dodgy textures and screen tearing) are waaaaaay down the bottom of the ladder when it comes to bug severity, so even if hundreds of people are on a project, they will be focussing on more serious errors like networks falling down, crashes, hangs and so forth.

 

4. With regard to his comment about "doing some basic QA on PC" to prevent shoddy ports. It is impossible to test every configuration of hardware and software on public PC's, especially when a lot of that software will never be formally supported (like virtual DVD drives and such). It's not QA's or Epic's fault, it's just an issue inherent with PC as a platform.

 

5. If you had an infinite number of QA staff working for an infinite amount of time, they wouldn't make the graphics (or the game) better. They can only spot what is broken and ask Dev to fix it. If the graphics, controls, audio, storyline etc. are lame by design then that is how they will stay.

 

In summary. Jon should never speak about QA.

 

I do agree that Noelviga is not 100% on the money. Selling games for £150, while great for developers and publishers, won't necessarily mean better games. A number of times the publisher I worked for tried throwing loads of people and money at a project to get it done quicker and up to standard. It doesn't work. In game development Time > Money.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

  Quote

4. With regard to his comment about "doing some basic QA on PC" to prevent shoddy ports. It is impossible to test every configuration of hardware and software on public PC's, especially when a lot of that software will never be formally supported (like virtual DVD drives and such). It's not QA's or Epic's fault, it's just an issue inherent with PC as a platform.

 

PC is not inherently a buggy platform and I can't believe you even implied such a thing. Sorry, but plenty of PC devs deliver games with minimal bugs. It is not the fault of the platform.

[deanb]

Well yeah regarding that, and specificlaly Epic, but I'm pretty sure the graphical bugs in Bulletstorm were an ATi (fuck it) thing. There's only two GPU manufacturers, Nvidia and ATi. I get you can't test every system, but not bothering to see what happens when you play the game on an ATi card is a bit iffy. It's not that much variety. DirectX is actually meant to massively minimize any difference's between hardware. Especially Dx10 onwards, it just sees the GPU as a particular amount of RAM n pipes, and Dx10 cards are very conformed between the two unlike back in the pre-DX10 days where there was physical differences in how the cards worked.

 

But yeah, saying about how PC is hard to dev for n such is all for naught when the kid on the other side of the class is doing it perfectly fine. It's just another lazy excuse on the part of developers. Pretty much the reason is, they didn't give two shits. If it booted up the game and 50% of folks could run it okay and reach the end without having to touch the ini files too often, then the port is a success.

 

http://www.next-gen....ers-bill-rights

(which btw is getting a new version this year as Stardocks consumer report thingy mentioned)

[TheForgetfulBrain]

Figures - I try to post on Kotaku and it won't let me, keeps giving me an error.

 

FINE THEN.

[deanb]

Read this thread.

http://www.reddit.co...s_left_to_live/

 

Srs, read it, at least a decent chunk before moving on.

 

 

Now read this

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

http://www.urlesque....er-lucidending/

 

It's not kotaku, but this is the standard their network goes for. Faking being cancer victims to say reddits crap. Which is hilarious since that's one of Kotakus main sources these days.

 

 

 

Oh wait kotaku related let's see who was in on this

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

 

 

Actually also something else:

http://kotaku.com/#!about/^masthead

 

Joel Johnson, the guy who wrote that "fuck you commenters" rant on Gizmodo a while back is now "Editorial Director" at kotaku. I'd guess from the layout of the names he's Crecentes new boss.

[Cyber Rat]

  On 3/10/2011 at 9:34 PM, Deanb said:

Joel Johnson, the guy who wrote that "fuck you commenters" rant on Gizmodo a while back is now "Editorial Director" at kotaku. I'd guess from the layout of the names he's Crecentes new boss.

 

Well, now we know their criteria on how to make it to the top. Crecente didn't hate commenters enough.

[Enervation]

Looks like the Gawker network is officially the Fox News of the internet.

[RockyRan]

Jesus god, Dean. Your post (the Lucidending thing and the Johnson douche getting promoted) completely solidified 100% that I will never visit Kotaku or another Gawker place ever again.

[Pirandello]

  On 3/11/2011 at 3:35 AM, Enervation said:

Looks like the Gawker network is officially the Fox News of the internet.

Except in this case, we can actually ignore them and watch as they slowly rot like the carrion they are.

[Faiblesse Des Sens]

Haha I'm amazed by your levels of hate/butthurt/etc. Not that I think disregarding your community is a good thing

[Enervation]

  On 3/11/2011 at 4:25 AM, Faiblesse Des Sens said:

Haha I'm amazed by your levels of hate/butthurt/etc. Not that I think disregarding your community is a good thing

 

Considering the topic name is "Fucking Kotaku," I'm amazed you were stupid enough to say something like this.